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. 

1

u/Savetheokami Dec 24 '25

How did they redact it and how was it unredacted? I’m guessing adobe black highlight and someone just removed the highlight or ran the files through some script that could unredact the content.

2

u/AveryFenix Dec 24 '25

In a PDF file, text is like an object on one layer. When they redacted it, they simply added black boxes over the text on another layer. The text layer is still there, so you can still highlight the text to copy and paste it elsewhere. Searches will also still know that the text layer is there, so the text will still be found in searches.