Why are Epstein’s emails full of equal signs?

Many of the emails released by the Department of Justice from its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein are as well Full of distorted symbols like:

Mixed text is so ubiquitous that it has spurred conspiracy theories that it could be some kind of code. But as plausible as it may be for a gang of elite sex traffickers to communicate in a secret language, the reality is probably more boring: The codes are likely artifacts of the way the Justice Department converted emails into PDF files.

“The glyphs and symbols are likely the result of a poor conversion process,” said Chris Broome, a professor and archivist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Specifically, the symbols look like leftovers Multipurpose Internet mail extensionsOr MIME, a 30-year-old standard for encrypting emails. The basic protocol for email transmits messages as short strings of simple ASCII characters, so when people started writing longer messages and trying to include formatting and symbols, MIME was developed as a way to encode them in ASCII.

With MIME, “=” is used to indicate either that a text string for transmission must be broken and rejoined—a “soft line break”—or, when followed by two other characters, that it must be converted to a specific non-ASCII tag. If you were to actually type “=” into an email, for example, it would be encoded as “=3D”. During normal use, the recipient’s email program decrypts these codes before displaying the formatted message.

Peter White, chief technology officer at the PDF Association, who examined a batch of PDF files, said that whatever software the Justice Department used to extract the emails and convert them to PDF files appeared to have skewed some of the decryption processes. Epstein documents.

“It was in the news, and there were a whole lot of PDF files,” he said. The association conducted similar analyzes of the Mueller report and the Manafort documents. “In general, we’re interested in anything PDF related. That’s kind of what we do and what we’re about.”

The clarity of the text and URLs led White to believe that these documents were digitally extracted and then converted to PDF, rather than physically printed and scanned, as is the case with It was the Mueller report. “Things have gotten better since then,” White said.

Specifically, the Department of Justice likely extracted the email data, converted it to a PDF, and then redacted it. In order to strip the document of metadata and perform redactions so that the black bars could not be removed, they then converted the documents to image files such as JPEG before converting them behind To PDF. The software initially used to extract and convert the data also picked up parts of the underlying MIME format instead of decoding them correctly. Or more simply: emails, sometimes partially decrypted, are converted to PDF, converted to JPEG, or converted to PDF.

This at least explains the abundance of “=”. But this does not fully explain why “=” is sometimes replaced by letters, such as the “J” in “Jeffrey”. No one I spoke to could conclusively answer this question, except to say that email is difficult, converting to PDF is even harder, and that the Department of Justice was converting a lot of documents in a hurry. (Redactions were noticeably inconsistent across all files as well.)

Broome thought it might be a character set conversion issue, which he saw repeatedly when the archiving tool he was testing couldn’t find the specific character set or font used by the email server.

Different email clients apply the standards in slightly different ways, making conversion more difficult, noted Craig Paul, a forensic examiner who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin Law School. “My hunch is that this is a mismatch between the code pages used by the sending mail client (possibly BlackBerry) and the application used to print messages to a PDF file,” Paul wrote. “The presence of BlackBerry and iPhone signatures in these emails indicates that the messages traversed multiple systems with different encryption practices, exacerbating decryption issues during PDF creation.”

“You’re looking at hundreds of different ways to convert these files from hundreds of different people using whatever software is available to them, and some of them might be good, some of them might not be,” Broome said.

“The PDF standard is very complex,” Broome wrote. “And email to PDF is particularly risky.”