this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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Honestly wondering if this was done deliberately by DOJ tech folks who weren't on board with the cover-up.
Never attribute to morality that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
The saying is usually malice but I suppose it still works with morality all the same
Because this would be doing a good thing, not a malicious one.
Being malicious is not exclusive to being a bad person. Good people can be malicious in the face of adversity. It’s an effective tool of protest.
malicious compliance to be exact which is not the same as malice, pure malice is somewhat evil.
I wonder how greed figures in, it's not like companies need to be moral to end up on the right side
Never attribute to ______ that which can be adequately attributed to profit/line go up.
Not usually, it's Hanlon's Razor.
Maybe we can call this version "Hamlon's razor" or something
Hey there. It doesn't work in authoritarian regimes. When the only way to resist is sabotage, sabotage is everywhere
From what I’ve heard, it wasn’t released, they were uploaded and it’s url kept private. Imo they probably did that to send it to a few highly ranked people so they could check if they agreed with the censorship before releasing them. However, the URL for those to-be-released files were easily guessed based on the pattern of the previously already public ones.
Despite propaganda, the og Nazis weren't competent either.
Stupidity transcends politics
Hahaha if that's true it's hilarious. Their ineptitude might be our saving grace.
Given the sheer ineptitude of this administration, this was likely stupidity.
When I worked for DOD, I worked on a FOIA request and was trained on using the declassification software. The software worked by highlighting the appropriate text and then "flattened" the highlight so you couldn't do this.
The software was REQUIRED to be used because it would also perform the validation.
These people probably used regular Adobe acrobat. Because they are that dumb. And they don't know about proper FOIA procedures.
Because they are stupid.
It might be likely that DOGE thought it was frivilous government spending the license for that software, because it's the government and they'd use licensed software, so axed it out.
30 minutes before releasing the Epstein files:
"Grok, how do I redact a PDF?"
They fired a bunch of the FOIA people. The people who know how to do this right are no longer employed by the federal government.
I heard some print it out and then scan it.
hell, taking a picture of the screen with a phone would have been better. this is literally the only way to have fucked this up that i can come up with. like maybe if they used too thin of a sharpie on physical paper, but even that probably would have blocked parts of the text.
that said, i can see the average technologically inept person making this mistake. if it wasn't on purpose, it would have to be someone that didn't grow up with computers. either someone trump's age, or someone who grew up with only smart phones. Iwould bet the latter knowing trump and his cheapness. this can't have been done by an existing professional in the system, they're too experienced normally. I know this is a lot of assumptions, but i bet it would have had to be a young intern from trump's camp. and i do bet that over intentional malice towards trump. anyone that did this on purpose would be smart enough to see far enough ahead to predict themselves get arrested or killed as soon as people figured it out. also, hanlon's razor.
i think i actually made almost this exact mistake once. difference is mine was for an assignment in high school 20 years ago and the consequence was getting snickered at by my peers. it's a genuinely easy thing to overlook if you're not used to using tools in a word editor or most other software. it's also entirely unsurprising that trump's camp would botch a project. he doesn't pay people and is a menace to his employees. no one compitent wants to work for him unless they're true believers.
so yeah, jumping to conclusions about this being intentional is conspiracy nut thinking. if someone's reasoning includes bits like "it just makes too much sense" and "think about how much they have to gain/lose" they're just jumping to conclusions without evidence. remember that correlation does not imply causation. just because something happened near a powerful person that affects the world or that person significantly doesn't mean there's a conspiracy. just because the motive for an action exists or makes sense that doesn't mean it happened. i have a motive to want to kill Trump, but if he dies while I'm near d.c. that doesn't make me a suspect. 90% of the people near d.c. at any given moment have motive to kill trump.
If true, their information needs to be noted if possible only after the arrest of all these other assholes. Gotta protect the ones that did not follow orders of this pedophile regime.
I have heard of a gov employee keeping a usb cable in a locked cabinet because they thought it had leftover data after use.
Not do far fetched, tbh. I always burn the pencil after writing down my password - if someone got a hold of it they could easily figure out what was last written. My typewriter was hacked numerous times this way!
Prior Incantato!
Not actually an insane practice. There are compromised cables that look normal but have hidden storage to record data for later retrieval.
That's the opposite. Your protecting the cable from being manipulated. OP is talking about protecting the cable from being read.
Assuming that the cable hadn't already been manipulated, in which case they were protecting it from being read.
The problem isn't that they were keeping a USB cable in a secured location for security concerns, the problem was that they were doing so because they believed bits were left over in the copper itself and enough such that data would be recoverable. Like marbles through a tube.
I do hope the practice was due to your point and that the particular person was just naive, misinterpreting a presumably shitty PowerPoint.
I was assuming an imperfect narrator. The only person who knows why the cable was locked up was the one who locked it up.
Oversecure is better than undersecure
Universal Security Box
ah yes, in case some bits got stuck in the pipe
It's those internet tubes, can't trust em
At this point? Probably, this isn’t the first time we have seen thick exact rookie mistake.
Of course, who knows since doge or whatever probably wiped the people who knew how to get things done I it and replaced with high schoolers that just can’t wait to gobble elons musky bits
It's really not difficult to properly redact documents. So I can't imagine how someone could even do this unintentionally...
or it was purposeful to feed the public another thread of distraction that we can all entangle ourselves with for the next few months.
At this point, the controversy is not Trump .... the controversy is the American government, the American media and the American public just rolling over another chapter of this absolute stupidity.