How to “read” the redacted parts of the Ghislaine Maxwell documents
https://twitter.com/paul_furber/status/1289226110249492482
Paul Furber@paul_furber - 2h
Various people have made the nonsensical claim that the redacted portions of the Maxwell docs can be unredacted by copying and pasting from the PDF into a Word document.
I checked. It's true. Oops.
Let's look at this document here:
https://ia801009.us.archive.org/25/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.447706/gov.uscourts.nysd.447706.143.0.pdf
I'm viewing the PDF in the Brave browser. Select the text and paste into an empty Libre office document. Voila.
I don't know whether this applies to all pages. But for this exercise to work you will probably need the original PDFs. Aggregated collections will probably not work.
Here's a list of the original PDFs from http://archive.org:
http://paulfurber.net/epstein/unsealed_list.txt [Note: Link 404'd]
I snagged them all using a simple bash script:
for f in cat unsealed_list.txt; do wget $f; done
It's 127 PDF files totalling 72 Mb.
You should be able to drop this list into your fav ftp or web crawler client and leave it unattended if you don't have access to a bash shell. The Outer Light confirms this unredacting exercise works here:
How to “read” the redacted parts of the Ghislaine Maxwell documents
the newly dropped documents from the civil case involving Ghislaine Maxwell have down been released. There are many redacted pages - however, there is a simple trick to see through the redactions.
https://youtu.be/Nc6eJFegC5M
Please don't use my list - it's incomplete. Get the list from here:
https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.nysd.447706/
Thank you @ethannoore!
Total: 507 PDFs for a total of 200 Mb.
Now backed up in case they go AWOL as tends to happen all too often in this day and age.
For the six other people using XFCE and Thunar, if you view the directory of PDFs as icons (ctrl-1), it's easy to see at a glance which documents could have redactions.
This probably applies to other OS file managers as well though.
11:47 AM · Jul 31, 2020·TweetDeck