Notice that email address for Abedin? It has a copyright symbol instead of an @ symbol - and it ends with ".goy" instead of ".gov."Emails show Huma Abedin in charge of Hillary Clinton's earpiece https://t.co/9dreUeDhZ9 pic.twitter.com/QZ8BpcZk2l— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 8, 2016
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:
@justinjm1 No. Cut and paste the address from the PDF. What do you get? "state.goy". As we said, the typo is State's.— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 8, 2016
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).
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.
ReplyDeleteSo the OCR program saw the "v" as a "y". Not at all unusual for OCR to be a bit flaky.
J