this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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out of all the censored things, they didn't think to censor a product key before declassifying it. I wish I could say I was surprised.
This seems to suggest that the redactions weren't done by legal professionals.
Understatement of the year so far.
The product key didnt have -TRUMP- in it so it's fine
Imagine if it did and the only reason it was censored was because they did a search and find > TRUMP > Make selected text background black.
I've only seen videos of it, but apparently you can copy paste the redacted parts of the pdfs. They legit left all of the text data on a different layer.
I wish the people who found that would’ve kept their mouths shut until 100% is released
Unfortunately with an error so egregious, the amount of people who found that near instantly was probably in the thousands
Exactly. I dabble in competitive assessment and the amount of times weve got competitors data because they didnt flatten a file is astounding. The one we try every time with moderate success is checking every picture to see if you can "uncrop" it. So many times the rest of the picture is actually in the file and the crop is just for display purposes. Most of the time the rest of the photo is useless, but ill never forget the time we got the whole process map for their upcoming production schedule
That sounds like a pretty cool job, do you have any other stories you could share?
FWIW they've always been bad at redacting things, this has happened before with other documents IIRC
It wasn't an error.
They're never going to be 100% released.
Yea I saw this as well, it was only a handful of documents but they did indeed do that on them.
Yep on mobile I could select the blackouts and do a copy paste into a note app.
It's a product key for an old no longer supported* product.
yea but it's still a valid key! the opsec part of me is dying atm.
I don't think a product key is directly a security risk. Though the sloppy undisciplined nature of this release is indirectly a risk I suppose.
I don't believe it's a security risk either, however it's considered a secure token/crediential, so those aren't supposed to be given public.