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.
Itās okay if you donāt understand the terms in this post, please upvote and crosspost for visibility. Thank you.
So hereās the challenge for anyone I can successfully nerdsnipe:
- Can you manage to recreate the original PDF from theĀ
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64Ā output included in the dump? It canāt 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 developedĀ 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 forĀ
Content-Transfer-EncodingĀ andĀbase64returns a number of results ā itās just that, unfortunately, most are uselessly truncated or only the SMTP headers from Apple Mail curiously extracted.
Spoiler: they couldnāt
I feel like this is how we defeat the redactions. Sleuthing, combining data points, finding mistakes, connecting with other validated materials, etc
Base64 takes 3 bytes at a time and converts them to 4 characters. You must decode those 4 characters as a unit; you canāt start at any arbitrary byte. Thatās 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 youāll be golden.
https://comp.lang.php.narkive.com/PouBlUT7/base64-partial-decoding
