You think it's accidental. I think it's malicious compliance. Some people actually work for the feds and dislike pedo trafficking rings, right? A perfect chance to make life exciting.
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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How about shutting the fuck up about this until everything is released?
Fr. Can't wait for nothing to finally happen.
I'm sure that some journalists will be assassinated/suicided.
Doesn't matter - there will still be black highlighted portions in the latter releases; yes, this timeline is THAT stupid.
Incompetence or malicious compliance from some FBI officers?
This screams malicious compliance to me. A lot of the staffers who would actually be doing this work are not elected officials doing this kind of work for the first time, and there would absolutely be strong guidelines on how to properly redact something.
There's also the possibility of the bosses asking why they're taking so long when they can just highlight it in black. A sufficiently rude boss rarely is spared from their own foolishness
I'm opting for malice. Lemmy acting like they're smarter, yet not realizing this isn't Trumps cabinet members personally editing this shit.
Even with everyone on the internet wondering out loud if they’d be stupid enough to do this again, the mad lads did it
For me, it looks like a fake-it-for-the-boss obfuscation. It looks black but is technically readable. Is your boss tech-savvy?
Seems that not everyone in the administration is fine with hiding the details to the public. Thanks guys.
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Are the MAGA supporters in the US actually aware of all this? Or does this news not even reach them?
I mean, it seems impossible to spin this obvious cover-up in a way that leaves the regime with any credibility whatsoever. I can't imagine how that could be done.
They will take anything they can to convince themselves it's not real. A podcast I listen to with MAGA parents are now saying Trump is only in them because he was an informant and caught Epstein despite about 1000 cases to the contrary.
It's a cult
what podcast?
The necessary conversation. they also upload to YouTube.
oh my god, he hosts my favorite bachelorette recap "game of roses". i have subbed, thank you! small world lol
Well, their propaganda machines certainly won't stop trying with every trick in the book.
Fox news reporting (if it can even be called that) on the Epstein files is that the DOJ released new documents, with a disclaimer about trump being mentioned. That what the documents suggest about him is false, and if it were true it would've been weaponized already.
Hmm, seems like one can only conclude that they don't want to know. Today, I watched a House hearing from September in which Kash Patel was questioned. Even then, it was so obvious that it was a cover-up: he awkwardly dodged the most basic questions, couldn't explain why victims were never interviewed even though they had asked to be, and so on and so forth - a real clown show - and each of the conservative representatives first thanked Patel for his great work and then asked random questions about Antifa or some other nonsense. You would think that no one could accept this – especially not from a party that campaigned on this issue. So I think that either they don't care or they are ok with it.
I'm shocked this still happens. I read about this sort of mistake many years ago with PDF files, and I assumed it had been fixed by now. My first thought whenever I see redacted electronic documents is this--that I'd read about it years ago, and I wondered the same thing this time. 'Shirley', I thought, 'they've figured this out by now, right?'
As another person commented, we can hope it's intentional defiance.
They haven't figured it out, and don't call me Shirley ;)
Nice to meet you, Shirley.
You think this was a mistake? LOL. No.
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Gotta admit, I finally thought I had reached the state where I could not be surprised by how stupid current unfolding events would be in the Trump era.
Nope, I was wrong, I am again genuienly surprised by how stupid some particular element of latest episode of the Trump Expanded Universe of Reality Is Reality TV Show is.
I can’t believe this administration is so inept. Wait…yes I can.
Best way to redact: black out text digitally on document. Print document. Verify correct text is blacked out. Scan papers into new document. All original metadata is gone, no “undo” available. Basic as F.
If anyone would like to post instructions for the pdf impaired...
I haven’t tried this, but this is what I’ve read:
You can highlight the redacted text, copy it, and paste the text into another document (like Word, WordPad, Notepad, etc.).
Another method I saw mentioned on Facebook:
“The backgrounds are transparent. Pull them into photoshop and throw a layer of white between the text and the black background and you have your text.”
If anything is unclear, please ask. Even if I can’t answer it, maybe someone else can.
It looks like the maintainers of the project have updated their project and page. It's much simpler now.
Installation:
pip install pdfplumber pymupdf
Usage:
python redact_extract.py example.pdf
If anyone has any questions about this comment as well, please feel free to ask. I know what this comment means, but a few years ago I wouldn’t’ve had a clue.
You’re asking on Lemmy?
- Install gentoo
Here's step-by-step instructions for the tool that the OP of the reddit thread open sourced. It creates a side-by-side pdf of the redacted and unredacted version at the end.
No root access is required at any point.
-
Download and extract the files of https://github.com/leedrake5/unredact?tab=readme-ov-file
-
Create a python virtual environment, but make sure the destination folder doesn't already exist (~/.env) here.
python3 -m venv ~/.env
- activate the environment
source ~/.env/bin/activate
You should now see (.env) before your prompt.
- Now install the python dependencies.
pip install pdfplumber pymupdf
You're all set up.
-
While still having your virtual environment active, indicated by the (.env) before your pompt, navigate to the downloaded github project, where the 'redact_extract.py' file is located.
-
Copy whatever pdf document you want to try to unredact to the same location.
-
execute the script
python redact_extract.py taco_crimes.pdf
The script should now have created a file for you in the current location with the redacted and unredacted version side by side.
To leave the virtual environment:
deactivate
To enter it again:
source ~/.env/bin/activate
To delete everything cleanly, just delete the virtual environment (~/.env in this case)
The project linked in evacide's Mastodon toot is even simpler to install. Create and activate a virtual environment like before, but at a different location (.env1 instead of .env, for example).
Then install the tool from pip in the virtual environment:
pip install x-ray
The tool is now installed and can be executed with a pdf file like so:
xray /path/to/your/file.pdf
https://github.com/freelawproject/x-ray
(sorry for the bad formatting. after posting, I can't preview anymore to figure out how to fix it.)
You don't need the lame script. Just select the obscured text in a document like the one they linked to & copy & paste or have the voice reader read it back.
So, hey. Everyone here is laughing about how stupid this was. Cool cool cool. But, has anyone downloaded the pdf before they took it down? How can I get a copy of the readable original?
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
Before the release this was an onion article
The onion is just tomorrow's news at this point
I literally thought about this and tried figuring out if I could check that myself, but I'm not versed enough with PDFs to be able to do this. Definitely tried, but got nowhere
Wow, love their idiocy!
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