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Befuddling that this happened again. It’s not the first time - Paul Manafort court filing (U.S., 2019) Manafort’s lawyers filed a PDF where the “redacted” part
by cmarschner 9mo ago
Befuddling that this happened again. It’s not the first time
- Paul Manafort court filing (U.S., 2019)
Manafort’s lawyers filed a PDF where the “redacted” parts were basically black highlighting/boxes over live text. Reporters could recover the hidden text (e.g., via copy/paste).
- TSA “Standard Operating Procedures” manual (U.S., 2009)
A publicly posted TSA screening document used black rectangles that did not remove the underlying text; the concealed content could be extracted. This led to extensive discussion and an Inspector General review.
- UK Ministry of Defence submarine security document (UK, 2011)
A MoD report had “redacted” sections that could be revealed by copying/pasting the “blacked out” text—because the text was still present, just visually obscured.
- Apple v. Samsung ruling (U.S., 2011)
A federal judge’s opinion attempted to redact passages, but the content was still recoverable due to the way the PDF was formatted; copying text out revealed the “redacted” parts.
- Associated Press + Facebook valuation estimate in court transcript (U.S., 2009)
The AP reported it could read “redacted” portions of a court transcript by cut-and-paste (classic overlay-style failure). Secondary coverage notes the mechanism explicitly.
A broader “history of failures” compilation (multiple orgs / years)
The PDF Association collected multiple incidents (including several above) and describes the common failure mode: black shapes drawn over text without deleting/sanitizing the underlying content.
https://pdfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/High-Security-PDF-Redactions-v4a_2.pdf https://pdfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/High-Security-PD...
- throwup238 9mo ago> - Associated Press + Facebook valuation estimate in court transcript (U.S., 2009) The AP reported it could read “redacted” portions of a court transcript by cut-and-paste (classic overlay-style failure). Secondary coverage notes the mechanism explicitly. What happens in a court case when this occurs? Does the receiving party get to review and use the redacted information (assuming it’s not gagged by other means) or do they have to immediately report the error and clean room it? Edit: after reading up on this it looks like attorneys have strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth), but the Associated Press was a third party who unredacted public court documents in a separate Facebook case.
- irishcoffee 9mo agoMy guess would be that if the benefitting legal party didn't need to declare they also benefitted from this (because they legally can't be caught, etc.) they wouldn't. I know and am friends with a lot of lawyers. They're pretty ruthless when it comes to this kind of thing. Legally, I would think both parties get copies of everything. I don't know if that was the case here.
- jdadj 9mo ago> What happens in a court case when this occurs? Does the receiving party get to review and use the redacted information (assuming it’s not gagged by other means) or do they have to immediately report the error and clean room it? Typically, two copies of a redacted document are submitted via ECF. One is an unredacted but sealed copy that is visible to the judge and all parties to the case. The other is a redacted copy that is visible to the general public. So, to answer what I believe to be your question: the opposing party in a case would typically have an unredacted copy regardless of whether information is leaked to the general public via improper redaction, so the issue you raise is moot.
- piker 9mo ago> Edit: after reading up on this it looks like attorneys have strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth), but the Associated Press was a third party who unredacted public court documents in a separate Facebook case. Curious. I am not a litigator but this is surprising if you found support for it. My gut was that the general obligation to be a zealous advocate for your client would require a litigant to use inadvertently disclosed information unless it was somehow barred by the court. Confidentiality obligations would remain owed to the client, and there might be some tension there but it would be resolvable.
- zerocrates 9mo agoMy recollection is that it varies quite a bit between jurisdictions. The ABA's model rules require you to notify the other party when they accidentally send you something but leave unspecified what else, if anything, you might have to do.
- ajross 9mo agoGiven the context and the baldly political direction behind the redactions, it's not at all unlikely that this is the result of deliberate sabotage or malicious compliance. Bondi isn't blacking these things out herself, she's ordering people to do it who aren't true believers. Purges take time (and often blood). She's stuck with the staff trained under previous administrations.
- lamontcg 9mo agoOr it is just the result of firing people who were competent and giving insufficient training to people who had never done this before.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- beaned 9mo ago[flagged]
- exasperaited 9mo agoYou mean the layers that were, in fact, just side effects of scanning the (non-authoritative) short form certificate?
- phendrenad2 9mo agoNot proven yet.
- exasperaited 9mo agoIt wasn't his actual birth certificate! It was the short form!
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago"There are major differences between the Trump 1.0 and 2.0 administrations. In the Trump 1.0 administration, many of the most important officials were very competent men. One example would be then-Attorney General William Barr. Barr is contemptible, yes, but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file. There are ways to properly redact a PDF digitally, but going analog is foolproof. The Trump 2.0 administration, in contrast, is staffed top to bottom with fools." https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/23/trump-doj-pdf-redactions https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/23/trump-doj-pdf-r...
- netsharc 9mo agoIt's like Russian spies being caught in the Netherlands with taxi receipts showing they took a taxi from their Moscow HQ to the airport: corrupt organizations attract/can only hire incompetent people... https://www.vice.com/en/article/russian-spies-chemical-weapons-agency-hack/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/russian-spies-chemical-weapo... Anyone remember how the Trump I regime had staff who couldn't figure out the lighting in the White House, or mistitled Australia's Prime Minister as President?
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago> with taxi receipts Please tell me they were saving them for expensing.
- SanjayMehta 9mo ago
- ricksunny 9mo agoThe covid origins Slack messages discovery material (Anderson & Holmes) were famously poorly redacted pdfs, allowing their unredacting by Gilles Demaneuf, benefiting all of us.
- heavyset_go 9mo agoI want to believe this is malicious compliance.
- cmarschner 9mo agoSince hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence
- ndsipa_pomu 9mo agoHaving lots of people involved means that it's more likely to be malicious compliance or deniable sabotage. It only needs one person who disagrees with the redactions to start doing things that they know will allow info to leak.
- michaelt 9mo agoDoesn’t having lots of people involved also raise the chance of incompetence? You’re more likely to get at least one inept agent in a random sample of 1000 than a sample of 10.
- ndsipa_pomu 9mo agoYep - I think they're both likely.
- thdrtol 9mo agoOnce I worked for a company that got a quote in the form of a Word document. Turned out it had history turned on and quotes to competitors could be recovered. There is a lot of incompitence when it comes to file formats.
- vidarh 9mo agoFor one of my first jobs I negotiated a better offer because "strings" on the document revealed the previous offer they'd sent out, and made me confident I could ask for more. Though, makes me wonder if someone has intentionally sent out offers like that with lower numbers to make people think they're outsmarting them.
- agilob 9mo agoFollow the letter of the law, but not the spirit.
- Scarblac 9mo agoIt already seems that they blacked out more than the law allowed, so following neither. Not that it matters much what the law says if the goal is to protect the man who hands out pardons...
- __alexs 9mo agoThis has happened so many times I feel like the DoJ must have some sort of standardised redaction pipeline to prevent it by now. Assuming they do, why wasn't it used?
- srean 9mo agoI am happy with their lack of expertise and hope it stays that way, because I cannot remember a single case where redactions put the citizenry at a better place for it. Of course if it's in the middle of an investigation it can spoil the investigation, allow criminals to cover their tracks, allow escape. In such case the document should be vetted by competent and honest officials to judge whether it is timely to release it, or whether suppressing it just ensures that investigation is never concluded, extending a forever renewed cover to the criminals.
- themafia 9mo agoSecure systems are not exactly the right environment for quick release and handling. So documents invariably get onto regular desktops with off the shelf software used by untrained personnel.
- drcongo 9mo agoDOGE
- 2026iknewit 9mo agoOf course there is a process. There was also a process on how to communicate top secret information, but these idiots prefered to use signal. I'm completly lost on how you can be surprised by this at all? Trump is in there, tells some FBI faboon to black everything out, they collect a group of people they can find and start going through these files as fast as they can. "When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king; the palace instead becomes a circus."
- scubbo 9mo ago> some FBI faboon I'm not familiar with the term, and Urban Dictionary only has "fake babboon" which I suspect is not the intent here - what does it mean?
- insertchatbot 9mo agoNot to mention when the White House published Obama's birth certificate as a PDF. I remember being able to open it and turn the different layers off and on.
- crazygringo 9mo agoAre you trying to suggest that indicated it was fraudulent? That has very much been debunked -- it's just an artifact of OCR and compression, something that many scanners do automatically [1]. You can still open it with Illustrator if you want to see: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss... [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/birth-certificate/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/birth-certificate/
- phendrenad2 9mo agoYeah, the idea that proves it's fraudulent has been debunked, but the alternative hasn't been proven, either. Nobody has named the specific OCR software that does this destructive replacement. It's a case of "well, there's an alterastive theory, and that's good enough" debunking.
- crazygringo 9mo agoNot sure what you mean by destructive replacement, since nothing is destroyed. So I just looked into this, and it's specifically Mixed Raster Content pipeline (ISO/IEC 16485) used in lots of different scanners. There's no need to find which specific software generated it because it's used by lots of them. It's a technique used to attempt to isolate font characters of the same size and style as separate layers before OCR-ing to make OCR more accurate. ABBYY FineReader, for example, is mentioned as producing the exact same type of results. But there's no guarantee that was the actual software because lots of scanning software does it -- it's a general technique. Plus it won't even be deterministically reproducible if it was e.g. scanned and OCR'd at higher resolution and then saved at a lower resolution, as is generally considered best practice for maximizing accuracy while keeping file sizes lower. https://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2013/01/heres-the-birth-certificate/#comment-235081 https://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2013/01/heres-the-birth-cert... So this is very much a nothingburger. It's not an "alternative theory", it's a complete and total explanation.
- g947o 9mo agoFTC vs Microsoft: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/28/23777298/sony-ftc-microsoft-confidential-documents-marker-pen-scanner-oops https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/28/23777298/sony-ftc-microso...
- sailfast 9mo agoTypically these folks use standard redaction software. Has anyone explored the fact that the software is just a buggy, silly mess?
- SilasX 9mo agoAlso the pedophile that tried to obscure his face in pictures with a swirl effect that they were able to reverse enough to identify him: https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2007/11/you-can-swirl-you-cant-hide/ https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2007/11/you-can-swi... IIRC there was a Slashdot discussion about it that went "Oh yeah, obviously you need to black out the face entirely, or use a randomized Gaussian blur." "Yeah, or just not molest kids."
- rkagerer 9mo agoNever trust a lawyer with a redact tool any more complicated than a marker. I've seen lawyers at major, high-priced law firms make this same mistake. Once it was a huge list of individuals names and bank account balances. Fortunately I was able to intervene just before the uploaded documents were made public. Folks around here blame incompetence, but I say the frequency of this kind of cock-up is crystal clear telemetry telling you the software tools suck. If the software is going to leverage the familiarity of using a blackout marker to give you a simple mechanism to redact text, it should honour that analogy and work the way any regular user would expect, by killing off the underlying text you're obscuring, and any other correponding, hidden bits. Or it should surface those hidden bits so you can see what could come back to bite you later. E.g. It wouldn't be hard to make the redact tool simultaneously act as a highlighter that temporarily turns proximate text in the OCR layer a vibrant yellow as you use it.
- jdlshore 9mo agoApple’s Preview app (which has a very thorough PDF markup tool) does this right: it has an explicit “redact” tool which deletes the content it’s used on.
- bg_tagas 9mo ago[dead]
- bena 9mo agoI think it's part laziness here. Placing a black rectangle on a PDF is easier than modifying an image or removing text from that same PDF.
- maxerickson 9mo agoThe tool in Acrobat is exactly placing black rectangles on stuff. There's a second step you are supposed to do when you are finishing marking the redactions that edits out the content underneath them, and offers to sanitize other hidden data: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/resources/how-to-redact-a-pdf.html https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/resources/how-to-redact-a-pdf.... That failed redactions happen over and over and over is kind of amazing.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- orionspelt 9mo agoBefuddling you are befuddled by non-tech obsessed people failing to grasp tech.
- rafram 9mo agoBased on the prose style, I'm assuming you copy-pasted a ChatGPT "deep research" answer?
- wycy 9mo agoThe prose style and the fact that it was super repetitive. Every bullet re-described the copy-pasting. Definitely LLM slop.
- 867-5309 9mo agosimilar to pressing delete or emptying recycle bin, in that all that happens is the operating system is told that section of the hard drive is now blank, but the underlying files are still there and available to recover
- yfw 9mo agoIts befuddling you think theres mechanisms to incentivize competency over loyalty in some of these organizations