Search Term: “Corney”

Clayton Cramer shares an oddity about this OIG document: Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation.

I have not read all 434 pages. But I bring this to your attention because a friend noticed something odd and disturbing. He found when examining a previous issue that searching for “Comey” failed to find many occurrences of Comey’s name. In this revision, I found 12 places where searching for “Corn” matched Comey’s name but more than 50 places where “Comey” matches. It appears that the “Corney” matches were the result of kerning the r and n into something that looks like “Comey”, but cannot be found by searching. Kerning is a feature of Microsoft Word (look under Format Font Advanced) but this would have to be done individually for each such occurrence. It makes it hard to find all uses of Comey’s name. My informant says the previous issue had even more such cases. Can anyone explain this weirdness?

You can download and test this for yourselves. He’s right.

Click the image to bring up a larger version.

19 Replies to “Search Term: “Corney””

  1. > Can anyone explain this weirdness?

    Well, OCR explains conversion from m to rn. It is a usual problem with bad OCR.

    Or it could be a joke (unicorn is a corney horse). Or it could be a deliberate alias to make searching harder. Or it could be a combination of things, like copy paste error + OCR.

    Is there any incriminating that CORNEY has done?

    1. That’s funny though! Made me giggle.

      James Corney ONLY wanted to obscure HIS name from the search utilities. Obarna and team were busy tossing Comey under the bus. Yes … in the end … it’s every man for himself.

  2. This must be one of those super duper spy things taught at the Antonio Prohías school of espionage.

    1. So I looked up Antonio Prohias and was pleased to discover who created all those Spy vs. Spy cartoons I loved as a boy. Thank you, Brian.

  3. I went to the link at the beginning of your post and clicked on the link for:

    https://www.oversight.gov/sites/default/files/oig-reports/o20012.pdf

    The report opened directly in a tab of my Firefox web browser… 478 pages (the 434 page report begins on the 34th page of the PDF document).
    I hit Ctrl-F and then searched for “Comey”.
    148 occurrences found. Nothing appears to be irregular coming at the document this way, which I consider the most straightforward.

      1. I don’t know.

        However… If the document obtained from the official source works properly, and the document obtained from some downstream intermediary exhibits some suspicious trait, any suspicion I have that there has been some underhanded manipulation of the document isn’t going to be directed towards the official source.

  4. One of my readers figured out why it is Comey some places but Corney in others. The reason is not conspiracy but it still mystifies me.

    “Only pages 1, 2, and 478 are text. Pages 3 through 477 are scanned images. If you zoom in on any one of those pages, you can clearly see the artifacts from the scanning process.

    The PDF was created with Adobe Paper Capture Plug-in.

    “You can use Adobe Acrobat with a scanner to create Adobe PDF files from paper documents. The resulting file is a PDF Image Only file—that is, a bitmap picture of the pages that can be viewed in Acrobat but not searched.

    “If you want to be able to search, correct, and copy the text from an Adobe PDF Image Only file, you can “capture” the pages in three file formats. Adobe PDF Formatted Text and Graphics, PDF Searchable Image (Exact) and Searchable Image (Compact) all apply optical character recognition (OCR) and font and page recognition to the text images and convert them to normal text. The Searchable Image file types have a bitmap image of the pages in the foreground, and the captured text on an invisible layer beneath it”

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