Unredaction isn't hacking
It just wasn't redacted to begin with.
This Guardian article says that “Epstein file redactions are being undone with hacks”. They aren’t hacks — the files simply weren’t redacted in the first place.
They looked redacted. They had black bars over the text, preventing humans from seeing the text. But, the text was still there. A redaction needs to remove the text — but the FBI’s attempt at redaction did not.
To understand this, open a word processing program like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. They have an option to change the background of text, the “Highlight Color”. An example is this below, where I show some text highlighted with yellow, and some other text that I’ve highlighted with black.
Now if I choose a black background color, the text becomes unreadable, because it’s foreground color is also black. But this doesn’t mean the text isn’t there. You can select the text and change it back to white (or yellow) in order to make it readable again. Or, you can select the text and paste it into a different document. Here is a link to the Google Doc so that you can see this for yourself.
We are not hacking when we select the text in an editor, copy, thend paste it somewhere else in order to read it. We aren’t particularly smart, it’s just that FBI agents are particularly stupid, believing that if they can’t read the text that it has been “redacted”. It hasn’t, the text is still there.
Changing the highlight color to black is something you can try at home, but what happened with the Epstein PDF files is slightly different. Instead of changing the background, they put black bars in front of the text. But anybody reading the PDF file online can still select the text, copy it, and paste the text somewhere else in order to easily view it.
Thus, when you see this sort of thing in a PDF file, you don’t know if it’s actually been redacted, whether the text is still there, or whether its been removed. You have to select the text and copy it.
This is one of the many non-redacted redactions in the Epstein dump. I include the PDF with this post so that you can scroll down to section 80 and see for yourself that the text hasn’t been redacted. Select the entire paragraph, copy, and paste somewhere else.
This kind of unredacting has been known for so long, it makes one want to start a new conspiracy theory that this was done on purpose, nudge nudge, wink wink.