- 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 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.

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.

Let all the files get released first.

Then show your hacks.

And yes, I've heard of Hanlon's Razor haha

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

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!

Please change the title.

May it continue to work in the decades to come!

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.

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.

Still suspect that someone can undo this from data may have been accidentally steaganographed across non-deleted parts of the image.

"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."

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.

It's the standard practice.

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.

At least it gives the US a better chance of doing a u-turn on the steep downhill path it recently took. Maybe it was intentional incompetence.

1. Draw a black box over it in image editor, save a screenshot

2. Crop the info out

Are there other good ways?

This would be comical if it weren’t so serious.

Yes, USDOJ is incompetent and dysfunctional, but this is not why. But sure, whatever, carry on...

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.

When do we find out that the nuclear launch codes got changed to "YoureFired!".

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

You think you uncovered the hidden layer but that was just a decoy.

You guys are too gullible.

just wow.

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.

> 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.)

copy and paste people, the idiots have taken over