How Bloomberg reported on the Epstein emails

Jeff Kao, Surya Mattu, and Dhruv Mehrotra of Bloomberg News give some background about how it reported on thousands of emails to and from Jeffrey Epstein.

Kao, Mattu and Mehrotra report, “To verify the emails’ authenticity, we used approaches that included cryptographic verification, metadata analysis and corroboration with external sources, such as public information and interviews with individuals involved. Digital security experts who reviewed our analyses called them solid and thorough.

“We analyzed industry-standard verification methods recorded in the header metadata of each email. Cryptographic checks verify that an email’s contents hadn’t been tampered with, while other checks assess an email’s chain of custody. Because common cryptographic checks hadn’t yet been widely adopted in the years when this account was most active, many older messages could not be reconfirmed cryptographically.

“For emails whose headers report the results of such checks, the ‘fail’ rate — or the portion of the emails that failed to validate for a type of check — was less than 1%. Manual review of those rare failures found no evidence of foul play.

“While it’s possible to modify header data, our analysis found no anachronistic methods of verification were used. In spot checks, provider-specific header formats matched their providers’ practices at the time. It would be difficult to generate such a large body of documents containing such consistent metadata and content spanning two decades.”

Read more here.