First thanks for taking my question seriously and not as just a rib and asking a lot of questions in return that I want to consider myself.

By "hands-on" I'm asking whether the provided insight is the product of human intellection. Experienced, capable and qualified. Or at least an earnest attempt at thinking about something and explaining the discoveries in the ways that thinking was done before ChatGPT. For some reason I find myself using phrases involving the hands (etc. hands-on, handmade, hand-spun) as a metaphor for work done without the use of LLMs.

I emphasize insight because I feel like the series of work on the Snowden documents by libroot is wanting in that. I expressed as much the last time their writing hit the front page: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46236672>.

These are summaries. I don't think that it yields information that can't otherwise be pointed out and made mention of by others; presumably known and reputable. With as high-profile of an event that this is I'd expect someone covering it almost 16 years later to tell us beyond what when judged on the merit of its import amounts to a motivated section of the ‘Snowden disclosures’ Wikipedia entry.

The discussion that this series invites typically is centered around people's thoughts about the story of the Snowden documents in general, and in this case exchanges about technical aspects like how PDF documents work and can be manipulated in general. The one comment that I feel addresses the actual tension embedded in the article—"Who edited the documents?"—leads to accusations that the documents were tampered with by the media: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566372>. I don't think that that's an implausible claim but I find issue with it being made with such confidence by the anonymous source behind the investigations (I'm withholding ironically putting "investigations" in...nevermind).

If the author actually provided something that advanced to the reader why this information is significant, what to do with or think about it and how they came about discovering the answers to the aforementioned 'why' and ‘what’ and additionally why they’re word ought to matter to us at all, I'd be less inclined to speculate that this is just someone vibe sleuthing their way through documents that on the surface are only significant to the public as the claim "the government is spying on you" is.

This particular post uncovers some nice information. It's a great find. I'm in no position to investigate whether it was already known. But what are we supposed to learn from it aside from "one of the documents were changed before it was made public". What's significant about the redaction? Is Ryan Gallagher responsible? Or does he know who is. Is he at all obliged to explain this to a presumably anonymous inquirer? Or is it now the duty of the public to expect an explanation as affected by said anonymous inquirer?

Remember when believing that the government was rife with pedophiles automatically associated you with horn-helmet-wearing insurrectionists?

New information extracted from Snowden PDFs through metadata version analysis