This is for the more technically inclined among us. I believe, like the author, the DOJ incompetence has created the biggest opportunity for community discovery and accountability.
It’s okay if you don’t understand the terms in this post, please upvote and crosspost for visibility. Thank you.
So here’s the challenge for anyone I can successfully nerdsnipe:
- Can you manage to recreate the original PDF from the
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64output included in the dump? It can’t be that hard, can it?- Can you find other attachments included in the latest Epstein dumps that might also be possible to reconstruct? Unfortunately, the contractor that developed the full-text searchfor the Department of Justice did a pretty crappy job and full-text search is practically broken even accounting for the bad OCR and wrangled quoted-printable decoding (malicious compliance??); nevertheless, searching for
Content-Transfer-Encodingandbase64returns a number of results – it’s just that, unfortunately, most are uselessly truncated or only the SMTP headers from Apple Mail curiously extracted.
Base64 takes 3 bytes at a time and converts them to 4 characters. You must decode those 4 characters as a unit; you can’t start at any arbitrary byte. That’s also why you sometimes get equal signs (=) at the end; they are padding the encoded string out to a multiple of 4 characters.
So, just make sure each chunk you decode is a multiple of 4 characters, and you’ll be golden.
https://comp.lang.php.narkive.com/PouBlUT7/base64-partial-decoding
I feel like this is how we defeat the redactions. Sleuthing, combining data points, finding mistakes, connecting with other validated materials, etc
Spoiler: they couldn’t
