Friday, September 9, 2016

Wikileaks and the ".goy" Huma Abedin/Hillary Clinton Email

Julian Assange and Wikileaks are getting shit from several quarters today for promoting an email from Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—with a very questionable email address:

Notice that email address for Abedin? It has a copyright symbol instead of an @ symbol - and it ends with ".goy" instead of ".gov."

Obvious fake - right? Proof that Wikileaks is doctoring emails - right? Also proof of anti-Semitism from Assange - right?

Assange defended the email as real, and the typos as the State Department's:


I decided to test it. (As I'm sure others have.)

Here's a PDF of the email—not from Wikileaks, but right from the source: the State Department's FOIA reading room. (Type in "earpiece" in the search box to get to the specific email. There are three results - it's the third one. You can also view it directly at the Wikileaks website.) Abedin's email address reads "AbedinH@state.gov," just as you'd expect.

But highlight Abedin's email address in that PDF, copy it, and paste it - and this happens:

AbedinH©state.goy> 
That's me - just copying and pasting that into this blog post, straight from the actual email record at the State Department's FOIA site. It's obviously just a reading error by the copy-and-paste machine (computer coding stuff that is above my computer coding knowledge).

1 comment:

  1. It looks like the emails are printed out, and then scanned into a PDF document. At that point, they are a PICTURE, not text. Then OCR (optical character recognition) is run on the picture, and the "computed" text is added back to the PDF.

    So the OCR program saw the "v" as a "y". Not at all unusual for OCR to be a bit flaky.

    J

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