Reaching out to a mod for coordination
well, I didn’t want to bring the SDMB into legal problems, or anybody else… but MODs OK’d it
If you go on reddit, it’s quite abuzz with the epstein-files and there are now quite a lot of sources where you can download 900 or so pages un-blacked-out.
It seems the administration used a wrong function to black out and did NOT “flatten the image” afterwards, so it turned out that you can mark and then copy and paste the text under tha black blocks.
I don’t feel like posting/hosting a huge pdf file. but poking around reddit should land you the DL-link for a file with a long name that ends in: …1320.0-combined.pdf
anyway, here is a mainstream media link also, explaining a bit of background …
The next batches released will surely have the black parts done in a more permanent way.
I can easily imagine persons publishing the de-redacted version (except perhaps in Congress or in a courtroom, or in a country with special status such as Israel) could be the target of arbitrary prosecution. The FBI could classify the de-redacted version as child p*rn, for instance.
In my opinion, until everybody knows more: If a person were to download a copy of the de-redacted document, that person would be wise to store it on a USB key and to make darn sure not to have a copy / backup / sync in their OneDrive or Google Drive or Apple Cloud or DropBox account.
which triggers an interesting Q:
can legal documents (interviews from a lawsuit, etc…) be (declared) child-pron?
Wouln’t that weasel-move ™ put a lot of people at risk who hold the files for legit-reasons (e.g. watchdog, the avg. public servant who receives a computer from a former co-worker with those files still on, backup tapes, cloud-servers,) …
Could newsmedia still report on that (I’d strongly assume so), etc…
thoughts?
my guess: the toothpaste is already out of the tube and there is no way of getting it back in. → Interesting times, indeed…
That’s just so perfectly on-brand for this administration.
That’s what happens when you fire all competent people because you consider competence and expertise to be evil.
- The redactions talked about here are of text. Are you saying that the FBI would classify people who post text documents they got off a government website as distributers of CSAM?
- You think that the FBI would charge foreigners with distribution of CSAM for doing this? Which countries do you think would extradite people to the US to face these charges?
- What “special status” do you think Israel has that would mean that Israeli citizens who post anti-Trump material would be given a pass that say British citizens posting anti-Trump material would not be given?
Under the leadership of Kash Patel, under orders from Donald Trump? What makes you think they wouldn’t?
They just might be incompetent enough to try it, maybe, but if they did, they’d be laughed out of court.
I mean, you the mods clearly don’t think it’s going to be treated as CSAM, or you would not have OK’d a thread containing instructions on how to access it, right? “Go to Reddit and search for the link ending in…” wouldn’t be acceptable for something illegal.
So it’s like they put a black “picture” over the text and then saved it, rather than either (a) do that and then print to pdf or (b) … use adobe’s built-in redaction tool that makes the redacted portion unrecoverable.
I don’t understand the hype around all this. So a bunch of elites are pedos, but we all knew that. It’s not like anyone’s going to do anything about it. What difference does this release make, incompetently censored or not?
e.g. “weak/small” countries that export a huge porportion of their GDP to the USA … for example Vietnam with 30% of all its economy’s production being shipped to USA …
I assume I dont have to explain the playbook on how that works with the current administration.
It is absolutely plausible that this is incompetence, but it’s also possible that it’s something on the inside doing the right thing. Lots of FBI agents were tasked with redacting the files and I’d have to imagine at least some of them are good men of conscience that know that this information shouldn’t be hidden from the public and may have deliberately left the information recoverable.
It’s actually pretty depressing how few whistleblowers we’ve had on this. I know Trump is trying to get rid of civil servants and replace them with lackies loyal to him personally, but I have a really difficult time believing that everyone who has dedicated their lives to serving this country whether it be in the FBI or CIA or other governmental institutions is keeping quiet on all of the evil shit we know the Trump admin is doing in secret.
it seems to me that the more graphic/humane/direct those things turn, the harder they hit in the court of public opinion, …
kindalike: 10 deaths are a tragedy, 1.000.000 deaths are a statistic
just think of the pic of the drowned boy washed on the beach, that changed history in europe in 2015 with everything regarding migration/refugees (not gonna post that one) …
The big question is if these blacked out sections include the names and/or other identifying information of victims. There is a general consensus that the victims of sexual abuse should not have their names made public [unless the victims choose to do so] as this can both cause a lot of problems for victims as well as discouraging future victims from reporting sexual abuse to the authorities.
I think the answer is yes, because (and I am not super familiar with the Epstein stuff so I could be misinterpreting this) there was a document where a lady said she had talked to Trump at Epstein’s island multiple timqes which went against prior testimony she had given in court where she said she’d only talked to Trump once or twice.
Assuming I’m not wildly misremembering this story, which is possible, her name would need to have been uncensored for that info to have come out.
There’s still value in knowing which specific elites are pedos.
I mean, maybe, but we’ve got to invoke Occam’s Razor, here. It’s incompetence regardless, because even if that had happened, none of the folks on the wrong side noticed it, and if they were remotely competent, they would have. So we have to either assume incompetence, or assume incompetence and also assume a principled whistleblower.
That doesn’t follow. Victims are often given identifying pseudonyms. If (as is not unlikely) the trial court and the documenters used the same pseudonym, that could be released publicly, and show that it’s the same person, without violating the victim’s privacy.
CSAM – “Child Sexual Abuse Material”?
Yep. That’s the “official” term nowadays. It’s assumed everyone knows it.
Competence is carefully avoided.