| ▲ | Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments(neosmart.net) |
| 251 points by ComputerGuru a day ago | 67 comments |
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| ▲ | dperfect 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Nerdsnipe confirmed :) Claude Opus came up with this script: https://pastebin.com/ntE50PkZ It produces a somewhat-readable PDF (first page at least) with this text output: https://pastebin.com/SADsJZHd (I used the cleaned output at https://pastebin.com/UXRAJdKJ mentioned in a comment by Joe on the blog page) |
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| ▲ | chrisjj 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > it’s safe to say that Pam Bondi’s DoJ did not put its best and brightest on this Or worse. She did. |
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| ▲ | winddude 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | there are a few messaging conversations between FB agents early on that are kind of interesting. It would be very interesting to see them about the releases. I sometimes wonder if some was malicious compliance... ie, do a shitty job so the info get's out before it get re-redacted... we can hope... | |
| ▲ | eek2121 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, the internet is finding all her mistakes for her. She is actually doing alright with this. Crowdsource everything, fix the mistakes. lol. | | |
| ▲ | TSiege 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This would be funnier if it wasn’t child porn being unredacted by our government | | |
| ▲ | PetriCasserole 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I can't believe what we've become. | | |
| ▲ | queenkjuul an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Become? | |
| ▲ | nixosbestos an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Every second of my political consciousness in the United States has been acutely tinged with the awareness that a bunch of people, across most of the political spectrum live in a constant state of denial. Denial of personal responsibility or culpability. Denial of cognitive dissonance. Denial of any distinct, self-informed morals. Denial of anything but a fear of others. Denial of anything that makes them fearful or uncomfortable or might invite confrontation. I've known from the second I started doing debate and FX/DX in highschool, well, let's just say I never thought that the majority of the 2FA-folks would be worth a damn when tyranny really came knocking. Fear of the other as a form of manipulation, and a distraction from class consciousness, has been their literal raison d'état since decades before I was born. I guess I was shocked that the President being a convicted rapist and documented child predator would be a bridge too far. But then we re-elected him. I believe it. We voted for this. We do nothing in the face of zero actual justice. This is exactly as good as we deserve. And best of all, it certainly doesn't stop here. This is what they chose to not redact. When we know they spent enormous tax-payer hundreds-of-people hours redacting the documents. I don't think it's even conspiratorial to say they left stuff in, so they could use it as justification for not releasing the other HALF of the files that haven't been released, even overly censored. We deserve this, and the much worse that our apathy has invited. | | |
| ▲ | hsuduebc2 31 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I will certainly feel less confident ridiculing conspiracy theories. I’d never believe Bill Gates would secretly slip antibiotics into his wife’s cocktail to treat an STI he got from a Russian prostitute on convicted pedophile estate. But here we are. |
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| ▲ | helterskelter 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I wonder if this could be intentional. If the datasets are contaminated with CSAM, anybody with a copy is liable to be arrested for possession. More likely it's just an oversight, but it could also be CYA for dragging their feet, like "you rushed us, and look at these victims you've retraumatized". There are software solutions to find nudity and they're quite effective. | |
| ▲ | chrisjj 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Let's see her sued for leaking PII. Here in Europe, she'd be mincemeat. | | |
| ▲ | ISL 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The US administration is, at present, regularly violating the law and ignoring court orders. Indeed, these very releases are patently in violation of multiple federal laws -- they're simultaneously insufficiently-responsive to meet the requirements of the law requiring the release of the files and fall afoul of CSAM laws by being incompletely redacted. The challenge, as we're all experiencing together, is that the law is not inherently self-enforcing. | | |
| ▲ | typeofhuman 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Can you provide a couple examples of the laws they're violating? | | |
| ▲ | roywiggins an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | How about court orders? https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/ice-violations-judge-... > ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence," Schiltz said, adding that he counted 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/frustrations-from-judge-prosecu... | | | |
| ▲ | ISL 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As noted above: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-119publ38/pdf/PLAW-... : the Attorney General was to have produced the entirety of the Epstein files, with very narrowly-enumerated redactions, in December. She has not done so. Furthermore, there are numerous allegations that the documents that have been released contain CSAM, which (referencing the PDF above) may fall afoul of 18 U.S.C. 2252–2252A. In addition, one need only glance at the action in US courts to see egregious violations of the Constitution and valid court orders playing out daily. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26513988-trorder0128... https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230... | | |
| ▲ | typeofhuman 31 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Allegations aren't evidence. Has the Administration actually been found guilty of violating the law - if that is even possible. | | |
| ▲ | jcranmer 5 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yes, the Abrego Garcia and Öztürk detentions are two very newsworthy cases that have actually reached the point of a final judgement in the district courts, as opposed to "merely" preliminary injunctions against the government. (It's also worth noting that almost none of the government's appeals to their losses in preliminary injunctions have been on the merits as to whether or not their actions were legal, but rather on the grounds of "no one should be allowed to challenge our actions," which has also been a fairly losing argument for everybody except SCOTUS.) |
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| ▲ | mikeyouse 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They illegally fired the IGs responsible for whistleblowers and fraud in every department; https://www.nycbar.org/press-releases/firings-of-inspectors-... They illegally withheld funds (impoundment) from congressionally authorized/mandated expenditures and relied on pocket rescissions to defund programs they didn't like: https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/pocket-rescissi... They keep illegally appointing unqualified hacks as US attorney in defiance of the mandate they're approved by the Senate (Essayli, Habba, Halligan, Sarcone, Chattah) - judges have found at least five of the appointments illegal. As one example: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/28/judge-los-angeles-t... They've repeatedly violated court orders to either return immigrant detainees or release them. "This is one of dozens of court orders with which respondents have failed to comply in recent weeks.": https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/27/politics/patrick-schiltz-judg... His targeting and shakedowns of Universities, law firms, and media companies is transparently illegal jawboning. Everything about the tariffs is obviously illegal which he confirms every time he opens his mouth since he's relying on 'national security' justifications to issue them without Congress and he keeps insisting they're punishment for some random perceived slight. His illegal firing of Federal workers without the notice required: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/25/nx-s1-5544317/federal-probati... Some sillier things like renaming the Kennedy Center -- the law that established it literally said that it couldn't be renamed without Congress -- so Trump firing everyone on the board and then appointing a bunch of his flunkees to vote for the name change doesn't cut it.. https://beatty.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/beatty.house.gov... It's a literal onslaught of illegality so I can't tell if you haven't read a news article since 2025 or if you're trolling. | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There's more than enough credible reports of CSAM in the Epstein Files dump - more than enough for me to not go and download even a single file of them myself, simply because German law does not care about why you are in the possession of CSAM, even if you took the picture yourself. The legal situation regarding CSAM is very strict no matter which country, and I better hope no one here will actually be dumb enough to provide actual links. |
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| ▲ | dagi3d 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | the issue is that mistakes can't be fixed in the sense once they are discovered, it doesn't matter if they are eventually redacted | |
| ▲ | rockskon 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah - they'll take these lessons learned for future batches of releases. |
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| ▲ | bawolff 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Teseract supports being trained for specific fonts, that would probably be a good starting point https://pretius.com/blog/ocr-tesseract-training-data |
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| ▲ | pyrolistical 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It decodes to binary pdf and there are only so many valid encodings. So this is how I would solve it. 1. Get an open source pdf decoder 2. Decode bytes up to first ambiguous char 3. See if next bits are valid with an 1, if not it’s an l 4. Might need to backtrack if both 1 and l were valid By being able to quickly try each char in the middle of the decoding process you cut out the start time. This makes it feasible to test all permutations automatically and linearly |
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| ▲ | bushbaba 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This proves my paranoia that you should print and rescan redactions. That or do screenshots of the pdf redacted and convert back to a pdf |
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| ▲ | pimlottc 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why not just try every permutation of (1,l)? Let’s see, 76 pages, approx 69 lines per page, say there’s one instance of [1l] per line, that’s only… uh… 2^5244 possibilities… Hmm. Anyone got some spare CPU time? |
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| ▲ | wahern 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | It should be much easier than that. You should should be able to serially test if each edit decodes to a sane PDF structure, reducing the cost similar to how you can crack passwords when the server doesn't use a constant-time memcmp. Are PDFs typically compressed by default? If so that makes it even easier given built-in checksums. But it's just not something you can do by throwing data at existing tools. You'll need to build a testing harness with instrumentation deep in the bowels of the decoders. This kind of work is the polar opposite of what AI code generators or naive scripting can accomplish. | | |
| ▲ | cluckindan 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | On the contrary, that kind of one-off tooling seems a great fit for AI. Just specify the desired inputs, outputs and behavior as accurately as possible. | |
| ▲ | pimlottc 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I wonder if you could leverage some of the fuzzing frameworks tools like Jepsen rely on. I’m sure there’s got to be one for PDF generation. |
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| ▲ | ChocMontePy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You can use the justice.gov search box to find several different copies of that same email. The copy linked in the post: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA004004... Three more copies: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA02153... https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA02154... https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA02154... Perhaps having several different versions might make it easier. |
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| ▲ | percentcer 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is one of those things that seems like a nerd snipe but would be more easily accomplished through brute forcing it. Just get 76 people to manually type out one page each, you'd be done before the blog post was written. |
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| ▲ | jjwiseman 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Or one person types 76 pages. This is a thing people used to do, not all that infrequently. Or maybe you have one friend who will help–cool, you just cut the time in half. | | |
| ▲ | wildzzz an hour ago | parent [-] | | Typing 76 pages is easy when it's words in a language you understand. WPM is going to be incredibly slow when you actually have to read every character. On top of that, no spaces and no spellcheck so hopefully you didn't miss a character. | | |
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| ▲ | WolfeReader 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You think compelling 76 people to honestly and accurately transcribe files is something that's easy and quick to accomplish. | |
| ▲ | fragmede 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Just get 76 people I consider myself fairly normal in this regard, but I don't have 76 friends to ask to do this, so I don't know how I'd go about doing this. Post an ad on craigslist? Fiverr? Seems like a lot to manage. | | |
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| ▲ | kevin_thibedeau 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| pdftoppm and Ghostscript (invoked via Imagemagick) re-rasterize full pages to generate their output. That's why it was slow. Even worse with a Q16 build of Imagemagick. Better to extract the scanned page images directly with pdfimages or mutool. Followup: pdfimages is 13x faster than pdftoppm |
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| ▲ | legitster 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Given how much of a hot mess PDFs are in general, it seems like it would behoove the government to just develop a new, actually safe format to standardize around for government releases and make it open source. Unlike every other PDF format that has been attempted, the federal government doesn't have to worry about adoption. |
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| ▲ | Spooky23 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You’re thinking about this as a nerd. It’s not a tools problem, it’s a problem of malicious compliance and contempt for the law. | |
| ▲ | derwiki 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | JPEG? | | |
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| ▲ | velaia 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Bummer that it's not December - the https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/ crows would love this puzzle |
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| ▲ | FarmerPotato 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If only Base64 had used a checksum. |
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| ▲ | zahlman 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | "had used"? Base64 is still in very common use, specifically embedded within JSON and in "data URLs" on the Web. | | |
| ▲ | bahmboo 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | "had" in the sense of when it was designed and introduced as a standard |
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| ▲ | nubg 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Wait would this give us the unredacted PDFs? |
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| ▲ | ryanSrich 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | That's the idea yeah. There are other people actively working on this. You can follow vx-underground on twitter. They're tracking it. | |
| ▲ | poyu 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think it's the PDF files that were attached to the emails, since they're base64 encoded. |
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| ▲ | linuxguy2 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Love this, absolutely looking forward to some results. |
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| ▲ | queenkjuul an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm only here to shout out fish shell, a shell finally designed for the modern world of the 90s |
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| ▲ | eek2121 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Honestly, this is something that should've been kept private, until each and every single one of the files is out in the open. Sure, mistakes are being made, but if you blast them onto the internet, they WILL eventually get fixed. Cool article, however. |
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| ▲ | blindriver 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| On one hand, the DOJ gets shit because it was taking too long to produce the documents, and then on another, they get shit because there are mistakes in the redacting because there are 3 million pages of documents. |
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| ▲ | rapind 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What they are redacting is pretty questionable though. Entire pages being suspiciously redacted with no explanation (which they are supposed to provide). This is just my opinion, but I think it's pretty hard to defend them as making an honest and best effort here. Remember they all lied about and changed their story on the Epstein "files" several times now (by all I mean Bondi, Patel, Bongino, and Trump). It's really really hard to give them the benefit of the doubt at this point. | |
| ▲ | thereisnospork 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Considering the justice to document ratio that's kind of on them regardless. |
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| ▲ | iwontberude 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This one is irresistible to play with. Indeed a nerd snipe. |
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| ▲ | netsharc 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I doubt the PDF would be very interesting. There are enough clues in the human-readable parts: it's an invite to a benefit event in New York (filename calls it DBC12) that's scheduled on December 10, 2012, 8pm... Good old-fashioned searching could probably uncover what DBC12 was, although maybe not, it probably wasn't a public event. The recipient is also named in there... | | |
| ▲ | RajT88 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's potentially a lot of files attached and printed out in this fashion. The search on the DOJ website (which we shouldn't trust), given the query: "Content-Type: application/pdf; name=", yields maybe a half dozen or so similarly printed BASE64 attachments. There's probably lots of images as well attached in the same way (probably mostly junk). I deleted all my archived copies recently once I learned about how not-quite-redacted they were. I will leave that exercise to someone else. |
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| ▲ | zahlman 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > …but good luck getting that to work once you get to the flate-compressed sections of the PDF. A dynamic programming type approach might still be helpful. One version or other of the character might produce invalid flate data while the other is valid, or might give an implausible result. |
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| ▲ | Evidlo an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I took at stab at training Tesseract and holy jeebus is their CLI awful. Just an insanely complicated configuration procedure. |
