Don't underestimate how important this particular screw up is: It means that there's now publicly available proof that they redacted information in a manner that violates the law, and that it can enter the conversation while the Epstein files still have the public attention, rather than months or years later.
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
657 points (98.5% liked)
News
33763 readers
2739 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
We’re founding a committee to oversee discussions about how to consider moving forward with this. Action will be taken at a faster rate than usual compared to usual congressional processes. This legislative action is expected to take place in 2047 once deliberations are complete.
The good place really is just democrats
Can't wait for the Supreme Court to decide in 10 years that releasing a document with ineffective redactions means the document was not technically redacted, so no laws were violated.
.... while simultaneously ruling that the information that was supposed to have been redacted can not be used because they say so.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
"Hacks" lol
The ultimate hack: Ctrl+C Ctrl+V
I know better than to try this and shutdown my computer. I'm not an idiot.
load more comments
(1 replies)
https://usdictionary.com/definitions/hack/
See definitions 3 and 5 for reference, I believe the term fully fits.
Life hack: turn the doorknob to open a door
Your stupid facist regime hate this one life hack
What they don't want you to know.
...literally?
I mean... probably (ass pulling) 80% of actual computer hacking is that level of exploit. People be REAL stupid
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
I choose to believe that this was done deliberately by disgruntled FBI agents.
It was probably just incompetence, but let me believe what I want.
¿Porque no dos?
This is what happens when you pull in people that don’t normally do records management. They redact using black highlighter instead of the redaction tool.
Or, this is what happens when people who work for the government really hate Donald Trump.
Malicious compliance
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
It's a good general rule, but taking this as gospel makes it very easy for the malicious to pass off their cruelty as stupidity.
If your goal is to reduce general stress, take it as it is and leave it there. If your goal is to distinguish what exactly is actually going on, then this is a tool worth keeping around, but it's not going to do the job on it's own.
load more comments
(1 replies)
You have to be more careful than many people expect think with the redaction tool. Sometimes it's text being redacted. Sometimes it's a graphic. Sometimes it's both on top of each other.
That's why my final step in redacting documents for Open Records (I do a LOT of it) is to flatten the PDF.
But the real bitch is protected docs. Some docs keep the redaction tool from working (e.g. docs with digital signatures). Sometimes I actually have to print a doc out and re-scan it to get the redactions to stick.
why are there so many people in this thread that redact things often enough to have favorite workflows?
I work in government and Open Records requests are regular things, and I have to redact a bunch of stuff to protect people's privacy.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I redact, print, and then scan. Its the only way to be sure.
Export to PNG -> redact PNG.
Ain't nothing hiding behind those (0,0,0) pixels.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
How is copying text from a PDF a hack?
I see 2 potential paths to this, possibly both:
-
Unknowledgeable individuals were tasked with redactions, and didn’t understand adding black bars over documents is closer to a sticky note than a marker.
-
Knowledgeable individuals taught others to ‘redact’ in this manner to sabotage the effort, and those who signed off on the release didn’t look any further than the rendered result, if they even did that.
It's like people saying their facebook got hacked when in reality, they logged in on a public computer and didn't log out. Or their password is their kid's name or some shit.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Adding to theory 2, I bet there was very little record keeping regarding which agent was redacting which document. The point of a coverup is that you try to reduce accountability. Even if only Trump loyalist FBI agents were selected for the censorship job, I doubt they all could remain loyalists after reading the Epstein files.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Someone shouldn’t have blabbed about it so quickly. There are more files to release, and now they will do a better job redacting them.
I was gonna say, "Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake".
I’m sure lots of people figured it out and kept their trap shut.
Yes, it took a couple of days before this became a story. Anyone seriously looking into the files would have discovered that quickly.
Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C is a hack now. Neat.
So long as you say “I’m in” after you hit Ctrl+V, it counts.
load more comments
(9 replies)
simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.
Did they just change the back and foreground colours to black and call it a day?
I would like to think that it was on purpose. So whoever was working on that knew that someone could realize it. I don't know why I keep having faith in people.
It makes sense. They didn't flush the entirety of the FBI and we know Patel isn't doing all this himself, so I too believe that there are people just doing some good ol' malicious compliance. Apparently documents from previous administrations didn't have this issue so they could do it correctly, they just aren't.
Doubtful.
This happens ALL the time. Countless publicly released police reports, legal documents, and even (allegedly) classified documents all just use the black highlighter in Acrobat because "that is what I would do if this were a physical copy".
One of the first things you do when anyone gives you a "redacted" PDF is to just highlight the text. The next step up is to then check the layers of the PDF in case they added black rectangles to a scanned document (and a lot of OCR tools actually do that by default).
Same with seeing if you have the document history in a word file.
Never underestimate how computer illiterate the average person is. We shit on genz for not knowing what a directory structure is but... they ain't that far behind the curve. It is mostly just that VERY narrow subset of genx/millennial who grew up with "family computers" that picked up most of these skills.
load more comments
(6 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
It's a shockingly common source of data leaks. There are some versions with more subtlety, like actually redacting the text but a copy of it remains in the file for version tracking, as a separate layer, or things like that.
PDF is derived from printer control tools, and has a lot of features built in that add flexibility for office document purposes, but can be surprising for people not expecting it.
If you're working as a team to redact documents you might deliberately use something reversible so that the person checking your work can 1) see what you redacted 2) unredact if they think you shouldn't have.
Sometimes people also just don't know there's actual reaction tools built in.
The part that I'm more surprised by is that whatever process they have for releasing documents didn't involve passing it through a system of some sort that automatically fixed that sort of thing.
That is fucking hilarious, this government doesn't even know how to use a black highlighter correctly.
load more comments
(1 replies)
People have been making these same mistakes for literally decades... How does the government not have a 1-click dedicated tool for this yet?
You think this was a mistake? Certainly some staffers did this on purpose, my friend. Good for them.
There are no heros working on this, any breaks we get are for to incompetence.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
I was sooo expecting this. They can’t/don’t do anything correctly.
Same. This is the same admin that had people claiming they were going to rewrite decades of code in "months".
I'm sure some dumbass told them AI was up to the task.
Totally unrelated, but it makes me happy they said "paste into a word processing file", and not M$ Word.
load more comments
(1 replies)
One thing you can always count on with MAGAs is their virtuosic incompetence.
LOL, I think I called this weeks ago, not that it took very much foresight to assume massive, easily-avoidable fuck-ups from the admin that thought someone like "Big Balls" was going to be able to figure out decades of COBOL code....
You can literally just copy and paste the entire in redacted docs.
view more: next ›