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I found this part interesting:

There are also other documents that appear to simulate a scanned document but completely lack the “real-world noise” expected with physical paper-based workflows. The much crisper images appear almost perfect without random artifacts or background noise, and with the exact same amount of image skew across multiple pages. Thanks to the borders around each page of text, page skew can easily be measured, such as with VOL00007\IMAGES\0001\EFTA00009229.pdf. It is highly likely these PDFs were created by rendering original content (from a digital document) to an image (e.g., via print to image or save to image functionality) and then applying image processing such as skew, downscaling, and color reduction.

GNOME Desktop users can put this in a Bash script in ~/.local/share/nautilus/ for more convincing looking fake PDF scans, accessible from your right-click menu. I do not recall where I copied it from originally to give credit so thanks, random internet person (probably on Stack Exchange). It works perfectly.

  ROTATION=$(shuf -n 1 -e '-' '')$(shuf -n 1 -e $(seq 0.05 .5))

  for pdf in "$@";
    do magick  -density 150 $pdf \
              -linear-stretch '1.5%x2%' \
              -rotate 0.4 \
              -attenuate '0.01' \
              +noise  Multiplicative \
              -colorspace 'gray' \
              "${pdf%.*}-fakescan.${pdf##*.}"
  done

That seq is probably supposed to be $(seq 0.05 0.05 0.5). Right now it's always 0.05.

Note that you can get random numbers straight from bash with $RANDOM. It's 15 bit (0 to 32767) but good enough here; this would get between 0.05 and 0.5: $(printf "0.%.4d\n" $((500 + RANDOM % 4501)))

Shouldn't $ROTATION be set inside the loop and actually used in the magick command?

You know, now that you point it out that seems obvious. I think maybe I was experimenting with rotation and left that in, unused. I did this years ago. The loop works OK though. Thanks for the feedback (and now I have to finish editing that script ...)

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...

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.

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

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

https://xkcd.com/1205/

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.

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

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.

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.

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Straight to the signup page? A bit blatant, no?

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I mean, I do that all the time when they ask me to print something, sign it, and then scan it.

Sign a blank paper, scan it, paste the original doc on it. Then keep the scan for future docs.

Has anyone analysed JE's writing style and looked for matches in archived 4chan posts or content from similar platforms? Same with Ghislaine, there should be enough data to identify them atp right? I don't buy the MaxwellHill claims for various reasons but it doesn't mean there's nothing to find.

There was a post on here about a project in stylometry that analyzed HN users comment history. The tool helped find accounts that had an extremely similar writing style to a given account. The site was soon removed due to privacy concerns but many users with multiple account attested to its accuracy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

It turns out stylometry is actually a pretty well-developed field. It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me

People always claimed this as a data leak vector but I've always been sceptical. Like just writing style and vocabulary is probably extremely shared among too many people to narrow it down much. (How people that you know could have written this reply?) The counter argument is that he had a very specific style in his mail so maybe this is a special case.

If you have a large enough set to test against and a specific person you are looking for, this is totally doable currently.

Of course it's doable. The question is how reliable the results are.

It just needs to find the needles in the haystack. Humans can better verify if they're truly needles.

Not just a test set, but enough of a set to search through and compare against. Several pages of in-depth writing isn't anywhere near sufficient, even when limiting the search space to ~10k people.

this is a well-studied field (stylometry). when combining writing styles, vocabulary, posting times, etc. you absolutely can narrow it down to specific people.

even when people deliberately try to feign some aspects (e.g. switching writing styles for different pseudonyms), they will almost always slip up and revert to their most comfortable style over time. which is great, because if they aren't also regularly changing pseudonyms (which are also subject to limited stylometry, so pseudonym creation should be somewhat randomized in name, location, etc.), you only need to catch them slipping once to get the whole history of that pseudonym (and potentially others, once that one is confirmed).

People do change over time, I used to write "ha" after every sentence for some reason

You know, i had a particularly cringy period in which i put "la" at the end of sentences.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. "Ooh, la" sounds really unnatural.

But on a serious note, what did "la" mean in your context? I've never seen this.

It’s a common thing for speakers of Singaporean English to end sentences with la/leh. But no idea if that’s what’s going on here.

You left off something.

sure, not denying that. my writing style is fairly different now in my 40s than it was in my late teens/early twenties.

but, those changes are usually pretty gradual and relatively small. thats why when attempting to identify someone via writing, you look at several aspects of the writing and not just word choice (grammar, use of specific slang, sentence length, paragraph structure, punctuation, etc.). it is highly unlikely that all aspects of someones writing changes at the same time. simply removing "ha" is inconsequential to identification if not much else changed.

additionally, this data is typically combined with other data/patterns (posting times, username (themes, length, etc.), writing that displays certain types of expertise, and more) to increase the confidence level of correct identification.

Stylometry is okay if you're trying to deanonymize a large enough sample text. A reddit account would be doable. But individual 4chan posts? You barely have enough content within the text limit.

Stylometry is extremely sophisticated even with simple n-gram analysis. There's a demo of this that can easily pick out who you are on HN just based on a few paragraphs of your own writing, based on N-gram analysis.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

You can also unironically spot most types of AI writing this way. The approaches based on training another transformer to spot "AI generated" content are wrong.

> You can also unironically spot most types of AI writing this way.

I have no idea if specialized tools can reliably detect AI writing but, as someone whose writing on forums like HN has been accused a couple of times of being AI, I can say that humans aren't very good at it. So far, my limited experience with being falsely accused is it seems to partly just be a bias against being a decent writer with a good vocabulary who sometimes writes longer posts.

As for the reliability of specialized tools in detecting AI writing, I'm skeptical at a conceptual level because an LLM can be reinforcement trained with feedback from such a tool (RLTF instead of RLHF). While they may be somewhat reliable at the moment, it seems unlikely they'll stay that way.

Unfortunately, since there are already companies marketing 'AI detectors' to academic institutions, they won't stop marketing them as their reliability continues to get worse. Which will probably result in an increasing shit show of false accusations against students.

> I can say that humans aren't very good at it

You're assuming the people making accusations of posts being written by AI are from humans (which I agree are not good at making this determination). However, computers analyzing massive datasets are likely to be much better at it , and this can also be a Werewolf/Mafia/Killers-type situation where AI frequently accuses posters it believes are human, of being AI, to diminish the severity of accusations and blend in better.

Well, humans might be great at detecting AI (few false negatives) but might falsely accuse humans more often (higher false positive rate). You might be among a set of humans being falsely accused a lot, but that's just proof that "heuristic stylometry" is consistent, it doesn't really say anything about the size of that set.

Hacker News is one of the best places for this, because people write relatively long posts and generally try to have novel ideas. On 4chan, most posts are very short memey quips, so everybody's style is closer to each others than it is to their normal writing style.

Funnily this also implies that laundering your writing through an AI is a good way to defeat stylometry. You add in a strong enough signal, and hopefully smooth out the rest.

Why are they wrong? Surely it depends on how you train it?

I'm pretty sure Epstein tried to meet with moot at least once: https://www.jmail.world/search?q=chris+poole

He met with moot ("he is sensitive, be gentile", search on jmail), and within a few days the /pol/ board got created, starting a culture war in the US, leading to Trump getting elected president. Absolutely nuts.

Few thoughts: in context it's not nuts at all:

- moot was fundraising for his VC backed startup during the years the emails are in, and he was likely connected via mutuals in USV or other firms. These meetings were clearly around him trying to solicit investment in his canv.as project.

- /pol/ was /new/ being returned; the ethos of the board had already existed for a long time and the decision to undo the deletion of /new/ was entirely unsurprising for denizens at the time, and was consistent with a concerted push moot was making for more transparency in the enforcement of rules on the site and fairness towards users who followed the rules. /pol/ didn't start a culture war at this time any more than /new/ had previously - it just existed as a relatively content-unmoderated platform for people to discuss earnestly what would get them banned elsewhere.

Besides /new/ there was also /n/ (not at that time about transportation.) Moot's war with people being racist on 4chan had many back and forths before /pol/ was created.

I always wondered how much of a cultural etc influence 4Chan actually had (has?) - so much of the mindset and vernacular that was popular there 10+ years ago is now completely mainstream.

Ah, a rare opportunity to share a blog post that had a big effect on my political outlook back in 2016, Meme Magic Is Real, You Guys

Who can say what effect it had on the world, but a presidential candidate reposting himself personified as Pepe the frog was still weird back then, and at least a nod to the trolls doing so much work on his behalf

https://medium.com/tryangle-magazine/meme-magic-is-real-you-... (dismissable login wall)

Counterpoint: https://youtube.com/watch?v=r8Y-P0v2Hh0

Summary: Trump used memes not in the sense of pepes but in the original (Dawkins') sense of "earworm" soundbites, along with a torrent of scandals, each making the previous seem like old news, to exploit a public tired of the "status quo" into voting for a zany wildcard pushing for reactionary policy

I remember in high school finding the whole nazi thing funny. They were literal losers in ww2. It was like drawing a communist hammer and sickle.

Looking back on it, I wonder if this was priming.

I didn't fall for it. They are still losers, but the encyclopedia dramatica with swastikas looks way way way less funny in 2026 than it did in 2008.

/pol/ in no way started the American culture war. It was brewing for a while.

pol was made to contain all posting on the American culture war so it could be banned from the other (more active) boards

You’re acting as if https://doge.gov does not exist. Ask yourself under which presidency, administration and kind of politics such is allowed to even exist with a straight face.

It would've existed regardless of internet memes, just under a different and similarly obnoxious name.

Well, broke the levee if you will. Otherwise, explain Pepe.

I hardly think an internet image of a cartoon frog heavily influenced American elections, despite a surface-level co-option by various Republican politicians.

I agree completely.

I'm just saying, it's a symptom. The crazy found critical mass, broke containment. From there it was laundered in millions of Facebook groups and here we are.

In no way?

Given the "nature" of 4chan (only a few hundred posts and a few thousand comments at a time, the vast majority of it shitposts and spam), it just can't do that. The imageboard format and limits basically prevent any scaling and mainstream success. If you follow any of the general threads in pol or sp for a while, you'll spot the same few people all the time, it's a tiny community of active users.

I think the logic is Pol didn't need to reach the masses, the masses only consume content they don't create it. You only need to radicalize the few people who then go on to be the 1% of people commenting and posting.

There's an old joke that 9gag* only reposts stuff from Reddit and Reddit only reposts stuff from 4chan and 4chan is the origin of all meme culture. This joke was widespread enough to reach myself and my friend group back in the day, even though none of used 4chan or Reddit.

If you radicalise the 0.01% of people who are prolific meme creators, you radicalise the masses.

* I did say old...

And Facebook repeats stuff from 9gag

Just to substantiate this a bit: I remember a gleeful consensus in certain circles being that /pol/ and /r/the_donald had "memed Trump into the White House". It's much more complicated than that, but there's certainly an element of truth there.

Then Reddit and almost all of social media went on to purge trump and pro trump content. The Donald was banned. Trump deplatformed across social media.

That's true, but not really relevant to this discussion. You can't really deplatform a president; yes he was no longer on Twitter, but roughly 8 billion people listen any time he speaks.

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be gentile

We're just not going to talk about that one I suppose?

'Sensitive' in this context can mean antisemitic. At least that's how I've heard this joke used.

Must be russian or qatari humour <|:o)

Which meeting are you seeing? That search doesn't seem to work for me, I'm only seeing the one Jan 2012.

It doesn't show up in JMail for some reason, but it's this email: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01852...

Thanks, trying to figure out the timeline relative to the board's creation given how close they are. The first email I can find related to a meeting is this one from Boris Nikolic on Oct 20th, with /pol/ on the 23rd.

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01992...

I don’t agree with this analysis.

The reason I don’t agree is that moot banned any Gamergate discussion and those people then went to 8chan, a site which moot had no control over.

And it was Gamergate that put some fuel on the fire which (IMHO) increased support for Trump. The 8chan site grew a great deal from it, then continued from that first initial “win”.

From moot's perspective, it can be as simple as being convinced by some rich guy you've never heard of to bring back the politics board. He doesn't need to have an intent to start a fascist coup, that's Epstein's job. GamerGate is just the point at which moot realized he'd fucked up and destroyed 4chan imageboard culture by letting /pol/ fester.

That is a crazy amount of emails from/about moot...

A bit off-topic, but I find it kinda funny that the "Decline" button on the cookie popup on this page is labled "Continue without consent".

They're really trying to guilt trip you.

Damn, so the website about the Epstein is Epstein too

> Information leakage may also be occurring via PDF comments or orphaned objects inside compressed object streams, as I discovered above.

hopefully someone is independently archiving all documents

my understanding is that some are being removed

Reddit is also removing and shadowbannig such posts, but there's a community on https://lemmy.world/post/42440468

Are they being removed or replaced with more heavily redacted documents? There were definitely some victim names that slipped through the cracks that have since been redacted.

Initially under "Epstein Files Transparency Act (H.R.4405)" on https://www.justice.gov/epstein/doj-disclosures, all datasets had .zip links. I first saw that page when all but dataset 11 (or 10) had a .zip link. At one point this morning, all the .zip links were removed, now it seems like most are back again.

I think some of the released documents included images of victims, which where redacted. So it's not necessarily malicious removals

That's my understanding too, so archiving the unredacted images could mean holding CSAM.

Which is of course very convenient for the government, similar to when wikileaks got prosecuted for holding state secrets.

If we're assuming they didn't leave victims unredacted on purpose

Pretty devious tactic if so. Chilling effect on both any further witnesses and anybody interested in archiving the data (gives them an ethical conundrum at least). In addition to giving them (the feds) a convenient excuse to take down random docs.

Not about a ethical conondrum when rehosting. Anyone who rehosts the whole files can be accused of hosting child porn and doxxing and taken down.

Re the OCR, I'm currently running allenai/olmocr-2-7b against all the PDFs with text in them, comparing with the OCR DOJ provided, and a lot it doesn't match, and surprisingly olmocr-2-7b is quite good at this. However, after extracing the pages from the PDFs, I'm currently sitting on ~500K images to OCR, so this is currently taking quite a while to run through.

Did you take any steps to decrease the dimension size of images, if this increases the performance? I have not tried this as I have not peformed an OCR task like this with an LLM. I would be interested to know at what size the vlm cannot make out the details in text reliably.

The performance is OK, takes a couple of seconds at most on my GPU, just the amount of documents to get through that takes time, even with parallelism. The dimension seems fine as it is, as far as I can tell.

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Haven't seen anything particular about that, but lots of the documents with names that were half-redacted contain OCRd text that is completely garbled, but olmocr-2-7b seems to handle it just fine. Unsure if they just had sucky processes or if there is something else going on.

Might be a good fit for uploading a git repo and crowdsourcing

Was my first impulse too but not sure I trust that unless I could gather a bunch of people I trust, which would mean I'd no longer be anonymous. Kind of a catch22.

GitHub would ban you

Any guesses why some of the newest files seem to have random ”=” characters in the text? My first thought was OCR, but it seemed to not be linked to characters like ”E” that could be mistakenly interpreted by an OCR tool. My second guess is just making it more difficult to produce reliable text searches, but probably 90% of HN readers could find a way to make a search tool that does not fall apart in case a ”=” character is found (although making this work for long search queries would make the search slower).

Was on the frontpage yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46868759

Thanks a lot!

The equal characters are due to poor handling of quoted-printable in email.

The author of gnus, Lars Ingebrigtsen, wrote a blog post explaining this. His post was on the HN front page today.

He explained the newline thing that confused me. Good read!

I can't even download the archive, the transmission always terminates just before its finished. Spooky.

What would be more interesting: His Bank accounts.

Who paid him?

Who did get paid?

And for sure the DOJ knows this, or can know it if they want.

So I have been wondering about this ...

Some of the gathered data is shown here, right? Probably not all.

Now ... that's static information though. That's not really an analysis, most definitely not an independent (open ended) analysis. And it will only show a very incomplete part of the full picture.

This is why I think the "release the files" movement, as good as they are, seems incomplete. I'd rather know a lot more about how they operate their networks, getting away involving underage women. How about secret services of other countries? Should that not also be highly important? So why is there not really a larger investigation as well as independent analysis? Those .pdf files alone can not tell the whole picture. That can just be the tip of the iceberg; and it evidently involves other countries too, with Prince Andrew being the most famous here (aka, the UK, but we already saw that other countries also have similar issues where people suddenly had to step away from politics when it was found out they visited the party-locations of Mr. Epstein).

> DoJ explicitly avoids JPEG images in the PDFs probably because they appreciate that JPEGs often contain identifiable information, such as EXIF, IPTC, or XMP metadata

Maybe I'm underestimating the issue at full, but isn't this a very lightweight problem to solve? Is converting the images to lower DPI formats/versions really any easier than just stripping the metadata? Surely the DOJ and similar justice agencies have been aware of and doing this for decades at this point, right?

This is speculation but generally rules like this follow some sort of incident. e.g. Someone responds to a FOI request and accidentally discloses more information than desired due to metadata. So a blanket rule is instituted not to use a particular format.

Maybe they know more than we do. It may be possible to tamper with files at a deeper level. I wonder if it is also possible to use some sort of tampered compression algorithm that could mark images much like printers do with paper.

Another guess is that perhaps the step is a part of a multi-step sanitation process, and the last step(s) perform the bitmap operation.

I'm not sure about computer image generation but you can (relatively) easily fingerprint images generated by digital cameras due to sensor defects. I'll bet there is a similar problem with PC image generation where even without the EXIF data there is probably still too much side channel data leakage.

Image metadata is the wild west of structured text. The developer of the foremost tool for dealing with it (exiftool) has made 'remove metadata' feature but still disclaims that it is not able to remove everything.

How could that be possible? Isn't JPEG a fairly straightforward container for JFIF+metadata?

"Fairly straightforward" is incorrect. Not an authority to describe in more detail, but the most tricky blocker I'm aware of are these proprietary "MakerNote" tags from camera manufacturers, which are (often undocumented) binary blobs. exiftool might not even know what's in there, let alone how to safely remove it without corrupting the file.

Somebody ought to train an LLM exclusively on this text, just for funsies.

DeepSeek-V4-JEE

It would be funny (and disturbing) to add Jemini to JMail.

These folks must really have their hands full with the 3M+ pages that were recently released. Hoping for an update once they expand this work to those new files.

why do we count this in "pages" when it's mostly an email dump

Based on my random poking around through the latest datasets for a few hours, while there are a bunch of emails, I don't know if it's "mostly" emails.

That said, in my opinion they are using "pages" as the metric because it makes the number sound huge.

This is so incredibly useful to me right now for incidental reasons I am commenting to make sure I can get back to it.

HN lets you mark submissions (and comments) as favorites, no need to spam the thread.

What is the legal basis for releasing the someone's private files and communications? If they can do it to Epstein, they can do it to you, to the Washington Post journalist, to former President Clinton, etc.

Is the scope at least limited somehow? Generally I favor transparency, but of course probably the most important parts are withheld.

> What is the legal basis for releasing the someone's private files and communications?

An act of congress, for one.

Also, AFAIK, federal privacy generally ends at death, as does criminal liability; so releasing government files from a federal investigation after death of the subject is generally within the realm of acceptable conduct.

Yes, I forgot about that major part of the story! Still, acts of Congress can't violate Consitutional rights.

It seems unlikely you lose all rights when you die or it would be chaos - imagine all the secrets people die with that affect everyone they know. An integral part of every estate plan would be incinerating records. Wills do have real power.

Your estate retains many of your rights when you die. However, the federal privacy act explicitly does not apply. Your estate may have privacy rights via the Constitution, although privacy is not specifically enumerated. Your estate may have privacy rights via state law; but that wouldn't bar the federal government from disclosing its investigative materials.

OTOH, there's a 2004 case, National Archives & Records Administration v. Favish[1], which establishes the surviving family's right of privacy to death scene photos, but that's technically not privacy of the deceased.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/oip/blog/foia-post-2004-sup...

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https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4405...

I assume this could not have passed while he was alive, because of the "bill of attainder" thing?

(It also surprises me that this passed anyway, given that both sides of the aisle seem to have people with clear reason to keep it covered up... ?)

(Also, Maxwell is specifically named, and is still alive... ?)

I believe a literal Act of Congress…

It was passed into law by congress and signed by the president:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epstein_Files_Transparency_Act

Given what we've seen so far, there's probably some very interesting stuff in Clinton's private files and communications. Not to mention the stuff in current president Trump's. Some random journalist, probably not. Unless it's a very wealthy and/or connected journalist like David Brooks...

I'd assume it was the nature of the case, and that discovery was done with him being dead.

He was a pedophile sex trafficker. Epstein and his clients deserve zero privacy.

You’ve sidestepped the important part of the question.

Who determines who deserves privacy, and how do they determine it?

That's a lot of PeDoFiles!

(But seriously, great work here!)

Elite PDF File ring

(2025) just follow hn guideline, impressive voter ring though

We're in early February 2025 [edit:2026] and the article was written on Dec 23, 2025, which makes it less than two months old. I think it's ok not to include a year in the submission title in that case.

I personally understand a year in the submission as a warning that the article may not be up to date.

Less about the age, and more about confusing what they are analyzing, for the files that were just released like a week ago.

We're in Feb 2026.

I'm not used to typing it yet, either.

Generally, I'd agree with you. However, the recent Epstein file dump was in 2026, not 2025, so I would say it is relevant in this case..

"We're in early February ~2025~ *2026*"