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...
Here's what I'm smelling so far. It's not a +17 offset, .. it's +49 of the ASCII table (to match the case printed).
A later section is +75
The final section doesn't look like an ASCII offset at all. pretty garbages.
What I find interesting is the "misspellings" -- perhaps if isolated from the document text they present a message unto themselves.
Thanks for sharing.
Can you elaborate on "case printed"? When I copy-paste the content into notepad, I get all-caps.
Also, can you explain to me the +49/+75, I feel like I'm missing something simple here. I'm looking at an ASCII table rn, but not seeing exactly what you're talking about. Tbc, I understand that 'A' +49 takes me to 'r', but if you search the doc, ctrl+f "a" yields capital and lowercase R's, as well as other random letters, which has been explained away as an error in the image vs text, but I'm still not certain that this is the case either as the file has obvious mistakes when copy-pasted and ROT'd.
I'm not super well versed in the processes for these sorts of things, but just using intuition and a little common sense, those misspellings aren't on the OCR end right? I mean, I get how the system could misinterpret an uppercase 'I' for a lowercase 'L', or merge 'rn' into an 'm' if the kerning is tight, but replacing 'P' with '' seems like the file either got corrupted at some point (is "mild" file corruption even a thing?) or it suggests some level intentionality.
Hello, fren. Happy to share my work with you.
To start with, I didn't search single characters, but rather pulled out whatever "text" is there. One way is to Ctrl+A (select-all), Ctrl+C (copy), Ctrl+V (paste) to a text file; the result for me is this. Another method is 'pdftotext' (a program that is part of the poppler-utils Python package); it produces a much similar output.
About the document, some of the pages are flat images. I have no guess as to why some pages are, and others are not, from a technical perspective.
To perform the rotation, I wrote this Python script (python2, not python3, fwiw). This lets me "turn the dial" so to speak on the cipher; python rotate.py 17 ; python rotate.py 21 ; etc.
So I went through many offsets until I found something that was readable.
17 is readable, but in ALLCAPS. This is what was meant by matching "the case printed"; an offset of 49 matches the document (mostly). But that offset does work consistently through the doc.
The next unreadable section becomes readable with an offset of 75, and looks to be the footnote on page 9 concerning COVID protocol.
]tandard occupancxM no adjustments for [
Z NPRO ^he ligible andidate staff shall determine an[Z NPR protocols for the spaceM including entrance and screening requirementsO ^he ligible andidate shall notifx ]SM the st st M the epartment of Yomeland ]ecuritx ederal \rotective ]ervice whoM in turnM shall ma e all reasonable efforts to accommodate such [`Z NPR related protocolsOUppercase letters are not properly displayed, but there was no better offset. Offset 65 fixes the initial 'S', but it doesn't fix the rest.
That's also what I mean by "misspelling": "]tandard" vs "Standard" ; since I can't find rhyme nor reason for the uppercase chars being off by independently varying degrees.
I'm willing to chalk it all up to PDF compression is weird. Hope this helped.