Depends on the converter, whether it keeps the Adobe spying
   features witting or unwitting -- which it may be aware of or not.
   And whether it has a deal with Adobe to retain disguised.
   Adode hidden code is quite devious -- for example it may remain
   hidden to use the converted version as a host germ carrier to
   propagate itself, following the bio model in our guts to use
   feces as fertilizer.
   Be careful about using free products, such as Adobe Reader
   and free converters of formats of all kinds. They often contain
   germs similar to the way NSA and other spies implant germs
   in innocuous programs and platforms -- "free" is as devious as
   "open" to those who exploit public trust in freedom and openness.
   Journalism a prime exploiter under the brand of freedom of the
   press to exploit with constitutional protection.
   Gmail is one of the most notorious germ transmitters. Tor not quite
   as evil, but less because newer than the Internet itself, the Internet
   Archive, Wikipedia, social media, PGP, and many more which may
   have had noble origins but have been adopted (and bought) by
   converters of good to evil -- most readily by government contracts,
   vulture capitalism, desparately broke and in debt, entrapment and
   coercion by law enforement -- or all of them.
   This list is beyond good and evil, thus spoke Zarathrusta, aka
   TCM, JG, EH. Though those gods are dead.
   Benjamin Brewer wrote:
> On Jan 31, 2015, at 8:59 AM, John Young
<[1]jya at
pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> Swell initiatives by all the Snowden distributors. Except most
> fall prey to PDF manipulation of tagging, implanting, tracking,
> by willful intent or by technical ignorance.
>
> It is virtually impossible to sanitize PDFs due to Adobe's
inherent
> design to meticulously spy on use of its products as well as
> deluded user attempts to hide who, when, what, how by users
> from creation to modification to wiping to stego to signing to
> forging to stinging. Image or accessible-text or other PDF
> formats, locked, redacted, watermarked, et al.
>

Pardon my ignorance about this, and I will do my own research, but do
these hidden formattings/stego/call-home functions disappear, get
mutilated, become broken when converting such PDF documents to other
document types via use of many conversion tools (Calibre comes to mind
instantly) or are these embedded organisms a persistent across any
automated conversion routine?

Cheers,
Benjamin

References

   1. https://cpunks.org/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks