people have figured out that the redacted documents released were not done with any redaction tool but merely highlighted boxes. many people are now combing through everything to see what can actually be viewed after all.
Not surprising. This has been a thing for quite some time, going back into the 2000s and 2010s.
You have a PDF file and you want to redact it. So you draw a black box over what you want to redact. Problem is, PDF works in layers. So you haven’t actually blacked out the text, you have just drawn a black box over the text, which is still in the file. This makes it trivially easy for anyone with a PDF editor to simply delete the black box, or with a PDF viewer to just save the file as text and the black box will not be saved with it.
PDF software generally includes an actual redaction tool, which not only draws a black box but removes anything under it. However you have to know this tool exists and how to use it.
This interests me from illegal standpoint though. There are regulations governing what sort of things can and cannot be redacted. If things are being redacted for for political reasons, IE to avoid making Trump look bad, that is now quite easy to prove.
When I’ve read the “hacked” headlines. I thought to myself “They couldn’t have just highlighted it in black… right?”. Can’t tell if incompetent or chaotic good.
Like the lady with whiteout in Erin Brockovich
It feels like someone wanted this out and had to follow orders. If intentional, it’s brilliant. If not, it’s hilarious.
Believing that someone engaged in some malicious compliance here would restore a tiny sliver of my faith in humanity… which means it was probably just incompetence.
This has happened plenty of times before with redacted documents, someone just goes in, sets the highlighting tool to black, and uses it that way, without realizing that doesn’t actually obscure the words underneath like a sharpie would
Well, I don’t think it’s highlighted in black. They just changed the image or vector data without changing/removing the text data that sits separately but rendered on top of it.
so highlighted black…
No. Highlighting in black will still store the text vector data (usually). It will just appear as a black block.
Have you checked that they actually changed the vector data?
No
of course they goddamn did ahahah nobody can tell a single one of them “no,” or “hey this isn’t a good idea.” they’re all smart, duh.
I wish they had waited to mention it until after all the docs have been released.
Yeah, this is an old problem with PDFs and some forms of Word documents. You could always go “Hey, show me the revisions!” and POOF! OG Document!
I had the benefit of running that on a business contract. “Hey, I wonder what all they changed on this before they sent it to us?”
It gave a fascinating insight into the things they WANTED in the contract but had to remove.
“Hacks”
lol
Everyone who’s ever used a WYSIWYG editor, putting on 90s sunglasses: “We’re in!”
🤦
Somehow I suspected something like this could happen. These people are so dumb.
