[cmarschner]

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...

[rkagerer]

Never trust a lawyer with a redact tool any more complicated than a marker.

I've seen lawyers at major, high-priced law firms make this same mistake. Once it was a huge list of individuals names and bank account balances. Fortunately I was able to intervene just before the uploaded documents were made public.

Folks around here blame incompetence, but I say the frequency of this kind of cock-up is crystal clear telemetry telling you the software tools suck.

If the software is going to leverage the familiarity of using a blackout marker to give you a simple mechanism to redact text, it should honour that analogy and work the way any regular user would expect, by killing off the underlying text you're obscuring, and any other correponding, hidden bits. Or it should surface those hidden bits so you can see what could come back to bite you later. E.g. It wouldn't be hard to make the redact tool simultaneously act as a highlighter that temporarily turns proximate text in the OCR layer a vibrant yellow as you use it.

[jm4]

It often comes down to not using the right software and training issues. They have to use Acrobat, which has a redaction tool. This is expensive so some places cheap out on other tools that don’t have a real redaction feature. They highlight with black and think it does the same thing whereas the redaction tool completely removes the content and any associated metadata from the document.

This was basically the only reason we were willing to cough up like $400 for each Acrobat license for a few hundred people. One redaction fuckup could cost you whatever you saved by buying something else.

I would like to believe that the DOJ lacking the proper software might have something to do with DOGE. That would be sweet irony.

[metabagel]

> Folks around here blame incompetence, but I say the frequency of this kind of cock-up is crystal clear telemetry telling you the software tools suck.

Absolutely. They know this is confusing, and they're bound and determined not to fix it. At the least, they need a pop-up to let you know that it's not doing what you might think it's doing.

[jdlshore]

Apple’s Preview app (which has a very thorough PDF markup tool) does this right: it has an explicit “redact” tool which deletes the content it’s used on.

[tobyjsullivan]

Always worth remembering that PDFs are basically a graphic design format/editor from the 70s. It was never intended for securely redacting documents and while it can be done, that’s not the default behaviour.

No surprise non-experts muck it up and I don’t see that changing until they move to special-purpose tools.

[fennecbutt]

Of course we can blame incompetence. It's incompetent not to realise your own incompetencies, also known as overconfidence.

Any lawyer should be like "I don't know what I'm doing here I'll get an expert to help" just like as a software developer I'd ask a lawyer for their help with law stuff...because IANAL uwu

[bena]

I think it's part laziness here.

Placing a black rectangle on a PDF is easier than modifying an image or removing text from that same PDF.

[m463]

> Never trust a lawyer with a redact tool any more complicated than a marker.

there's white-out on my monitor.

> ...frequency of this kind of ...

sometimes I wonder if it is plausible deniability. Like people don't WANT to cover this up and do it in a certain way.

[heavyset_go]

I want to believe this is malicious compliance.

[baby]

Lots of loyalists have replaced people there. It's for sure incompetence.

[cmarschner]

Since hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence

[jvanderbot]

And here we are again rediscovering Hanlon's Razor.

[legulere]

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

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

[jrochkind1]

In 2025, never attribute to incompetence what you could to a conspiracy. [sarcasm]

They fired/drove away/reassigned most of those who are competent in the executive branch generally, it is pretty easy to believe that none of those managing the document release and few of those working on it are actually experienced or skilled in how you do omissions in a document release correctly. Those people are gone.

[throwup238]

> - 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.

What happens in a court case when this occurs? Does the receiving party get to review and use the redacted information (assuming it’s not gagged by other means) or do they have to immediately report the error and clean room it?

Edit: after reading up on this it looks like attorneys have strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth), but the Associated Press was a third party who unredacted public court documents in a separate Facebook case.

[jdadj]

> What happens in a court case when this occurs? Does the receiving party get to review and use the redacted information (assuming it’s not gagged by other means) or do they have to immediately report the error and clean room it?

Typically, two copies of a redacted document are submitted via ECF. One is an unredacted but sealed copy that is visible to the judge and all parties to the case. The other is a redacted copy that is visible to the general public.

So, to answer what I believe to be your question: the opposing party in a case would typically have an unredacted copy regardless of whether information is leaked to the general public via improper redaction, so the issue you raise is moot.

[irishcoffee]

My guess would be that if the benefitting legal party didn't need to declare they also benefitted from this (because they legally can't be caught, etc.) they wouldn't.

I know and am friends with a lot of lawyers. They're pretty ruthless when it comes to this kind of thing.

Legally, I would think both parties get copies of everything. I don't know if that was the case here.

[throw101010]

> strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth)

If it's worth so little to your eyes/comprehension you will have no problem citing a huge count of cases where lawyers do not respect their obligations towards the courts and their clients...

That snide remark is used to discredit a profession in passing, but the reason you won't find a lot of examples of this happening is because the trust clients have to put in lawyers and the legal system in general is what makes it work, and betraying that trust is a literal professional suicide (suspension, disbarment, reputational ruin, and often civil liability) for any lawyer... that's why "strict" doesn't mean anything "little" in this case.

[piker]

> Edit: after reading up on this it looks like attorneys have strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth), but the Associated Press was a third party who unredacted public court documents in a separate Facebook case.

Curious. I am not a litigator but this is surprising if you found support for it. My gut was that the general obligation to be a zealous advocate for your client would require a litigant to use inadvertently disclosed information unless it was somehow barred by the court. Confidentiality obligations would remain owed to the client, and there might be some tension there but it would be resolvable.

[tremon]

Here in NL if confidential information about offenders leaks from court documents, it usually leads to a reduction in sentencing because the leak of classified information is weighed as part of the punishment. If the leak was proven to be intentional, it might lead to a mistrial or even acquittal. Leaking of victims' information usually only results in a groveling public apology from the Minister/Secretary of Justice du jour.

[bamboozled]

What a joke…

[ajross]

Given the context and the baldly political direction behind the redactions, it's not at all unlikely that this is the result of deliberate sabotage or malicious compliance. Bondi isn't blacking these things out herself, she's ordering people to do it who aren't true believers. Purges take time (and often blood). She's stuck with the staff trained under previous administrations.

[lamontcg]

Or it is just the result of firing people who were competent and giving insufficient training to people who had never done this before.

[__alexs]

This has happened so many times I feel like the DoJ must have some sort of standardised redaction pipeline to prevent it by now. Assuming they do, why wasn't it used?

[srean]

I am happy with their lack of expertise and hope it stays that way, because I cannot remember a single case where redactions put the citizenry at a better place for it.

Of course if it's in the middle of an investigation it can spoil the investigation, allow criminals to cover their tracks, allow escape.

In such case the document should be vetted by competent and honest officials to judge whether it is timely to release it, or whether suppressing it just ensures that investigation is never concluded, extending a forever renewed cover to the criminals.

[2026iknewit]

Of course there is a process.

There was also a process on how to communicate top secret information, but these idiots prefered to use signal.

I'm completly lost on how you can be surprised by this at all? Trump is in there, tells some FBI faboon to black everything out, they collect a group of people they can find and start going through these files as fast as they can.

"When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king; the palace instead becomes a circus."

[themafia]

Secure systems are not exactly the right environment for quick release and handling. So documents invariably get onto regular desktops with off the shelf software used by untrained personnel.

[harywilke]

there are FOIA lawsuits seeking the redaction training videos, one by https://bsky.app/profile/muellershewrote.com so maybe one day we will know more.

[kayodelycaon]

They probably fired that department.

[drcongo]

DOGE

[insertchatbot]

Not to mention when the White House published Obama's birth certificate as a PDF. I remember being able to open it and turn the different layers off and on.

[crazygringo]

Are you trying to suggest that indicated it was fraudulent? That has very much been debunked -- it's just an artifact of OCR and compression, something that many scanners do automatically [1].

You can still open it with Illustrator if you want to see: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss...

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/birth-certificate/

[JumpCrisscross]

"There are major differences between the Trump 1.0 and 2.0 administrations. In the Trump 1.0 administration, many of the most important officials were very competent men. One example would be then-Attorney General William Barr. Barr is contemptible, yes, but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file. There are ways to properly redact a PDF digitally, but going analog is foolproof.

The Trump 2.0 administration, in contrast, is staffed top to bottom with fools."

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/23/trump-doj-pdf-r...

[groestl]

> made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page

That's not very competent.

> going analog is foolproof

Absolutely not. There are many way's to f this up. Just the smallest variation in places that have been inked twice will reveal the clear text.

[netsharc]

It's like Russian spies being caught in the Netherlands with taxi receipts showing they took a taxi from their Moscow HQ to the airport: corrupt organizations attract/can only hire incompetent people...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/russian-spies-chemical-weapo...

Anyone remember how the Trump I regime had staff who couldn't figure out the lighting in the White House, or mistitled Australia's Prime Minister as President?

[g947o]

It's not fool proof:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/28/23777298/sony-ftc-microso...

[stevage]

I would just do the digital version of that: add 100% black bars then screenshot page by page and probably increase the contrast too.

[tdeck]

The bigger difference from my perspective is that they have competent people doing the strategy this time. The last Trump administration failed to use the obvious levers available to accomplish fascism, while this one has been wildly successful on that end. In a few years they will have realigned the whole power dynamic in the country, and unfortunately more and more competent people will choose to work for them in order to receive the benefits of doing so.

[ekianjo]

> William Barr. Barr is contemptible, yes, but smart AF

You mean the guy who covered up for Epstein's 'suicide' and expected us morons to believe it?

[eviks]

> but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file.

This is a dumb way of doing that, exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence or only as smart as the tech they grew up with. Also, this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length, which is a very common leak when especially for various names/official positions. And it doesn't eliminate the risk of non-redaction since you can't simply search&replace with machine precision, but have to do the manual conversion step to printed position

[SilasX]

Also the pedophile that tried to obscure his face in pictures with a swirl effect that they were able to reverse enough to identify him:

https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2007/11/you-can-swi...

IIRC there was a Slashdot discussion about it that went "Oh yeah, obviously you need to black out the face entirely, or use a randomized Gaussian blur." "Yeah, or just not molest kids."

[sailfast]

Typically these folks use standard redaction software. Has anyone explored the fact that the software is just a buggy, silly mess?

[agilob]

Follow the letter of the law, but not the spirit.

[Scarblac]

It already seems that they blacked out more than the law allowed, so following neither.

Not that it matters much what the law says if the goal is to protect the man who hands out pardons...

[g947o]

FTC vs Microsoft: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/28/23777298/sony-ftc-microso...

[yfw]

Its befuddling you think theres mechanisms to incentivize competency over loyalty in some of these organizations

[rafram]

Based on the prose style, I'm assuming you copy-pasted a ChatGPT "deep research" answer?

[wycy]

The prose style and the fact that it was super repetitive. Every bullet re-described the copy-pasting. Definitely LLM slop.

[867-5309]

similar to pressing delete or emptying recycle bin, in that all that happens is the operating system is told that section of the hard drive is now blank, but the underlying files are still there and available to recover

[orionspelt]

Befuddling you are befuddled by non-tech obsessed people failing to grasp tech.

[ricksunny]

The covid origins Slack messages discovery material (Anderson & Holmes) were famously poorly redacted pdfs, allowing their unredacting by Gilles Demaneuf, benefiting all of us.

[exasperaited]

You mean the layers that were, in fact, just side effects of scanning the (non-authoritative) short form certificate?