Comment by juujian
6 days ago
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...
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Straight to the signup page? A bit blatant, no?
> 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 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.
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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.
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If it's already scanned, then you don't have to leave your desk.
Working from home and no scanner in the house?
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.
You’re talking about 1,000 FBI agents locked in a building. There’s no printer.
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.
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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.
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