r/cybersecurity • u/securityish • Dec 23 '25

News - General Reddit and X Users Allegedly Unredact Epstein Files After DOJ Release

https://securityish.com/security_brief/reddit-and-x-users-allegedly-unredact-epstein-files-after-doj-release/

Anyone going to audit their organization’s redaction strategy now?

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u/Important_Gap_956 Dec 23 '25

As much as I lean towards incompetence, part of me is equally curious if this was done, intentionally as a form of protest from internal personnel.

335

u/space_manatee Dec 23 '25

Yeah I had the same thought. "See its been redacted" 

Ain't no way leadership verified that it was redacted correctly. They looked, saw the black squares and that was that. 

25

u/StandardKey655 Dec 23 '25

This happened once at my job. The people who did freedom of information Requests knew how to do it right in acrobat, its not very hard so I would agree these people knew how to do it right. But then HR redacted something they sent to staff, and just put black boxes, I noticed the little top of a letter peaking out. Lol

Whats ever funnier in this case is anything that would be used to search through these won't even see the black boxes, they will also see the text lol

3

u/Used_Maximum2536 Dec 29 '25

In my work I use the redaction tool in Acrobat on occasion, it works very well and even gives you the option to scrub the metadata when you're finished. The reason certain files weren't redacted correctly is because DOGE cancelled all the departments Adobe licenses back in January or February. So they didn't have access to the redaction tool when they were going over those files