""The glyphs and symbols are probably some artifact of a poor conversion process," said Chris Prom, professor and archivist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Specifically, the symbols look like remnants of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, or MIME, a 30-year-old standard for encoding emails. The protocol underlying email transmits messages as short strings of simple ASCII characters, so as people started writing longer messages and trying to include formatting and symbols, MIME was developed as a way of encoding them in ASCII."
""With MIME, the "=" is used to signal either that a string of text should be broken for transmission and rejoined - a "soft line break" - or, when followed by two other characters, that it should be converted to a particular non-ASCII mark. If you wanted to actually write "=" in an email, for example, it would be encoded as "=3D." During normal use, the recipient's email client decodes these symbols before displaying the formatted message.""
Many emails released by the Department of Justice include sequences of garbled symbols that resemble a secret code. Those symbols align with artifacts from MIME quoted-printable encoding, where "=" signals soft line breaks or encodes non-ASCII characters (for example "=3D" represents "="). Normal email clients decode those sequences before display. During extraction and conversion of the emails to PDF format, the quoted-printable decoding appears to have been mangled, leaving raw encoded sequences visible. The result is pervasive scrambled text in the PDFs rather than intentional coded messages.
Read at The Verge
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