Are there tools for trying to predict possible fits for redacted data given font, black bar size, and context?
jmward01•53m ago
I was thinking something similar. I wonder if the font uses kerning, and you know the rendering engine and the algorithm for how the text was blocked, if you can get exact text back even. Or, at a minimum, rule out words based on the available information. Not a field I am familiar with but I bet there are a lot of ways to uncover the redacted values.
amarant•28m ago
I don't know what fonts are typically used in redacted documents, but surely this kind of technique could be rendered useless by a mono space font?
Seems silly not to use a mono space font in these cases.
sa46•22m ago
Wouldn’t a mono space font provide more information since you can extrapolate the exact number of characters?
In some redacted documents, there is even an alphabetical word index at the end with a list of pages on which the words appear.
The redacted words are also redacted in the word index, but the alphabetically preceding and succeeding words are visible, as is the number of index lines taken up by the redacted word's entry, which correlates with the number of appearances of that word.
This seems like rather useful information to constrain a search by such a tool.
mapontosevenths•31m ago
Does it even matter? The kind of people who see stuff like this and are still fine with it are likely fine with anything else thats discovered as well.
what exactly does this mean? misrepresenting the altered document as unaltered?
i cant imagine it being illegal to do madlibs
typeofhuman•23m ago
> lets you put your own information over a redaction box.
This doesn't remove redactions, it lets you write over them.
websiteapi•6m ago
why unredact, rather than just edit the pdf to remove the redaction box and insert whatever you want? presumably you'd want a viewer to see that you modified a redaction, but why?
Waterluvian•1h ago
jmward01•53m ago
amarant•28m ago
Seems silly not to use a mono space font in these cases.
sa46•22m ago
estimator7292•53m ago
DavidSJ•37m ago
The redacted words are also redacted in the word index, but the alphabetically preceding and succeeding words are visible, as is the number of index lines taken up by the redacted word's entry, which correlates with the number of appearances of that word.
This seems like rather useful information to constrain a search by such a tool.
mapontosevenths•31m ago
The truth has become irrelevant.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000250...