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On Thursday, the Department of Justice released more than 3 million additional materials, media, and documents as part of the files related to the investigation of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The files are, as expected, sordid and horrifying—millions of pages of emails, photos, and videos tied to one of the most notorious sex traffickers in modern history. They have also become a source of something unexpected: digital piracy.
Yes, using the DOJ’s website, users are pilfering software and documents from the Epstein files. Among other things, they’re able to activate software, download e-books, and pirate copyright reference manuals directly from what was dropped last week. While absurd, it’s a revealing illustration of how the department mishandled this release—and resulted in far more serious harm to Epstein’s victims along the way.
You can try it yourself. Just head to the DOJ’s “Epstein Library” page, verify that you’re over 18, and start searching. You’ll be able to access a trove of books, articles, and documents associated with the billionaire over decades. You can download the e-books. Find reference manuals for audio systems. Hell, if you’re sick of the paywall on this very website, you can access at least one of Slate’s articles in the Epstein files.
If you wanted to, you could even activate Windows 7 using what appears to be Jeffrey Epstein’s product key shown in a photograph of what is likely his laptop. I don’t know why you would—there are plenty of other ways, legal or not, to do this that don’t involve a notorious pedophile. But if you so desired, you could use the key to activate Windows 7 Home Premium, as content creators online already have.
Tech YouTuber Dave Eddy posted a video on Monday showing his followers how to use the Epstein files to download a reference manual for the programming language Bash. “You could find this reference manual a lot of places online—I just wanted to show you guys one website you could find it,” Eddy, who posts under the name You Suck at Programming, said jokingly.
It’s silly and a bit absurd, but anyone who understood the scope of what was being released ought to have seen this coming. Remember: These are millions of documents spanning roughly 30 years. The scale of the latest release, which also happens to be the biggest, is immense. It is piling a mountain on top of another mountain. Of course, the internet is going to jump in and go to town on the documents, turning even these grim revelations into a meme. It would have been a Herculean task for anybody to make sure that every single copyright material is kept out of the documents—but especially so for this DOJ.
Indeed, this DOJ didn’t even do the bare minimum of scanning for material in the trove that should not have been made public. Along with the product keys, e-books, and news articles, the Trump administration also published highly sensitive information about the very victims the Epstein file release was supposed to help. It’s not just names and identifying information; it’s also photos and videos. Yes, the DOJ published dozens of uncensored nude images of young women—some possibly teenagers—on its official website.
On Monday, the department announced that it had withdrawn thousands of documents and media in the files after two lawyers of Epstein victims notified a judge that the government failed to redact names and identifying information of victims. One woman, who identified as an Epstein victim, said that she received death threats after the release of her name (and private banking information) across 51 entries in the files.
“Within the past 48 hours, the undersigned alone has reported thousands of redaction failures on behalf of nearly 100 individual survivors whose lives have been turned upside down by DOJ’s latest release,” the lawyers wrote.
They continued: “There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred—particularly where the sole task ordered by the Court and repeatedly emphasized by DOJ was simple: redact known victim names before publication.”
In response to a New York Times investigation, a DOJ spokesperson stated that the department was “working around the clock to address any victim concerns, additional redactions of personally identifiable information, as well as any files that require further redactions under the act, to include images of a sexual nature.” It feels as if the DOJ is having its DOGE moment: It’s moving fast, breaking things, and fixing it after the fact.
The department was tasked with a tight deadline to release the Epstein files, the scale of which spanned decades and included millions of documents and media, yet still somehow represented just a fraction of a monstrous man’s crimes. Like so much of everything associated with this government, though, it was done sloppily and recklessly. Between the emails, e-books, and product keys are human lives. In the end, what was supposed to be a step forward for accountability replicates the very carelessness and cruelty that defined Epstein’s abuse in the first place.
