On this day in conspiracies

President Woodrow Wilson signs the Federal Reserve Act. The Jekyll Island 'Aldrich Plan' was its blueprint, but Congress, led by Carter Glass, had reworked it to add public governance: a government-appointed board sitting atop twelve regional reserve banks, precisely because the original was attacked as too banker-controlled.

A Larimer County judge sentences Richard Heene to 90 days in jail and Mayumi Heene to 20 days of weekend jail, with years of supervised probation and a bar on profiting from the episode. Richard Heene is later ordered to pay $36,000 in restitution toward the cost of the response.

Josh Quittner, chief executive and co-founder of the technology site Decrypt, documents two low-tech methods. The first exploits a copy-paste flaw in some PDFs, where the tool laid a black image over text instead of deleting it. The second involves screenshotting scanned pages and using ordinary phone photo filters, raising exposure and brilliance while lowering contrast, to read through the ink. He notes this class of faulty redaction is a known error that has surfaced in earlier high-profile cases.