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In a public record request to a city government, I have gotten back a number of records that are .txt format of e-mails with attachments appearing to be base64. The e-mail attachments are jpegs, pdf, png, or doc in base64 a shorter example is below. The government official claim "The records we released to you are in the form that was available, including the file you noted. From what I have been told, it is likely garbled computer coding. We have no other version of those records."

Questions:

Does someone have to intentionally work at saving the e-mail and attachments in this way so that they are unreadable, thus making the information not public (hiding it)?

or is this something that can plausibly happen in saving "garbled computer coding"? If it is plausible that a computer does it, how?

Is there a way of decoding it? I have tried a number of online decoding with various settings and have been unsuccessful.

I have done a number of public record requests from this city and department in the past and have never gotten such .txt documents. The public record request is around a city contract that is problematic.

From: "Steinberg, David (DPW)" <david.steinberg@sfdpw.org>
To: "Goldberg, Jonathan (DPW)" <jonathan.goldberg@sfdpw.org>
Sent: Fri, 17 May 2019 20:40:36 +0000
Subject: Re: SOTF - Education, Outreach and Training Committee, May 21, 2019 hearing



   
       ----boundary-LibPST-iamunique-566105023_-_-
        Content-Type: image/jpeg
        Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
        Content-ID: <image002.jpg@01D50CB4.2B093D10>
        Content-Disposition: attachment; 
                filename*=utf-8''image002.jpg;
                filename="image002.jpg"
        
         /9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEAYABgAAD/2wBDAAoHBwkHBgoJCAkLCwoMDxkQDw4ODx4WFxIZJCAmJSMg
        IyIoLTkwKCo2KyIjMkQyNjs9QEBAJjBGS0U+Sjk/QD3/2wBDAQsLCw8NDx0QEB09KSMpPT09PT09
        PT09PT09PT09PT09PT09PT09PT09PT09PT09PT09PT09PT09PT09PT09PT3/wAARCABJAFEDASIA
        AhEBAxEB/8QAHwAAAQUBAQEBAQEAAAAAAAAAAAECAwQFBgcICQoL/8QAtRAAAgEDAwIEAwUFBAQA
        AAF9AQIDAAQRBRIhMUEGE1FhByJxFDKBkaEII0KxwRVS0fAkM2JyggkKFhcYGRolJicoKSo0NTY3
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        ----boundary-LibPST-iamunique-566105023_-_---
NXTTOGO
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1 Answers1

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enter image description here

I got the image by copying your base64 data to a file and

base64 -d file > image.jpeg

on my Debian/Linux.

RFC 2045 section 6 says binary data are to be encoded in US-ASCII characters so that it's quite normal images are encoded by base64 although GUI email reader would not show you raw data.

When you see such raw data, it means somebody might copy and paste other emails blindly, still it less likely happen. (Obviously your example is part of multipart message, but not complete.)

Decode service on web is available, for example, here.

chomeyama
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  • Thank you very much. I was able to replicate, got the same image. I take it I can do the same thing with pdf, and doc. "When you see such raw data, it means somebody might copy and paste other emails blindly, still, it less likely to happen." My guess it this happens only when a person copies and saves messages and records in a .txt form, since txt can not show a pdf or jpeg or doc it converts it to base64? They could save records in their original form ie .pdf which is easier than what they are doing. I ask this because it has legal implications. – NXTTOGO Jan 11 '21 at 18:20