General Discussion

The equal sign issue (=9yo vs 19yo)

This looks terrifying and the implications are huge but technically it’s one of the most explainable discrepancies.

What likely happened: • Emails were originally stored as plain text or HTML • During export to PDF, OCR and/or text normalization got involved • The equal sign (=) is a fragile character because it’s commonly used in email encoding

In email systems, = is often: • A soft line-break marker (quoted-printable encoding) • A continuation indicator • A formatting escape character

So if one pipeline preserved quoted-printable text and another decoded + flattened it, you can absolutely end up with =9 yo in one file and 19 yo in another — without any human “editing” happening.

THAT SAID The semantic impact is MASSIVE. We now have multiple public versions of the same document where: • A single character completely flips the meaning • There’s zero provenance or explanation attached

If I were building this search system, I’d call that a major process failure with serious consequences.

At the same time, I get why they didn’t “clean it up.” The volume is insane. Normalizing this first would be a monumental task (maybe eventually doable w/ AI), but then people would rightly complain the docs weren’t raw or original anymore. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

The real issue IMO is how this was released to the public with no explanation at all. We’re clearly not the only ones scratching our heads.

Bottom line: this looks like different ingestion / export / redaction workflows — not necessarily tampering. Exactly what you’d expect when one of the largest document dumps ever is pulled from different systems, processed by different tools, and published without normalization.