News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on A Technical and Cultural Assessment of the Mueller Report PDF.

Re:A Technical and Cultural Assessment of the Mueller Report... by jakecopp on Saturday April 20, 2019 @04:49AM (#19705475)
> In releasing the redacted PDF of the report to the public, Barr avoids suspicion that the document had been edited (changed) in addition to straightforward redactions. PDF serves the need to unambiguously assure the press and the public that they are seeing Mueller's actual report.

This is such a shame. The PDF wasn't even signed.

Is an HTML file with a hash provided directly by Mueller/whoever is doing the redacting too much to ask?

> There's really no model for redaction of HTML-based web content.

Is replacing censored text with a fixed number of some character not good enough?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Technical and Cultural Assessment of the Mueller Report... by jstanley on Saturday April 20, 2019 @04:57AM (#19705495)
With either a PDF file or an HTML file, there's no way to prove that the document is a redacted version of the original, rather than an edited-and-redacted version of the original. I also don't see what using PDF adds here.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Technical and Cultural Assessment of the Mueller Report... by sjy on Saturday April 20, 2019 @10:54AM (#19706813)
Anyone with the original document can eyeball individual pages and confirm that they (or black bars of the right size) appear in the redacted version. Doing that with unpaginated HTML requires you to use and understand some kind of diff tool, and if there are any significant differences (like a whole paragraph that disappeared without a trace), they can be plausibly blamed on 'technical difficulties.'
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Technical and Cultural Assessment of the Mueller Report... by Mirioron on Saturday April 20, 2019 @08:15AM (#19706125)
I think it's because many people think you can't edit PDFs, but they know you can edit text documents.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A Technical and Cultural Assessment of the Mueller Report... by gruez on Saturday April 20, 2019 @12:12PM (#19707280)
Even if you really can't edit PDFs, there's nothing preventing you from recreating the document and exporting that as a pdf. After all, it's all text.
[ Parent | on HN ]