• just_another_person@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    Good fucking luck. These aren’t paper files you can burn, and the reference trees are fucking DEEP.

    Federal agencies use digital reference and versioning to make sure there is always a paper trail back to access and fucking with records. You can’t go back and scrub these things just on the surface.

    If you’re familiar with code repositories like git or svn, it’s like that. Anyone who accesses or changes a file is logged. Any deletions have revisions saved. All the links to external sources like court documents or witness testimony is kept on record similarly, and you can’t go back and scrub the history like you could by just burning shit without breaking a whole bunch of stuff. There’s always a source of truth in these systems.

    I think they are imagining they keep access to these systems out of touch if anyone until Trump is safely out office is my guess. Then he thinks he can pardon it all away, but the history will be saved and accessible eventually.

    Congress (or at least some of them) know how these systems work, and they’ll find broken references or bad links to things that should exist and have gone “missing” once they dig in. I’d like to see the excuses for the disappearing of data when new subpoenas come out.

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      17 days ago

      I hope you’re right. And I hope Trump’s people are dumb enough not to realize it.

    • sudo@lemmy.today
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      17 days ago

      without breaking a whole bunch of other stuff

      They have shown a penchant for doing exactly that. The Whitehouse is literally in shambles. People need to stop acting like anything they say or do would ever be in good faith.

      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        Regardless of their intentions, you just can’t hope and wish the underlying systems to obey your wants.

        Think of it like you creating a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, except when it says to go to page 43, that page is missing. Or a reference to a character later in the book was missing from previous pages.

        It’s a digital statement of record, and attempts to alter the history of said statement breaks everything in the “future” created in this system. If you try and go back to delete stuff, the record will be broken if you break a link to something previously created.

        They don’t have the manpower to dump and completely recreate the entire FBI database to solely remove Trump’s name from these files, and even if they did, there would still be references in documents to things that no longer exist, like “Evidence Document #328”, and then it shockingly doesn’t exist anymore? No fucking way.

    • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
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      17 days ago

      You seem to have some familiarity with this. Would I be right in surmising that these systems are based on some kind of append only ledger system similar to git?

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        Thanks for sharing this.

        I’ve been running OCR on the images folder of the files since last week and just reached out to the creator to see if they want the data I’ve processed. Right now that entire graph is ONLY the “text” portion of the dump. There are 26k images, which are mostly pictures of emails and other documents. I’m like 80% through processing them (although I’ve had some hiccups in the past 24 hours).

        https://codeberg.org/sillyhonu/Image_OCR_Processing_Epstein

        • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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          16 days ago

          Whoa, I hope they’re interested. I didn’t realize the pics info wasn’t included. Thanks for doing all that work. I looked through some of it and there’s a ton there.

          • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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            16 days ago

            Yeah its ridiculous how much is in there. I’m pulling their current repo to see how they are building their DB so if they don’t get back to me, I can at least combine the two databases.

            And if any one reading this wants a copy of what I’ve processed so far, I’m more than happy to share.

            But it looks to me like they dropped a couple hundred on just processing those text files. It would be north of 2.5k additional to process the data I’m creating.

            That being said, mine only goes as far as extracting the contents and creating a sha256 hash to keep track of the documents themselves/ document tampering. It doesn’t take the next step to extract names, locations, dates, etc…

            I’m working that out now but it seems like the way to do this would be so it fits into their DB seamlessly.

          • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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            16 days ago

            Its phenomenal. I have found a few places where it falls down, and its usually when the text is incredibly small. You can see its being down sampled before it gets handed off to the model. It falls down on like, one example I found, some bank disclosure documentation from bank of america:

            It just came out as all I’s and o’s.

            For the emails, book text, letters, etc… I genuinely haven’t found a place it didn’t work correctly as I’ve been spot checking the output.

            If you have colab you can just try the script I put up. All you need to do to have it run is to book mark the house oversite committee google drive folder to your local google drive.

        • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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          17 days ago

          This is the release of the files from the oversight committee. Yes, it’s legit, lol. It depends on what committee is releasing what.

        • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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          17 days ago

          Presidential use of autopen-type devices goes back hundreds of years:

          https://www.shapell.org/behind-the-scenes/the-robot-pen/

          The first president to use the autopen extensively was Thomas Jefferson. … Since Jefferson, various US presidents have made use of the autopen; some were guarded about it while others were more open about its use. Whereas once the official White House position was to deny the existence or usage of the autopen, today its existence is more of an open secret.

          Harry Truman was rumored to make use of the device; Gerald Ford was open about his utilization of the autopen, but it was Lyndon B. Johnson who blew the doors off the entire affair by allowing the device to be photographed in the White House, appearing on the cover of The National Enquirer with the article “The Robot That Sits in for the President.”

          John F. Kennedy was so dependent on the autopen, that he became the subject of a book entitled The Robot That Helped to Make a President.

          But sure, the biggest political scandal of all time is not putting a Russia-compromised 34-times convicted felon and serial pedophile rapist who aims to turn the USA into a fascist autocracy into the presidency twice, but when Biden used a machine (as Trump also does) to sign things.

  • FluorideMind@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    I recently got heavily down voted for suggesting that if they release, we couldn’t trust the validity anyway.

  • tinfoilhat@lemmy.ml
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    15 days ago

    Edit > Find > Replace

    F: Trump R: BIDEN!!!

    Result: Donald BIDEN!!! is the dog that hasn’t barked.

  • Asafum@feddit.nl
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    17 days ago

    Oh you mean Trump just saying the other day that “it’s all Democrats” in the files anyway wasn’t him essentially admitting that they removed all the Republicans from it. Gee color me shocked.

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      17 days ago

      So when he suddenly demanded the release of the files the other day, it wasn’t his characteristic humble contrition but just knowing they finished the data purge?

      • Salamanderwizard@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        What are steps we should take when this happens? I’m not directly asking you, but more the room. Like what is gonna happen if he releases the files and only Dems are on it? That’s what got me worried.

        • TachyonTele@piefed.social
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          17 days ago

          Theyre going to pretend only dems were in it and use politics to go after them. And the news reporters will go along with it.

        • jdredbeard@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          Hundreds, possibly thousands, of vicitims are alive right now and can and will identify any perps one both sides of the isle.

          • Salamanderwizard@lemmy.world
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            17 days ago

            I hope the world takes em seriously. I’m so tired of folks. As a person who is married to a rape victim…that no one believed…it kills me folks don’t take this shit seriously…

    • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.uk
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      15 days ago

      I haven’t seen anyone talk about how that’s only a win for the evidence tamperers if there are no clean copies in the hands of other actors - and it’s absurd to imagine there’s not. All they’ve done is put themselves in the power of another (likely to be a state actor), and probably one they were already vulnerable to, if I’m any guess.

    • ClassStruggle@lemmy.ml
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      17 days ago

      He approved them because they are now part of an active investigation he asked Bondi to open last week. Can’t release investigation evidence to the public

  • ctrl_alt_esc@lemmy.ml
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    17 days ago

    One thing I don’t get about this whole Epstein files thing - there are multiple people who have already had access to all of them for quite a while, including many democrats, right? If there were anything incriminating in them, wouldn’t they be required by law to report it and otherwise incriminate themselves? Where I come from there are certain crimes for which you are required to do so and I’m pretty sure human trafficking and abuse of minors falls into that category. Is that not the case in the US?

    • ultranaut@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      I don’t understand this line of thinking. The Epstein files are the product of criminal investigations. The DOJ has the files and so anyone who has seen them thus far would be authorized to access them by the DOJ (primarily FBI agents and DOJ lawyers). There isn’t any scenario where people like that would be obligated to publicly report incriminating information in the Epstein files. That’s exactly why the DOJ created the Epstein files, to gather incriminating information that can potentially be used in court by Federal prosecutors. If you are under the impression that Democratic politicians have access to the Epstein files, that is not correct.

      • ctrl_alt_esc@lemmy.ml
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        17 days ago

        If you are under the impression that Democratic politicians have access to the Epstein files, that is not correct.

        I was under that impression, yes, weren’t they given access some time ago? Seems like I was wrong, thanks for the info!

        • ultranaut@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          No. They have access to a variety of things (e.g. Epstein’s estate provided them with a bunch of his emails) but they just voted to force the DOJ to release the Epstein files, it has not happened yet.

    • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      17 days ago

      I am not a lawyer and I do not work in one of the fields I’m about to mention, so this is just what I’m assuming based on things I’ve pieced together from articles and conversions I’ve had over the years, I might be completely wrong idk.

      Afaik, there’s no law requiring a regular person to report a crime they’re aware of. There’s crimes I personally would report if I knew happened, but other types of crimes that I absolutely would not ever report because I’m morally/ethically opposed to that law existing. I don’t think I could get in trouble for that.

      In the us, there are professions where the people in them are considered “mandatory reporters”. Teachers, CPS people, daycare workers, stuff like that. People in those fields will absolutely be charged if they don’t report a crime that requires mandatory reporting. I don’t think all crimes fall under that umbrella either though, I think it’s more just crimes against children etc. Like I’ve shared my media server with a person who is a mandatory reporter, but they’ve never reported me for distribution of copyrighted materials, and I’ve done drugs with another mandatory reporter and they didn’t report me for eating a bunch of mdma like a degenerate raver.

      So I don’t think people in Congress are mandatory reporters, but if they are the crimes at the heart of the Epstein files would definitely be the kind that have to be reported. Also if they’re being briefed in closed door sessions on classified materials, obviously the classification handling procedures would supersede the mandatory reporting requirements. I think, that’s actually an interesting question, is there someone with clearance mandatory reporters can report to if they’re coming across reportable stuff in classified materials? Idk.

      Hopefully someone comes along who knows a bit more than me about this stuff.

  • ronigami@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    So the Democrats will get better by filtering and the Republicans will stay bad. Brilliant strategy to get the Dems back in power.