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Comment by streetfighter64 | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting. That document in particular seems to be an interview of A. Acosta by the DoJ from 2019. But what reason would the FBI have for pretending it's a scanned document, if it is genuine? Perhaps there's some aspect of Epstein's deal with Acosta that they'd rather not reveal to the public?

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%207/EFTA000092...

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Not that I can speak from personal experience or anything... But somebody on an email chain may have requested a scanned version of the document to ensure there is no metadata and the employee might have found it easier to just flatten the pdf and apply a graphical filter to make the document appear like a scanned document. There might even be a webtool available somewhere to do so, I wouldn't know...

> the employee might have found it easier to just flatten the pdf and apply a graphical filter to make the document appear like a scanned document

Is that remotely plausible? I can't imaging faking a scan being easier than just walking down the hall to the copier room.

Depending on their technical capability, yes.

I mean even in this thread you got what are essentially one-liners to do it.

Definitely less hassle then doing it irl

Hoe big a percentage of FBI / DoJ employees are running linux (with imagemagick) as their work computer? I'd be surprised to see a similar oneliner for a stock windows installation.

Yeah they might have used some web converter, but that on the other hand would have been extremely incompetent handling of the secret data.

Installing MSYS2 is a matter of a few minutes. There is also WSL and macOS features a POSIX shell, imagemagick is likely already installed as a dependency somewhere, like ffmpeg often also is.

I know I'm not the brightest bulb by any measure, but do some people really take less than at least a few minutes to come up with one-liners for problems as novel as graphical transformations to PDFs? Maybe if the presumed techie hacker / federal worker took it as an amusing challenge I could see this being done, but genuinely out of pure laziness? That's incredible if true.

It's not a novel problem. But yes, I don't think people quite appreciate how quick and easy it is for people who are in the habit of brewing up one-liners to solve simple problems to do that. I've done it here on HN for jq toy problems before, and I don't really doubt there are people similarly familiar with imagemagick.

It’s a mix of “they’ve done it many times before” and these days AI. But remember the “they’ve done it many times before” just means that in a technical and popular forum you’re likely to find the handful of people who have done so regularly enough to remember the one liner. Also this is probably easily searchable as well so even prior to AI not super hard.

There is nothing novel about it. I saw at least one person say that they have done exactly the same thing out of laziness.

If it's already scanned, then you don't have to leave your desk.

It's thousands of pages, surely investing some time in a script is faster. They were in a rush as well.

If they were faking the documents rather than the delivery method they definitely could have invested some time in flawless looks.

Or more-realistic flawed looks as the case is here.

The time advantage of faking a scan becomes better the more pages you have to scan.

https://xkcd.com/1205/

Nice. But 5 years seems unrealistic. Who stays on the same job using same processes 5 years these days? Even if the task might remain the same, input formats might change, requiring extra maintenance to the tool. Should recalculate that for 3 years before using it in my automation decisions.

you do not work in the public sector, where processes change rarely, slowly, and partially

Working from home and no scanner in the house?

No printer.

If I look at my personal work situation, working from home would mean I can't do it immediately, but would have to remember to do it the next day. Or just do it digitally right now in a few minutes and have it off my to-do list

Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to laziness, these are government workers

I think maybe the old "don't attribute to malice" adage goes out the window when we're talking about a coverup of a giant child sex trafficking ring run by high-up people in the government.

While I don't disagree with your point about Epstein case being a massive cya for a ton of people in power, the fact is that if they deeply wanted to cover up something the right way to do it would to be to actually print it and scan it, this does look like someone shortcutted some broad order to print and scan all digital media.

You’re talking about 1,000 FBI agents locked in a building. There’s no printer.

Look, what I'm saying is that I don't have a scanner at home or at work and I've find this.

I am only guessing that they had to remove the document from a classified network in a way where data won't possibly leak

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