‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Thursday, September 12, 2019 4:43 AM, Douglas Lucas <dal@riseup.net> wrote:
Redaction errors from .gov are surprisingly common.
The court reporter at Barrett Brown's first (of two) sentencing hearing provided a transcript of that proceeding. The PDF included black redaction squares censoring her transcribed text of two bench conference.s All I had to do to liberate that text from redaction was use the PDF program Okular: I clicked "Selection", highlighted the redacted text, picked "Copy to clipboard", and pasted the clipboard contents into a text editor.
way back when (early 00's) i used this technique to search for PDF court documents with "CONFIDENTIAL", "PROPRIETARY" keywords and used the same trick to un-redact the telco information regarding fiber plats, routes (rights of way), and capacities. there was a lot of litigation among telcos, municipal governments, and others during this time :) i always assumed this trick would die a quick death... alas, here we are! ... i really want a shodan for shoddy redactions.