Three days ago, I wrote a post about stumbling across uncensored/unredacted plain-text content in the DOJ Epstein archives that could theoretically be reconstructed and reversed to reveal the uncensored originals of some of the files. Last night, I succeeded in doing just that, and was able to extract the DBC12 PDF file from the Epstein archive EFTA00400459 document. Don’t get too excited: as expected, the exfiltrated document (available for download here) turned out to be nothing too juicy and is “just” another exemplar of the cronyism and the incestuous circles of financial funding that Epstein and his colleagues engaged in.
There is a lot I could say in this post about the different approaches I took and the interesting rabbit holes I went down in trying to extract valid base64 data from the images included in the PDF; however, I am somewhat exhausted from all this and don’t have the energy to go into it all in as much detail as it deserves, so I’ll just post some bullet points with the main takeaways: