Redactish.
“Those were clearly inserted by Radical Left Hackers after the DOJ confirmed that none of the docs incriminated Trump!”
-Lunatic Rightwing Media Audience once their talking heads get done telling them what happened and why it’s someone else’s fault.
The Guardian referred to these acts as “hacks.” I think I know where the real hacks are – at The Guardian.
Sort of an accurate description. It might make sense to laymen.
This is what happens when to trade competency for loyalty.
The administration will say it’s “fake News,” and the media will agree.
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I was watching a coffeezilla video on the new leaks yesterday, and I saw he could highlight and copy text in the pdf document.
I have had broken PDFs that lose the ability to select and search for text for much less modifications, and was wondering if there was a way to see behind the redaction.
I figured it would be a task for someone to look at the text in code and see the redacted parts, but turns out everyone can do it lol.
And nothing will happen. Magats are ging to maga. Democrats are ging to democrat.
And you’ll continue doing nothing?
What’s ging mean
Going, presumably.
I thought so but I wasn’t sure, didn’t make much sense. Thanks?
It’s an expression and might be an old people thing as I’m older. It’s something like “Cats are going to cat”, i.e., cats will do cat things as it’s in their nature.
msm has no interest in covering it fully, because its mostly captured by conservatives
Honestly wondering if this was done deliberately by DOJ tech folks who weren’t on board with the cover-up.
From what I’ve heard, it wasn’t released, they were uploaded and it’s url kept private. Imo they probably did that to send it to a few highly ranked people so they could check if they agreed with the censorship before releasing them. However, the URL for those to-be-released files were easily guessed based on the pattern of the previously already public ones.
Despite propaganda, the og Nazis weren’t competent either.
Hahaha if that’s true it’s hilarious. Their ineptitude might be our saving grace.
I have heard of a gov employee keeping a usb cable in a locked cabinet because they thought it had leftover data after use.
Not do far fetched, tbh. I always burn the pencil after writing down my password - if someone got a hold of it they could easily figure out what was last written. My typewriter was hacked numerous times this way!
Prior Incantato!
Not actually an insane practice. There are compromised cables that look normal but have hidden storage to record data for later retrieval.
That’s the opposite. Your protecting the cable from being manipulated. OP is talking about protecting the cable from being read.
The problem isn’t that they were keeping a USB cable in a secured location for security concerns, the problem was that they were doing so because they believed bits were left over in the copper itself and enough such that data would be recoverable. Like marbles through a tube.
I do hope the practice was due to your point and that the particular person was just naive, misinterpreting a presumably shitty PowerPoint.
ah yes, in case some bits got stuck in the pipe
It’s those internet tubes, can’t trust em
Oversecure is better than undersecure
Universal Security Box
Never attribute to morality that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Hey there. It doesn’t work in authoritarian regimes. When the only way to resist is sabotage, sabotage is everywhere
The saying is usually malice but I suppose it still works with morality all the same
Because this would be doing a good thing, not a malicious one.
Being malicious is not exclusive to being a bad person. Good people can be malicious in the face of adversity. It’s an effective tool of protest.
malicious compliance to be exact which is not the same as malice, pure malice is somewhat evil.
I wonder how greed figures in, it’s not like companies need to be moral to end up on the right side
Never attribute to ______ that which can be adequately attributed to profit/line go up.
Not usually, it’s Hanlon’s Razor.
Maybe we can call this version “Hamlon’s razor” or something
Given the sheer ineptitude of this administration, this was likely stupidity.
When I worked for DOD, I worked on a FOIA request and was trained on using the declassification software. The software worked by highlighting the appropriate text and then “flattened” the highlight so you couldn’t do this.
The software was REQUIRED to be used because it would also perform the validation.
These people probably used regular Adobe acrobat. Because they are that dumb. And they don’t know about proper FOIA procedures.
Because they are stupid.
They fired a bunch of the FOIA people. The people who know how to do this right are no longer employed by the federal government.
30 minutes before releasing the Epstein files:
“Grok, how do I redact a PDF?”
It might be likely that DOGE thought it was frivilous government spending the license for that software, because it’s the government and they’d use licensed software, so axed it out.
I heard some print it out and then scan it.
hell, taking a picture of the screen with a phone would have been better. this is literally the only way to have fucked this up that i can come up with. like maybe if they used too thin of a sharpie on physical paper, but even that probably would have blocked parts of the text.
that said, i can see the average technologically inept person making this mistake. if it wasn’t on purpose, it would have to be someone that didn’t grow up with computers. either someone trump’s age, or someone who grew up with only smart phones. Iwould bet the latter knowing trump and his cheapness. this can’t have been done by an existing professional in the system, they’re too experienced normally. I know this is a lot of assumptions, but i bet it would have had to be a young intern from trump’s camp. and i do bet that over intentional malice towards trump. anyone that did this on purpose would be smart enough to see far enough ahead to predict themselves get arrested or killed as soon as people figured it out. also, hanlon’s razor.
i think i actually made almost this exact mistake once. difference is mine was for an assignment in high school 20 years ago and the consequence was getting snickered at by my peers. it’s a genuinely easy thing to overlook if you’re not used to using tools in a word editor or most other software. it’s also entirely unsurprising that trump’s camp would botch a project. he doesn’t pay people and is a menace to his employees. no one compitent wants to work for him unless they’re true believers.
so yeah, jumping to conclusions about this being intentional is conspiracy nut thinking. if someone’s reasoning includes bits like “it just makes too much sense” and “think about how much they have to gain/lose” they’re just jumping to conclusions without evidence. remember that correlation does not imply causation. just because something happened near a powerful person that affects the world or that person significantly doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy. just because the motive for an action exists or makes sense that doesn’t mean it happened. i have a motive to want to kill Trump, but if he dies while I’m near d.c. that doesn’t make me a suspect. 90% of the people near d.c. at any given moment have motive to kill trump.
If true, their information needs to be noted if possible only after the arrest of all these other assholes. Gotta protect the ones that did not follow orders of this pedophile regime.
At this point? Probably, this isn’t the first time we have seen thick exact rookie mistake.
Of course, who knows since doge or whatever probably wiped the people who knew how to get things done I it and replaced with high schoolers that just can’t wait to gobble elons musky bits
or it was purposeful to feed the public another thread of distraction that we can all entangle ourselves with for the next few months.
At this point, the controversy is not Trump … the controversy is the American government, the American media and the American public just rolling over another chapter of this absolute stupidity.
The Guardian claims that there are some redacted documents that can un-redacted by copying the text and pasting it into another window. Also, in other documents, photoshop can be used to enhance features of the redacted portions of text to reveal potential characters being covered.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/23/epstein-unredacted-files-social-media
Never forget that above all, above the narcissism, the megalomania, and the viciousness, above all Trump is a terrifyingly stupid and incompetent man. When he hires, he does so that he feels like he’s the smartest one in the room. That tells me a lot about the people now running our federal government.
With all of its mercilessness, it can be easy to forget that authoritarianism is a profoundly flawed and short-sighted way to run a government.
The incompetence is staggering.
thats how russia is run, get rid of the “potential threatening” govt workers and replace them with brown-nosers.
And also has a long history. They’ve done this before.
Trump’s GOP supporters are all incompetents.
When you fire all of the intelligence out of the intelligence community, and the rest jump ship.
I really hope they’re put in front of a panel and say “we don’t have the manpower”
first thing to do is them stopping any investigation against russia, and agains trump when he got into power. on the intelligence side tulsi gabbard runs interference.
That’s the only thing they’re good at
So the entirety of the files released thus far, have been copied and unredacted I would assume. Might just need to buy some popcorn. Probably going to be a wild couple weeks.
I haven’t checked myself, but on another post someone claimed that only some of the pages were “redacted” in this manner. If that’s the case then while we got more information than they probably wanted us too, there is still some information that’s yet to be made available.
Look at the address:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet 8/EFTA00025010.pdf
TW: Beware, this is upsetting.
Good fuck this is filthy
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Might have been a little optimistic… I’ll take whatever win we can get!
This is true, but still, that number of mentions must be concerning for many people.
Except, if we’ve learned anything to this point, it’s that Trump will once again face zero repercussions from this.
No. Only some files. Most have been redacted in an effective manner.
Why do I keep expecting the US government to be remotely competent at anything?
It was more competent before they fired everyone competent and replaced them with incompetent sycophants. It wasn’t perfect before, but far better than now.
Propaganda i guess, the evidence for incompetence has been right there for decades and it keeps getting easier to find.
To be fair it’s genuinely a super common mistake. I see redacted documents often at work (I do nothing fancy, just some privacy policy thing we deal with) and on like 30% of the documents we get you can either just highlight the underlying text or literally click and drag the black box off of the words lol.
I guess what happens is people can redact it such that they can no longer see it in their particular pdf software but then a different software can bypass it
I guess what happens is people can redact it such that they can no longer see it in their particular pdf software but then a different software can bypass it
That’s pretty charitable. I’ve worked civil service many years ago and the computer skills of some of them were beyond laughable. I never dealt with redacted documents during that stint of my life but I can say with 100% certainty that I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if someone “redacted” a document by making the text and background highlight color black and posting the Word
docxfile online.It’s a mistake you can expect interns to make, Feds should do better. They’ve pulled this same stunt many times before. And considering Trump ordered the entire FBI to work on this, one would think they’d do it properly.
It’s entirely dependent on which parts of the government you’re dealing with. The parts operated by the career civil servants and people who got there by working the job tend to be run perfectly well.
In cases where it’s political appointees following rules and guidelines setup by the aforementioned people, it tends to be… Fine.It’s the political appointees who actively disregard or are hostile to the civil service who are profoundly incompetent. You know, because they were selected for ideology, not competency.
For some reason that I think is spelled really similar to “traitorous anti American assets and useful idiops” the trump administration has been opposed to. and in favor of making it easier to fire, the civil service, AKA: the competent part.
It’s why you can end up with the parts that work well, like the military, NOAA and others like it wandering around being competent (prior to the current “let’s fire everyone and try to destroy the country” moment), while political appointees accidentally add a reporter to an illegal group chat. It’s the authoritarian impulse to demand orthodoxy and committed belief not just from the people who decide direction, but from the people who make day to day decisions as well.
As a fun aside, it lets you know who was doing the redaction work instead of the people who would normally be responsible for ensuring a smooth release of documents.
As a fun aside, it lets you know who was doing the redaction work instead of the people who would normally be responsible for ensuring a smooth release of documents.
Does it? It seems to me that the ineffective redactions could be either hostile Trump appointees acting with incompetence or patriotic career civil servants engaging in malicious compliance, so it doesn’t actually reveal which.
