A Technical and Cultural Assessment of the Mueller Report PDF

Re:A Technical and Cultural Assessment of the Mueller Report... by IshKebab on Saturday April 20, 2019 @09:06AM (#19706321)

Yeah they keep saying "they could have easily used native digital redaction" but that clearly isn't as easy as they think because there have been numerous instances of people screwing that up.

Maybe those people used the wrong software or buggy software, but how do you know software is buggy? Much easier to print and scan than to dive into the PDF file on a really low level.

They could however have just converted it to PNG and then back to PDF digitally to keep the quality good. No need to physically print and scan it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Technical and Cultural Assessment of the Mueller Report... by rtpg on Saturday April 20, 2019 @09:41AM (#19706477)

to be honest the analog redaction techniques are pretty bad.

For example there's a list of names, alphabetical. Two names are redacted.

Michael Cohen, Richard Gates, [REDACTED], Roger Stone, and [REDACTED] (newline) [REDACTED]. The final redaction could fit approximately three letters.

The fact that these are analog redactions makes it really easy to tell that the two other people are Kushner and Donald Jr.

Meanwhile if they had opened the report in Word and done [REDACTED] they wouldn't have these super-basic issues.

There _is_ an advantage in that you can have more confidence that the original document is merely being redacted and not completely changed, but it's not really beyond motivated people to actually change the source doc if they wanted to.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Technical and Cultural Assessment of the Mueller Report... by gotorazor on Saturday April 20, 2019 @12:16PM (#19707312)

I think the redaction just allows them to say that it was redacted, not that anyone didn’t know who was in the list of names. Anybody paying attention to television news for the past 2 years would know who was in that list of names.

[ Parent | on HN ]