You’re talking about 1,000 FBI agents locked in a building. There’s no printer.

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.

Working from home and no scanner in the house?

No printer.

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.

you do not work in the public sector, where processes change rarely, slowly, and partially

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

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 a mix of “they’ve done it many times before” and these days AI. But remember the “they’ve done it many times before” just means that in a technical and popular forum you’re likely to find the handful of people who have done so regularly enough to remember the one liner. Also this is probably easily searchable as well so even prior to AI not super hard.

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.