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Friday, 31 August 2012

More on the Barack Obama birth-certificate

Obama Release Your Records has a fascinating piece on the Barack Obama birth-certificate story, a story that just won't disappear...
Do read the whole article but here's a taster:
'The investigation's technical analysis relied on the work of Mara Zebest, an author and tech editor, who was enlisted by the Cold Case Posse to look at the documents. She concluded in a report that: “Obama’s PDF file can no longer be referred to as a ‘document,’ since that term implies it existed and started in paper form. Obama’s PDF must be referred to as a ‘digital file’ because that is all it has ever been. …”

Ms. Zebest says Obama’s long-form birth certificate is not even a good forgery. “Poor is an understatement. It’s horrific,” she said. “When it was released, I still expected a file that would be difficult to determine as fraudulent, but when I opened it up, within seconds it was clear it was an obvious fake.” In order to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, she says she called a friend who was also familiar with computer programming. He downloaded if from the White House website and had the same reaction. “Oh my God, somebody has been very sloppy here,” he said, according to Zebest.

For Ms. Zebest, the foremost sign that the document has been tampered with is the existence of layers. “Layers are a very damning part of why this is a forgery,” she said. Layers appear when a document is opened in a graphics program, like Adobe Illustrator. These layers contain elements from the document, but not the whole document. One layer may contain the background color. Another layer may contain only black text. The information that appears on each layer depends on how the document was originally created.

For those more familiar with a non-digital era, think of layers as transparencies used with a slide projector. Multiple transparencies may make up a single image. In this case, the transparencies are stacked one on top of the other to create a composite of Mr. Obama’s long-form birth certificate.

Ms. Zebest says there should be no layers in Mr. Obama’s birth certificate. “If you take a birth certificate and scan it into a computer, you’re going to end up with a flat document. You're not going to have anything with layers. The fact that it has multiple layers in itself means manipulation,” she said.

Obama’s long-form birth certificate contains nine layers.'
The story of Barack Obama's birth certificate interests me because I find it so unlikely that he was not born in Hawaii. However I think that there are many other questions that do need to be asked  about his history, questions that are easily evaded by the Obama camp by denigrating anybody who asks such questions with the insult 'birther'. Why have Barack Obama's educational records not been released? BIRTHER  So is it beyond the realm of possibility that the birth certificate released by the Barack Obama camp was deliberately made to look like a forgery?

Paranoid, Moi?

1 comment:

jaz said...

Open *any* PDF in illustrator and it will appear to contain layers. All this says is that Ms. Zebest doesn't know what she is talking about.

Even the National Review Online, hardly a pro-Obama cheerleader has said this is a nonsense.

" But these layers, as they’re being called, aren’t layers in the traditional photo-editing sense of the word. They are, quite literally, pieces of image data that have been positioned in a PDF container. They appear as text but also contain glyphs, dots, lines, boxes, squiggles, and random garbage. They’re not combined or merged in any way. Quite simply, they look like they were created programmatically, not by a human.

What’s plausible is that somewhere along the way — from the scanning device to the PDF-creation software, both of which can perform OCR (optical character recognition) — these partial/pseudo-text images were created and saved. What’s not plausible is that the government spent all this time manufacturing Obama’s birth certificate only to commit the laughably rookie mistake of exporting the layers from Photoshop, or whatever photo editing software they are meant to have used. It’s likely that whoever scanned the birth certificate in Hawaii forgot to turn off the OCR setting on the scanner. Let’s leave it at that."


http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/265767/pdf-layers-obamas-birth-certificate-nathan-goulding