- 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-PD...
- The U.S. federal government is bad at redactions on purpose.
The offices responsible for redactions are usually in-house legal shops (e.g., an Office of Chief Counsel inside an agency like CBP) and the agency’s FOIA office. They’re often doing redactions manually in Adobe, which is slow, tedious, and error-prone. Because the process is error prone, the federal government gets multiple layers of review, justified (as DOJ lawyers regularly tell courts) by the need to “protect the information of innocent U.S. citizens.”
But the “bad at redactions” part isn’t an accident. It functions as a litigation tactic. Makes production slow, make FOIA responses slow, and then point to that slow, manual process as the reason the timeline has to be slow. The government could easily buy the kind of redaction tools that most law firms have used for decades. Purpose built redaction tools speed the work up and reduce mistakes. But the government doesn't buy those tools because faster, cleaner production benefits the requester.
The downside for the government is that every so often a judge gets fed up and orders a normal timeline. Then agencies go into panic mode and initiate an “all hands on deck.” Then you end up with untrained, non-attorney staff doing rushed redactions by hand in Adobe. Some of them can barely use a mouse. That’s when you see the classic technical failures: someone draws a black rectangle that looks like a redaction, instead of applying a real redaction that actually removes the underlying text.
- It's funny seeing this play out because in my personal life anytime I'm sharing a sensitive document where someone needs to see part of it but I don't want them to see the rest that's not relevant, I'll first block out/redact the text I don't want them to see (covering it, using a redacting highlighter thing, etc.), and then I'll screenshot the page and make that image a PDF.
I always felt paranoid (without any real evidence, just a guess) that there would always be a chance that anything done in software could be reversed somehow.
- "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake" - Napoleon Bonaparte
Let all the files get released first.
Then show your hacks.
- I wonder if any of this is a conscious act of resistance vs. just incompetence.
And yes, I've heard of Hanlon's Razor haha
- I tried to reproduce this - turns out the affected files weren't in the data sets recently released, but other files on the DOJ site (now taken down).
I guess the big take-away is scrape everything ASAP when it comes out. I haven't found any meaningful differences yet, but file hashes are different in the published data set zip files available today versus when Archive.org took a snapshot a few days ago.
I did write a bit of a tool which will detect and log and dump the text of affected PDF's, since redacting via drawing black boxes as well as using dark-colored highlights are both programmatically detectable. Pretty trivial to do so. Happy Holidays for anyone else who has the day off!
- I swear the top comment on every popular post is always about semantics or nitpicking and is very rarely about anything in the article itself.
- Its not a hack to copy and paste text that is part of the document data. The incompetence of the people responsible to comply with the law doesnt mean its reasonable to label something a hack.
Please change the title.
- Rather than bemoaning the ignorance of those who can’t grasp that the text still exists under black rectangles, we should thank our lucky stars that this method of deredacting still works, well over a decade after the first time I heard of it.
May it continue to work in the decades to come!
- Man if you can do this should keep it secret until they release more bad redactions...
- Sounds like a different take on this Onion headline: https://theonion.com/cia-realizes-its-been-using-black-highl...
- It's quite funny really. Apparently you just cut and paste the text into Word. They just had the pdf put black rectangles on top.
- "hacks".
This is like putting a post-it on a printed document and circulating it as "redacted" -- and calling anyone who lifted the post-it a criminal/thief.
- Apart from the technological and procedural question, I would love to learn why the DOJ found it important to protect Indyke. He was Epstein's lawyer, and now we learn that he was personally involved. He is not a Washington person. We expected there to be politically motivated protection of certain people, but is the DOJ just going to blanket protect anybody in the docs?
- This has to be on purpose, right?
Redacting documents is hard for people who didn't learn how to properly do it, and don't have the right tools. But for courts, the FBI or the DOJ this shouldn't apply. They know how to do it right.
I can only imagine, that some people didn't redact the documents properly on purpose. Plausible deniability.
- Stupid question: why is the government even allowed to redact stuff? Isn’t the government keeping secrets from the people totally antithetical to democracy?
- Print on paper. Physically cut out the pieces you want to send to remove. Scan.
Still suspect that someone can undo this from data may have been accidentally steaganographed across non-deleted parts of the image.
- CNN has an article claiming that the botched redaction work is the fault of the Virgin Islands’ attorney general’s office, not the Justice Department. From https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/politics/epstein-redactions-g...:
"The glitch appears to affect only a tiny number of the hundreds of thousands of documents that the Justice Department has posted online this past week because of a new Epstein-related transparency law. And it appears this redacting error wasn’t committed by the Justice Department – but rather by the Virgin Islands’ attorney general’s office when it first posted the original court filing onto a public docket in 2021."
- Let's nobody make any fuss about this yet, lest they wise up before releasing the rest of the docs this way too!
- Fun fact: Many times you can also declassify numbers by simply looking at the width of the text boxes. I wrote a blog post about it many years ago: https://jensrantil.github.io/posts/how-to-partially-declassi...
- It sets a bad precedent to call things like this hacks.
Firstly, calling this redaction implies that the data is missing, and calling what was done "unredacting" is akin to saying someone "decrypted" a cryptographic hash function.
Nobody unredacted anything here, they merely discovered that it hadn't been redacted, and simply looked like it was redacted.
Calling this a hack places responsibility on the people who discovered the information, rather than on the people were put in charge of handling the redaction and screwed it up.
- Part of me wonders whether they had some of the text under the "redactions" changed too.
- How it’s done from technical point?
- To me is strange that for such important document they didn't print them and scan with a scanner (that way it's physically impossible that some metadata or other thing that is not on the printed piece of paper ends up in what is released).
It's the standard practice.
- is there an overview page somewhere just about what was redacted?
- Maybe someone knows law can answer this. Is it a crime to ”unredact” files in the US? You probably know that the information is classified since you are putting in the work. Where I live I believe it’s a crime if you share information that is classified even if it’s leaked. So I would not publicly brag about this online.
- When i hack something, it generally takes a bit more than just copy pasting..
- This reminds me of when some government org leaked social security numbers in client-rendered html comments (or something similar) and people who discovered this were called hackers for using browser dev tools
- I feel like it is some form of malicious compliance from some fbi agents
- Doesn't sound like much interesting was found otherwise that'd be what's making all the headlines... Everything in that article is pretty much what I'd expect.
- I bet the width of the redacted areas also be used to determine some idea of the content too
- A mafia state puts loyalists on top and can't produce anything ( smart people leave) and smart people who think for their own can't be promoted.
That's also why a mafia extorts and doesn't run complex businesses in general.
Perhaps the US can survive this administration. But somewhere down the line it will become broken.
- reminds me of that leaky redaction program that won the obfuscated c contest some years back
- It depends on what do you mean "hack". Redacting important documents can qualify as a heck of a hack.
- Not hacks, (malicious?) incompetency.
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- thank you for using the old.reddit link, it’s a small miracle they keep that running…
- Can you post the document numbers, I can't find where these texts are in the original pdfs.
- Not the first time; in 2005 the US report about Nicola Calipari's death in Baghdad was redacted (and unredacted by italian newspapers) in the same way.
- pdf is just a computer version of laminated paper
- Shout out to Stirling PDF that can be self hosted and has a relatively robust and easy to use redaction tool. All for free.... For now....
- Can you shadowprofile the redactions by length of the black box and heuristic occurance bundling?
- What is the proper way to do this? I see a couple suggestions in the comments:
1. Draw a black box over it in image editor, save a screenshot
2. Crop the info out
Are there other good ways?
- I love how every single comment here is litigating whether or not this qualifies “hacking” (yes I know obviously it does not) so I can’t really find any discussion on the contents lol
- Doesn't work on any PDF's of scanned documents , for example the contacts list.
- Any redactions of note? Going full conspiratard here and assuming this information that was accidentally censored ineffectively also reveals nothing new.
- "some" or a single file?
- I "hacked" my facebook account the other day. I forgot my password and used the "forget password" link to gain access .
- Nice. Love malicious compliance.
- I never want to hear a MAGA supporter whine about DEI or meritocracy ever again. Supposedly you're against that stuff but just hire loyalists who fuck everything up? Embarrassing.
- when i first saw this, i thought it was a meme. There is no way the DOJ could be so incompetent to fumble their own cover up.
- I wonder if it's purposeful misdirection
- One of the most pathetic things that has come out of this is that the British press refuse to say the phrase "Prince Andrew" anymore. It has to be Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
- i wouldn't trust any of these "undo's"
- A better headline would’ve been: “authorities utterly fail in their attempts to redact documents. Again.”
This would be comical if it weren’t so serious.
- If you think mere human incompetence with documents is bad, imagine all the vibe coded apps.
- This is probably just pure stupidity, but part of me hopes there is some tech person in there who knew exactly what they were doing. I’d take a job as a tech person in this administration just to sabotage stuff like this.
- Alright, now when everyone knows this. I hope people have backed up all the files to unredact everything before DOJ retracts the sensitive documents.
- I love how the entire internet thinks that this is a big deal when all that happened is that USDOJ re-posted some poorly-redacted court documents that were poorly redacted by non-USDOJ attorneys more than three years ago.
Yes, USDOJ is incompetent and dysfunctional, but this is not why. But sure, whatever, carry on...
- Ctrl-c and ctrl-v are not hacks.
They are unredacted because either those in charge are not familiar with basic office tasks, or someone wanted this stuff to leak and nobody checked thier work. Either brand of incompetance should cause heads to roll. But, just like the signal fiasco, nothing will happen. When your brand is perfection, you cannot ever admit a mistake.
- There are people here that would still vote for these evil people.
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- Am I crazy or didn't the same thing happen with Epstein's phone book some years ago? Coincidence?
- Lots of these redaction doesn't make sense unless they're made to protect the rich and powerful. Not surprising of course.
- The US really is pathetic.
When do we find out that the nuclear launch codes got changed to "YoureFired!".
- So is the data extracted the names of the victims that were supposed to be hidden to protect them? Or is there something else that might be worthy of exposing?
- My favorite excerpt so far:
Case ID #: 50D-NY-302757
Witness Information
First Name: Donald
Middle Name:
Last Name: Trump
Age: 70
DOB:
Additional Info: Again, just trying to find out the NYPD detective on the FBI sex trafficking task force that called me a couple of weeks ago and spoke to me about some of these issues.
How is Contact Known: He participated regularly in paying money to force me to ‐----- with him and he was present when my uncle murdered my newborn child and disposed of the body in Lake Michigan.
Type: Business
Address:
City: Washington DC
State: District of Columbia
Zip: 20500
Country: United States
- The Epstein Files Transparency Act signed into law last month permits the Department of Justice “to withhold certain information such as the personal information of victims and materials that would jeopardize an active federal investigation”
just wow.
- This is "fake stupidity", a decoy to make the public think it is uncovering stuff that was meant to be hidden while in reality the really damning documents have been filtered and or doctored already. You might get thrown some meaningless and practically worthless + innocent scraps and bones like Trump wrapping his arm around a young woman and that‘s it.
You think you uncovered the hidden layer but that was just a decoy.
You guys are too gullible.
- Terrible headline. The unredacted data was included in the file. That's not a hack.
- See also:
We Just Unredacted the Epstein Files
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364121
I tried to ascertain, but am not certain, this is the original blog source. Maybe they made some prior X posts.
- The article buried the lede. Last sentence:
> It was unclear how property material complies with the redaction standard under the law.
In other words, who knows what else was redacted that is unrelated to either the victims or jeopardizing an active federal investigation (are there any related to Epstein? I thought those all got killed, except those ordered by Trump to investigate Democrats of course.)
- It has become more plausible that nothing of value was released and the level of obviously poor redaction was done as a tarpit to own the libs.
- ah yes, “hacks”
- hacks :facepalm:
- Trump's razor: Why attribute something to incompetence when you can attribute it to patriotic sabotage?
- Did we learn anything useful or is it exactly as I said in the other thread, which got downvoted to hell, that all the really juicy blackmail material is with the CIA and will never see the light of day?
- "hacks"
copy and paste people, the idiots have taken over
- This site has really gone downhill lately with drivel like this being upvoted. Any real developers on this site anymore?
- "hacks" lol. Next, ctl+alt+del and it's equivalents are gonna be called arcane theurgy
- “Like you guys have had this stuff for a year. Doesn’t it seem like you could just throw all that into AI at this stage of the game? And just redact the names of the victims, and let’s go.” Joe Rogan
- There is a book by Richard Dawkins- I am me I am free or something like that, and it has a main picture of Richard standing naked and having a private part being covered by black rectangle but somehow my laptop back then was slow and when you scrolled it would temporary remove the square for a split second
- I think this is a good thing. I think the people talking dictator this and that do not understand we have the ability to critique the administration. What we lack is control of the underhanded lobbyism. It is a warped democracy but still a democracy.