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posted by on Saturday June 10 2017, @05:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the like-with-a-cloth-or-something dept.

Following Winner's arrest and subsequent charging, the security researcher has submitted a pull request to the PDF Redact Tools, a project for securely redacting and stripping metadata from documents before publishing.

[...] "The black and white conversion will convert colors like the faded yellow dots to white," Szathmari told Bleeping Computer in an interview.

Bleeping Computer

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by KilroySmith on Saturday June 10 2017, @06:53PM (6 children)

    by KilroySmith (2113) on Saturday June 10 2017, @06:53PM (#523549)

    >>>And what would be the point of printing a document, only to scan it in as PDF?
    Well, it's a great way to definitively strip any identifying metadata from the document. Were I ever to leak a document, it's certainly one of the steps I'd take.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Saturday June 10 2017, @07:08PM (5 children)

    by mhajicek (51) on Saturday June 10 2017, @07:08PM (#523556)

    Why not scan the print with OCR and release it as a text file?

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @08:09PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @08:09PM (#523570)

      Proof that a document is official often requires the letterhead, signatures and other markings.

      • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday June 11 2017, @09:21AM

        by mhajicek (51) on Sunday June 11 2017, @09:21AM (#523735)

        Well those are easy enough to Photoshop.

        --
        The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday June 10 2017, @08:18PM (1 child)

      by frojack (1554) on Saturday June 10 2017, @08:18PM (#523573) Journal

      First you'd have to print it. (That leaves a digital record of who printed what, from what station, at what time).
      Sending it out of the NSA across any network is going to get you caught quickly.
      So you have to get it out of the NSA in printed form, and do your scanning and PDFing outside.
      So you smuggle it out in paper form.

      Oh, wait. I think I see the problem right here.... How did THAT happen? Just walk out with a sheaf of papers?
      Seems to me, Ms Winner was set up for this fall. She can't be smart enough to GET that job, and dumb enough to think it would be that easy.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday June 10 2017, @11:08PM

        by kaszz (4211) on Saturday June 10 2017, @11:08PM (#523621) Journal

        There are a lot of people with clearances. They don't seem to mean too much. And in fact her boss(es) may not be that smart or just squeezed by budget or profit demands. It was a subcontractor after all.

    • (Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Saturday June 10 2017, @08:41PM

      by KilroySmith (2113) on Saturday June 10 2017, @08:41PM (#523578)

      Often the letterhead, headers, and footers help to authenticate that the document is "real", even though they're easily faked.