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I do not think pages were numbered 1-6000. I think there were multiple documents, so you would need to do something like:

1. Split all the pages into piles for page 1, page 2, page 3, etc...

2. Look at highest page pile first, because it would have least number of documents, work backward through page piles searching for matching previous page until you extract all of the pages[0] for that document.

[0] If pages were heavily blanked out, identification might have been difficult.




Today we'd run them through a portable scanner, upload the individual PDFs to a crowd source site, and have the proper order in under a day.


Not if they stick you in a room and say "none of these documents can leave," which is what it sounds like happened here.


Tethering/Hotspot + EyeFi Wifi-Enabled SD card.

It's possible the room is a faraday cage, but not likely.


Back then it wasn't likely. Today? If the NSA has secure rooms for viewing confidential documents that can not leave the room? It seems pretty darn likely it is a faraday cage. You think they don't know what they're doing? Or don't have the money in their budget?


> You think they don't know what they're doing? Or don't have the money in their budget?

Budget? Yes. I don't dispute that. Know what they're doing? Clearly they don't.


You say the NSA don't know what they're doing?

(Snowden suggests they don't and that they have some level of incompetence).

They'd search you going in and searchyou going out and probably observe you while you're there.

You should operate under the assumption that the NSA are not idiots.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/feedtrough_ns...

This is iust one example, but there are many more, of backdoors introduced by NSA into commercial equipment.


so we got nothing to worry about?


We have everyting to worry about. Would you feel safe/confortable with a toddler waving a fire arm on your face?


In this scenario, leaving with or otherwise distributing a copy of the document would be equivalent to walking out the door with the original. Do you really think the NSA wouldn't be able to prevent that from happening?


I didn't think the NSA would be hopelessly humiliated by a lone syadmin currently residing in Russia to protect himself from a lack of due process, but here we are.


Snowden was considered an insider. Here a person considered an outsider would be in a controlled environment with the specific purpose of restricting the flow of information.


Do you think the NSA would allow a scanner in the room?


And whoever read page 556 would be tweeting about who kills Dumbledore before the last pages were even scanned.




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