Or worse. She did.
1. Get an open source pdf decoder
2. Decode bytes up to first ambiguous char
3. See if next bits are valid with an 1, if not it’s an l
4. Might need to backtrack if both 1 and l were valid
By being able to quickly try each char in the middle of the decoding process you cut out the start time. This makes it feasible to test all permutations automatically and linearly
Unlike every other PDF format that has been attempted, the federal government doesn't have to worry about adoption.
Hmm. Anyone got some spare CPU time?
I consider myself fairly normal in this regard, but I don't have 76 friends to ask to do this, so I don't know how I'd go about doing this. Post an ad on craigslist? Fiverr? Seems like a lot to manage.
Cool article, however.
The recipient is also named in there...
The search on the DOJ website (which we shouldn't trust), gives back these results for the query: "Content-Type: application/pdf; name=", yields maybe a half dozen or so similarly printed BASE64 attachments.
There's probably lots of images as well attached in the same way (probably mostly junk). I deleted all my archived copies recently once I learned about how not-quite-redacted they were. I will leave that exercise to someone else.
A dynamic programming type approach might still be helpful. One version or other of the character might produce invalid flate data while the other is valid, or might give an implausible result.