Trump administration 2024-2028

[HavokFour]

So I am seeing that certain files that were released can actually be unredacted if you download them and use a simple python script, due to how those PDF's were created.

I am going to refrain from linking anything just to be safe, but they're in the wild now for the curious.

 

[Brad Sallows]

This Michael Schellenberger?

Yes, that Schellenberger.

Supposing Nordhaus's opinions of Schellenberger having odd beliefs about UFOs and J6 and censorship (Schellenberger co-investigated the "Twitter Files" with Matt Taibbi) to be true and not inflected by Nordhaus's own politics, they are irrelevant to the facts. I put up a link to Schellenberg's X post because it was a convenient summary of facts I already knew from other reading.

Moskowitz on X

Also Moskowitz

The second post is particularly interesting. "We didn't get an interview" is not the same as "we didn't get a response".

 

[dapaterson]

So I am seeing that certain files that were released can actually be unredacted if you download them and use a simple python script, due to how those PDF's were created.

I am going to refrain from linking anything just to be safe, but they're in the wild now for the curious.

Poor quality redaction by adding layers to a PDF is a tale as old as time.

(Or at least as old as the PDF standard)

 

[Good2Golf]

(Or at least as old as the PDF standard)

Which PDF standard?

• PDF
• PDF/A
• PDF/E
• PDF/X
• PDF/VT
• PDF/UA
• PDF/searchable

 

[PPCLI Guy]

Bari Weiss, who has delayed the story, has plenty of credibility. Sharyn Alfonsi, the reporter, has not very much.

Is that an opinion, or do you have sources?

 

[FJAG]

they are irrelevant to the facts

There's the point.

You decided to discredit Alfonsi's credibility by a post from Schellenberger who himself is problematic. But we don't know the actual facts in the Publix matter because it was never addressed in depth because before the report his people ran for cover. The fact that Publix and various Florida Republican shills objected after the fact is par for the course.

The actual point here is that Alfonsi does have a solid reputation as an investigative reporter covering decades. Schellenberger is irrelevant. You're trying to deflect from the factual situation behind the 60 minutes story by an oblique ad hominin attack on Alfonsi. That's typical MAGA strategy.

 

[McG]

I’m having a hard time accepting that the US military will in any way make or take hostile moves against Greenland or Denmark.

A military does not get to make those decisions. When you join, you don’t join with the freedom to pick which wars you will support.

 

[brihard]

So I am seeing that certain files that were released can actually be unredacted if you download them and use a simple python script, due to how those PDF's were created.

I am going to refrain from linking anything just to be safe, but they're in the wild now for the curious.

The ineptitude is amazing.

 

[FJAG]

The ineptitude is amazing.

I don't know about the police field but in the law one, two and a bit decades ago the search for a software solution that would really, really redact an electronic document permanently was a major issue. At the time there were several solutions that did redaction but could still be compromised.

I would have thought that by this time that there would be a foolproof tool and that DoJ would have it widely deployed.

 

[Lumber]

I don't know about the police field but in the law one, two and a bit decades ago the search for a software solution that would really, really redact an electronic document permanently was a major issue. At the time there were several solutions that did redaction but could still be compromised.

I would have thought that by this time that there would be a foolproof tool and that DoJ would have it widely deployed.

Redact the document with whatever tool you chose, then take a screen capture of the image of the redacted document. How is it that complicated?

 

[brihard]

I don't know about the police field but in the law one, two and a bit decades ago the search for a software solution that would really, really redact an electronic document permanently was a major issue. At the time there were several solutions that did redaction but could still be compromised.

I would have thought that by this time that there would be a foolproof tool and that DoJ would have it widely deployed.

Acrobat Pro does it easily and reliably. My best guess is they never got rid of the Optical Character Recognition layer after they blacked out using whatever tool they used.

The most hilarious case would be if someone just highlighted the text and gave it a black background to match the characters.

Either way, no excuse for failing something this spectacularly.

 

[FJAG]

Redact the document with whatever tool you chose, then take a screen capture of the image of the redacted document. How is it that complicated?

It's not. It's time consuming and somewhat impractical from a business point of view where larger numbers of documents need to be dealt with especially if many of them are paper and need digitizing and Batesing in the first place.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Is that an opinion, or do you have sources?

Opinion. There is no authoritative source for credibility of journalists. Either you read them, or you don't.

Weiss is one of the handful of prominent people in media pressured by peers to either conform to their political preferences or move on, in this case at the NYT. The incident reflects badly on them, not her. I can guess that her subsequent financial success at Substack, her departure from leftist hive mind conformance, and particularly her new job have all antagonized the politically active left in US media. (I'm only guessing about the first; the latter two have been openly expressed by people who don't like her.) Leftists like to control institutions; they've gotten used to controlling institutions; they object to change.

I expect people who object to her and what they figure will be shakeups at CBS to fight back. Fighting back includes creating controversy where they can. The controversy they're trying to gin up here is that she's somehow in the pockets of the Trump administration.

If Moskowitz told his story straight, he dead-ended the juiciest angle of a story ("pay-to-play") people had undoubtedly been working on for a while and for which the frame had already been decided. Denied an opportunity to interview him and thus edit/splice a version of his story to suit themselves, they went ahead anyways. People should worry more about the credibility of anyone involved in that, particularly the senior-most.

 

[HavokFour]

Acrobat Pro does it easily and reliably. My best guess is they never got rid of the Optical Character Recognition layer after they blacked out using whatever tool they used.

The most hilarious case would be if someone just highlighted the text and gave it a black background to match the characters.

Either way, no excuse for failing something this spectacularly.

I looked into it further, the python script was just to automate the process (because there are thousands of files). You can manually highlight the redacted text and paste it into a new document and if it's one of the effected ones, voila. Trump's name appears over 600 times now.

 

[OldSolduer]

Let me guess - he’s going to rename Christmas