I tweeted about it at the time, but this new li’l forum feels like a much more fun place to say this post reminded me of the similar digital forensics performed by Duff Johnson of the PDF Association on the canonical Mueller Report PDF.
Anyone aware of other similar deep-dive metadata forensics performed on notable digital documents? A great reminder even the least tangible media show the witness marks of humans & machines.
(Any conversation about digital-typography forensics is incomplete without mentioning the Killian documents controversy of 2004. US news program 60 Minutes claimed it had documents from the Texas National Guard around 1972 that revealed that President George W. Bush had evaded his service obligations. After the reveal, it took only a few days for armchair typographers to point out why the documents were fake: the documents used digital Times New Roman, which of course didn’t exist at the time. Later, the incident was the basis of a film starring Cate Blanchett, who got to utter the line “Nobody wants to talk about that—they want to talk about fonts.”)
The New York Times reports today that Justice Samuel Alito, author of the opinion that was leaked this year, may have sanctioned the 2014 leak of another opinion he wrote, also pertaining to reproductive rights.
What We Can Deduce over Leaked Tea, to Guest