by Charles Miller

In the U.S. there is a law known as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The FOIA is frequently used by the news media for investigative purposes, though any individual may invoke the law to request access to government records. For as long as this law has been in existence (since 1966), devious government employees have been finding ways to avoid complying with it. It was in the news just this week that one slimy U.S. government ex-employee used what appeared to be intentional misspellings in a sophomoric effort to circumvent public-information requests. That attempt was not even creative, but leave it to other more resourceful bureaucrats to come up with a scheme so incredibly stupid that it is actually brilliant in its simplicity.

This has apparently been going on for years, and has been reported from time to time that some public officials who wanted to hide their email correspondence from the public but required by law to retain them were found to be using Greek fonts after writing their emails. That is not to say any of them could read or speak that language; they wrote only in their native English but after writing changed the font to the Greek alphabet. In doing so they were hiding their emails in plain sight.

An official Freedom of Information request might read something like "Produce all correspondence, emails, and other documents containing the words 'kickback' and/or 'bribe' during the calendar years 2020 through 2024." The government office being investigated would be legally obligated to search its records for those two words but might not find them if the sender of an email had simply changed the font to Greek.

If you type the letter S on an English or Spanish keyboard you will see the familiar letter "S" but if you then change the font to Greek the letter "S" changes to "sigma." Change E and the Greek letter "epsilon" appears; and so on. The result is that you may type in English but after changing fonts the resulting characters that appear on the screen are nothing but gibberish of Greek letters. This gibberish is unsearchable by the software used to fulfill FOI requests, but the recipient of the email who knows the message to be written in English has only to select the text and change the font back to English to read the message.

The cunning bureaucrats figured out that the software designed to search their correspondence and official documents is not programmed to find English text that has been reformatted using Greek letters, or Russian Cyrillic, or Armenian, or Arabic, etc. etc..

In the English alphabet there are 26 letters while the Greek alphabet contains 24, most of which are different from English. For example the word "kickback" translated to Greek is "τραμπούκο" which is a real word, but "kickback" transliterated in a Greek font is "κισκβασκ" which if not a real word in Greek and is just nonsense. That might be enough to throw investigative reporters and government watchdogs off the scent.

As I stated in the introduction, this is such a stupid idea that it is actually brilliant. If you have some kind of document on your computer that you wanted to make just a bit difficult to find or decipher, you could use the bureaucrat's trick. For a much more detailed tutorial, please point your browser to Youtube.com and search for the video entitled "How to install Greek fonts and type in Greek."

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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