Ok, so I've just done a bit of digging on the Presidential Transition Act of 1963 (+the Enhancement Act of 2019), and the General Services Administration, which led me to this: https://presidentialtransition.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2020/05/GSA-MOU-and-Trump-Transition.pdf
The Eligible Candidate, as a condition of receiving services and office space. shall disclose to the Administrator the date of contribution, source , amount, and expenditure of all monetary contributions, Including currency of the United States and of any foreign nation, checks, money orders, or any other negotiable instruments payable on demand , received for use In the preparation of the Eligible Candidate for the assumption of official duties as President. Disclosures made under this paragraph shall be In the form of a report to the Administrator by February 19, 2017. The report shall be made available to the public by the Administrator upon receipt
GSA will supply software and equipment, and the equipment will be returned by February 19, 2017. This equipment will be Inventoried and all data on these devices will be deleted.
So February 19th is shaking up to be an important day on multiple fronts... We have Sidney/Lin/PA SCOTUS cases, but also it appears that it's a deadline for Bidan's transition team...
So, then I go to try to double-check and reference Biden's Memorandum of Understanding: https://presidentialtransition.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2020/09/2020_MOU_between_GSA_and_Eligible_Candidate_Biden.pdf
Motherfucker ain't even searchable... If you do ctrl+f "F" (as in February) it highlights all the W's...
So then I try "G" (as in GSA) and it highlights all the X's...
Now I'm starting to notice a pattern... ROT-17 ... I repeat ROT-SEVENTEEN
(caesar cipher, look it up on ddg if you aren't familiar)
If I'm correct in this guess, then when I ctrl+f "H" it should return all the Y's... lemme check real quick, aaaaaaand sure enough, BANG BISCUIT!!!
Now, I'm gonna spare you the details and just give you the raw data of the rest of my findings. Below will be 4 columns: input (what you type into ctrl+f), output (what gets highlighted), occurrences (# of times it appears in the document), notes (a '✔' indicates that I verified that each occurrence is the stated letter; I only looked at those with fewer than 100 results, and there are exceptions in this doc, it's not a perfect 1-for-1 substitution)...
a => r 1229
b s 1045
c t 1710
d u 420
e v 181
f w 155
g x 44 ✔
h y 247
i z 25 ✔
j § 2 ✔
k " 1 ✔
l {?} 4 unknown, perhaps {redacted}
m n/a 0
n n/a 0
o n/a 0
p n/a 0
q n/a 0
r n/a 0
s n/a 0
t n/a 0
u n/a 0
v n/a 0
w n/a 0
x n/a 0
y n/a 0
z n/a 0
0 a 1293
1 b 278
2 c 644
3 d 779
4 e 2484
5 f 537
6 g 262
7 h 637
8 i 1635
9 j 1 ✔
! l 44 n=21, 'i';n=22, 'i' ... possibly others, hard to spot
@ q 46 ✔
# n 66 ✔
$ o 113
% p 147
^ n/a
& q 6 ✔
* u 36 ✔ n=27, 'a'
( s 183
) t 204
- y 8 ✔
_ n/a
= n 1394
+ v 23 ✔
[ n/a
] n/a
\ n/a
{ n/a
} n/a
| n/a
` n/a
~ n/a
; l 759
' r 65 ✔
: k 33 ✔
" m 39 ✔
, w 11 n=2, ' '; n=4, 'c'
. [,e 2 n=1, '['; n=2, 'e'
/ ] 1 ✔
< m 388
> o 1236
? p 479
TLDR- Biden's MOU is encrypted with a modified ROT-17 caesar cipher
I archived the pdf here:
Feel free to copy and post on 8k too...
This is bizarre. My first thoughts is that the document has been put through some obfuscating software, to remap the font to different characters. This would serve as a simple substitution cypher on the plain text, while keeping the document human readable. Doing this would serve to stop copying and pasting text from the document, and also stop searching from insider the viewer and web-search indexers.
From some quick looking I found normally non-printing character \u001f maps to a capital I, and \u0019 maps to a capital C. Those aren't ROT-17, even on an ASCII table. I think that some characters happened to be ROT-17 is an interesting coincidence.
One thing I do wonder about is what other PDF documents are out there that obfuscated like this, and are being overlooked because they're unsearchable.
Why would they do that? Is the info too damning??
Someone versed in presidential transfer protocols would have to answer whether or not it is damning.
I suspect whoever did the redaction also did the scrambling too (probably a checkbox in the redaction software).
From my brief skimming of the document it details what the GSA is expected to supply to the candidate pre-election, and after the election if they win. Nothing I'd expect to find something nefarious in. Some buildings, names, departments and IT details have been redacted One redaction I do find odd is the redaction of the eligible candidate's signature and printed name (I don't know if this is standard procedure or not).