Reverse-Engineering the Redactions in the Ghislaine Maxwell Deposition
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Slate magazine was able to cleverly read the Ghislaine Maxwell deposition and reverse-engineer many of the redacted names.
We’ve long known that redacting is hard in the modern age, but most of the failures to date have been a result of not realizing that covering digital text with a black bar doesn’t always remove the text from the underlying digital file. As far as I know, this reverse-engineering technique is new.
EDITED TO ADD: A similar technique was used in 1991 to recover the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Tags: courts, redaction, reverse engineering
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Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/10/reverse-engineering-the-redactions-in-the-ghislaine-maxwell-deposition.html