I’ve been on WorldNetDaily’s case lately for trotting out a steady stream of crank self-proclaimed document experts while avoiding the recognized professionals in the field.
I have not been completely fair in my criticism. WorldNetDaily, according to an article by Bob Unruh back on May 1, 2011, actually contacted two forensics professionals and asked them to look at the Obama long form PDF.
While WND has published links to the full reports of some of its crank experts, they have treated the real experts differently.
Ivan Zatkovich
Unruh spends most of his article treating the report of Ivan Zatkovich of eComp Consultants. Mr. Zatkovich has an impressive career, having given forensic testimony in federal civil and criminal trials. While most of his activity seems to be related to patents and telephony, at least one case involved images. Mr. Zatkovich is not a crank by any means. What seemed odd to me then is why a link to his actual report was not published along with Unruh’s article.
To clear the matter up, I emailed Mr. Zatkovich with my questions, and he was kind enough to reply, and to include the missing report provided to WorldNetDaily. Mr. Zatkovich said:
Here is a copy of the full Obama birth certificate report which I submitted to World Net Daily. I believe it is fairly objective, and don’t believe WND’s excerpt was quite accurate.
Ivan
I must agree. WND readers say that every expert who has looked at the long form concludes that it’s a fake/fraud/forgery. Mr. Zatkovich, while maintaining that the separation of the document into layers was manual, concludes:
All of the modifications to the PDF document that can be identified are consistent with someone enhancing the legibility of the document.
The Zatkovich report directly contradicts the report of WND crank expert Douglas Vogt, by saying: “A certificate was produced by the State of Hawaii and copied onto green safety paper, as per normal procedure.” Vogt claims the State of Hawaii produced no paper document at all. He also contradicts WND crank expert Mara Zebest when he reports that the layers were not due to Adobe Illustrator.
John Berryhill
Jon Berryhill is the COO of Berryhill Computer Forensics. Bob Unruh says only:
A second opinion, from Jon Berryhill of Berryhill Computer Forensics, said for a complete analysis, access to the original document would be best.
No indication is given whether or not a report was provided by Mr. Berryhill, and what else Berryhill might have said. However, if Berryhill had called the long form PDF a fake, there is no doubt that Mr. Unruh would have said so. He didn’t.
Conclusion
WorldNetDaily contacted two legitimate document experts and asked them to look into the Obama long form birth certificate PDF. Neither of them called it a fake.
The report clearly addresses all the issues before coming to its conclusion. There is more there that those who want to believe the document is fake will want to read. It clearly dismisses many of their arguments.
The only real “issue” that I have with this report is that it consistently references http://www.whitehouse.com as the source of the examined PDF.
When it should have been http://www.whitehouse.gov/ in the file.
Reading Zatkovich’s conclusion, it seems he really wanted to leave open the door for forgery as a possibility.
In so many words- this document looks normal and when scanning it they enhanced text for legibility. There is no evidence any content was changed, but because the document was changed by enhancing text, I can’t rule anything out.
Weasel words.
It is important to stress that neither of the experts saw the physical copy of the document. WND did not ask to see it, much less to have a document expert view it. There are two physical copies of the long form birth certificate, that the Director of Health of Hawaii stated she had seen being copied and were accurate. And these were given to Obama’s lawyer. In principle, WND could ask to see them and take them to a document expert (or bring the document expert to the document). But WND has chosen not to do this. Why not?
Because if it did, the chance of a respected document expert saying that the physical document was forged are nil, or virtually nil. WND prefers to speculate about the lousy PDF copy (the one that shows the “the” with a faint “h” as “txe”) and not to ask to see the physical document.
It is important to stress that neither of these document experts, nor any of the other “experts” has examined the actual physical document. They all have based their opinions only on the Web image, in the main on the PDF image. In principle, it is possible for WND to ask to see the physical copy itself, one of the two that Obama’s lawyer brought back from Hawaii. But WND has apparently not done this (if it had asked to see the document and was turned down, it would have reported that fact). Why not? Because if it took the actual physical document to a document examiner, the chance of the forensic document specialist stating that it was forged is nil, or nearly nil.
Despite the conflicting nature of the reports from individuals, Ivan does make the following conclusion –
“All of the modifications to the PDF document that can be identified are consistent with someone
enhancing the legibility of the document. It is possible that in addition to enhancing the legibility of the
document that the content of the document was also changed. There is no specific evidence of how or
why that content would have been changed, but the evidence clearly indicates that the document was
changed .”
This is a huge red Flag that Doc convienetly leaves out in his quoted comment. Once again, Doc attempts to mislead his readers especially in light the fact the reason Doc quotes appears to based on speculation but the fact that the birth certificate was changed appears to be a certainty.
Good find Doc. I am going to invite both of them to come on Reality Check Radio on a future show.
Someone certainly enhanced the legibility of the document. Unfortunately for birthers, it was the programmers who wrote the PDF software.
Other computer experts not fully reported on were the ones who found the hidden text showing the real certificate number by OCRing the PDF. Corsi’s article failed to point out that they also discovered hidden text showing Obama was born in “110nolulu” and his mom was born in “Wichita anus.”
WND’s white house reporter, Les Kinsolving, saw the physical copy, the day it was released:
http://www.mediaite.com/online/world-net-dailys-les-kinsolving-reacts-to-release-of-president-obamas-birth-certificate/
When President Obama released his short form certificate, only one reporter showed up. When he released the long form certificate, only a few people in the room cared to look at the original. That includes intrepid reporter Les Kinsolving, who simply did not care to view the actual evidence, although, to his credit, concluded the President was born in Hawaii.
No forensic examiner can say anything of value without examining the original paper copy. Since the State of Hawaii has confirmed the President’s story, that debate is going no where. The only hope for these folk is that when Ms. Dr. Taitz finally gets her “discovery” of the original, bound volume, she will find that the President’s certificate was fraudulently created and inserted. Since she already has reached that conclusion, she just needs to touch the book to release her report. This discussion of computer generated copies (with great respect to Doc) was, is, and will remain irrelevant, except for the limited point that desktop analysis of documents one has not seen is not science, and fraught with risk.
You can chose to spin the story (“glass half empty”) as you like. The difference between my reporting and that of WND is that I provided the original report which and other readers can see for themselves. My expectation is that most of my readers care about context and will read the source material and make up their own minds.
The point of my recent articles is to refute the claim that all the experts examining the Obama long form conclude fraud. I have shown that such claims are lies.
Further, Zatkovich is mistaken about manual enhancement. He says that he knows of no optimization process that creates layers. It’s true that he doesn’t know about one, but I do. It’s called Adaptive optimization, and it’s described in the Adobe manual.
Poor John. He keeps coming back here to put his stupidity on display for all the world to see.
Only in John’s world does a “possibility” magically become a “certainty.”
John also forgets that several reporters, including one from WND, viewed one of the original copies of the birth certificate. If its content was changed when it was converted to a PDF, wouldn’t one of those reporters have noticed? Did Les Kinsolving notice any difference? If so, why has he been silent about it?
Tell us, John – which parts of the birth certificate were “certainly” changed. Please be specific.
I asked a birther to WND why they don’t publish articles with real experts. WND’s response:
It is part of the Obama supporters’ disinformation campaign. Obama did not release the original birth certificate — the paper document is still in the vault in the Hawaii Department of Health. Experts who are certified to testify at trial and are members of the various certified forensic associations are trained to be reluctant to render an opinion unless they can view the original document. All Obama has released are xerox copies and a PDF file. Even the certified copy of the birth certificate — the only one with an embossed seal — the White House has locked from view. A court of law would demand the “best evidence” of the document and the “best evidence” is the original 1961 paper Obama birth certificate, if such a document really exists.
The experts WND has brought forward are some of the country’s top experts on Adobe software. To say they are not experts because they are not certified by one of the forensic associations is not correct. Detecting electronic document fraud is a relatively new science and the experts we have brought forward would all be accepted by courts for their expertise.
Most of the Obot radicals themselves lack the credentials to give a professional judgment on the credentials of the experts we have brought forward.
In the final analysis, the Obots cannot answer what the WND critics have proven — all they have left is to launch Saul Alinsky attacks on the WND critics who have risked their careers to come forth and tell the truth.
When you think about it — if Obama had been honest, Obama would himself have released the original 1961 paper document to a group of forensic experts who are court-qualified. Have Obama release the original 1961 paper document and WND would be delighted to get together an expert panel of traditional forensic experts ASAP.
Meanwhile, maybe the Obots could show why the WND experts are wrong — we now have overwhelming evidence the document is a forgery and the Obots are reduced to saying the experts are not experts — a judgment the Obots are not professionally qualified to make.
http://www.bernardgoldberg.com/do-you-believe-in-the-devil-and-a-few-other-questions/
WND is really doubling down. We haven’t seen a recent report on Corsi’s book sales. They must need to free up their warehouse space for the copies they will need to buy up of the books Lakin & Orly plan to write.
Recent report? Have there been any reports? Book sales numbers are guarded like state secrets. They used to be available, but now one has to be a member of a special club. And they are open to manipulation.
Cratering extra hard in the online rankings now. Already yo-yo’ing between 5K and 10K on Amazon …. which means some of Obama’s aging books are now outselling it LOL
For those who want to see just how sucessful Jerry’s sack of cack is
http://www.novelrank.com/asin/1936488299#
Total sales since it’s release from Amazon, Amazon.ca and Amazon.co.uk
Amazon…………………3,964
Amazon.co.uk…………95
Amazon.ca……………..264
Grand total…………….4,323
It never got any visible traction at B+N (as witnessed by it’s ranking) so if this lame puppy passed 6,000-8,000 I would be very, very suprised.
( will not make any assumptions as to how many of the sales were internal to WND to pimp the book)
“All of the modifications to the PDF document that can be identified are consistent with someone enhancing the legibility of the document. It is possible that in addition to enhancing the legibility of the document that the content of the document was also changed. There is no specific evidence of how or why that content would have been changed, but the evidence clearly indicates that the document was changed.”
…. which is why it is so important, and reassuring, to compare the PDF to other available images.
Have any of these “experts” commented on other other images of the LFBC besides the PDF? Seems to me that all have focused like a laser on the PDF, its appearance and structure, none actually evaluating what it says, or its relation to other available information.
Which is what ultimately renders them all near useless, IMO.
Wrong- They are hacks. And Obama’s LFBC PDF was not created with Adobe products, something your hacks don’t seem to grasp.
They would get their asses handed to them, if any court would actually allow them to be expert witnesses. Won’t happen
You lack the credentials to say that we lack the credentials to question the credentials of your hacks.
Constantly accusing us of Alinsky tactics is in itself an Alinsky tactic.
Your hacks have been debunked here and elsewhere-
Answer one question- How come you cannot find an “expert” to declare Obama’s LFBC a forgery who wasn’t already a birther? It makes you guys look like the joke you are.
Wow. Does this mean that there are less suckers than I thought, or are the birthers too broke to buy the hardcover?
(all those teabags hanging from funny triangle hats add up…)
You need to take better care with your quotes
These so called “experts” couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag, much less get past a Daubert motion. I would actually love to see that occur. They would fall one by one.
Oops. Sorry Sef!
It’s easy to misquote things here.
Can anyone declare that when looking at the WH PDF they believe they are looking at an image capture/photo/scan of a real paper document? I don’t think anyone can because it appears to be something else, -something that contains no semblance to an image of an embossed folded document copied on paper. If you get the sense that it is instead something graphically created on a computer via unknown methods, then you have to ask yourself “Why?” The first issue isn’t whether or not its information is true or false, rather, it’s “why isn’t this an obvious scan of a real piece of paper?” If one concludes that it isn’t a scanner image then one gets into the area of suspicion that it might be something that the words forgery and fraud cover, not in relation to the veracity of its content, but to its presentation as something that it may not be, namely, a scan of an actual certified paper birth certificate.
The subject of most significance is whether or not it’s truly a scanner image. The issue of all of the questions raised by its PDF nature are different from the issue of what the nature of the image itself is. Is it an image of a real document or is it an image of a created representation of a real document. If it is the former then questions arise as to why it doesn’t look like a real paper document and why no expert has had access to it/them. If it is the latter, then the question arises as to why it was created. No expert can answer that. It also raises the question as to whether it is even legal to present such an image as being that of an official State vital records document. Does the law allow a publicly elected official to pretend that a computer-crafted image is a true copy of an actual certified state document? Aren’t there laws to prevent such a misrepresentation?
One can dispute the technicalities of the PDF but those are the smaller picture issues. The bigger picture is about “what is it really?” and the “why?” that follows if one suspects that it is not really a scanner image at all.
The Obama PDF is not inconsistent with unquestioned scanned documents. One high-powered electronic image specialist says he sees nothing fishy.
So beyond some misinformation, there’s no reason to suspect the Obama long-form PDF. However, those arm-chair experts who make YouTube videos questioning the PDF come to the table convinced that Obama is a fraud and then try to prove it.
To Arnash: The paper original was displayed at the press conference. Any reporter there was welcome to touch it. As best we can determine, only one reporter did. WND’s reporter chose not to inspect the original, but pronounced himself satisfied. Why are you fussing about a copy on the internet when there is an original (actually, I think there are two), and the State of Hawaii says it is genuine?
Ok, so indeed your question would arise as to “why it was created”.
Can you or anyone else put forward any reason why it was created, bearing in mind that In order for the content of the image that is on the WH website to be NOT the same as the content of the actual certified copy birth certificate document issued to the President by Hawaii (and shown to journalists), the most senior people in the state of Hawaii would have to be in on that deceit?
If Hawaii are in on that deceit why wouldn’t Hawaii have just instead created a forged certified birth certificate in the first place?
Nothing you say makes any sense. Why would it have folds in it? It wasn’t mailed to the President, it was hand carried. And that copy has been certified by the State of Hawaii as being a true copy of the original document. The PDF was made to allow everyone who was interested to be able to view the information contained on the certified birth certifigate. The PDF is not the legal document. They could have drawn pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers on pdf if they wanted to and that would in no way invalidate the copy of the BC from which the pdf was made.
By the way, the real document from which the PDF was made has an embossed seal.
Dr. Conspiracy:
“One high-powered electronic image specialist says he sees nothing fishy.” I agree. The only things that seem truly odd is what appears to be a carefully placed upside-down typed “3” on the face of the “A” in the signature of”Alvin”. It appears to form a smiling face, which would be a very odd thing for Alvin (or someone) to do to his signature. And also, the fact that the photo-copies handed out to reporters contained no background, yet the text was complete even though all the gray-scale text elements were confined to the background layer (which was missing). That is something that has no explanation so far, probably because no one has addressed it.
The expert that found nothing fishy was only referencing what he saw. But my point was that reasonable people might find something fishy about what you don’t see, namely an appearance that looks like an actual piece of paper, along with an embossed State Seal stamped into its surface. It is what’s missing in the appearance that raises suspicions that it is not the result of a scan but of a computer based creation. It is that suspicion that then raises the questions that follow it. “What is it really?” It’s clearly a PDF, but is it the result of a PDF save from a scan, or a PDF save from a photo, or a PDF save from an image manipulation program? What is its origin? We have no answers and I don’t think any have been offered.
“State of Hawaii says it is genuine?” Not exactly, though that is what they implied by their statement in support of the PDF image. One can choose to believe them and think naively that they have no reason to not be truthful, but such an assumption doesn’t take into account the enormous negative consequences of telling the truth if that truth was not supportive of what the White House presented. If the PDF does not accurately portray what they printed for the White House then they would have to choose sides, and the side they would choose would not be the one that would lead to an enormous national crisis. They aren’t warriors impatient for the fight of their lives. Path of least resistance…
John Reilly
“The paper original was displayed at the press conference.” If only life was that simple. Something was displayed but it was not simultaneously authenticated by anyone who was a document expert, nor by anyone from the Hawaiian office of vital records. Why would anyone at this point automatically leap to the conclusion that it was something other than a print-out of the PDF? It is understandable that the White House press corps would not question the authenticity of a document that was being presented as being genuine. To do otherwise would take a really bold leap of cynical suspicion. Such a mind set is a great rarity in the American press, for better or worse.
Judge Mental :
“Can you or anyone else put forward any reason why it was created, (no, only speculation as to another place of birth) “In order for the content of the image that is on the WH website to be NOT the same as the content of the actual certified copy birth certificate document issued to the President by Hawaii, the most senior people in the state of Hawaii would have to be in on that deceit”
Judging by the statements they’ve made, either it is a true representation or they are lying to protect him, knowing that it is not. It’s not hard to believe they would but there isn’t enough reason to have any certainty either way. The PDF can’t be shown to contain false information but it also can’t be shown to contain truthful information because it isn’t an actual document and it is unclear that it is an actual scan of a document. Almost everything surrounding it is unclear. The only thing supporting it is the un-sworn statements made by the Hawaiian officials, which, with the stakes being what they are, it could be argued, should be taken with a grain of salt. If one has suspicions about the PDF’s origin, then one is left with having suspicions about the Hawaiian official’s objectivity also. A whiff of conspiracy is produced when suspicions foul the air that heretofore seemed innocently pure.
gorefan:
“Why would it have folds in it? It wasn’t mailed to the President, it was hand carried.” They probably wouldn’t have folds if carried in a full-size document envelope, or they could have been folded and placed in a mail envelope. No way to know which.
” And that copy has been certified by the State of Hawaii as being a true copy of the original document.” Yes, but we can’t say definitely that anyone has seen those copies. “The PDF was made to allow everyone who was interested to be able to view the information contained on the certified birth certificate.” Of course that is what reason says, but it also says that it doesn’t look like a real paper document. So that begs the question of whether or not it is an image of a real document. A conclusion that it isn’t would be followed by the question of why that would be.
“They could have drawn pink hearts…on the pdf if they wanted to and that would in no way invalidate the copy of the BC from which the pdf was made.” True, but you first have to know/believe beyond a reasonable doubt that the PDF was the result of a scan of an actual document. If you suspect that it wasn’t, then you have to wonder about why the PDF was “created”. Then you are off into the land of conjecture, where you can’t know if any possible suspicions have any validity to them or not. It might remind one of what Churchill said about communism, “It’s like a mystery wrapped in a riddle, inside an enigma.”
As for the Onaka signature, you’re just seeing poodles in the clouds.
If you look carefully in the upper left corner, where the image is darkened due to the curve in the paper, you can see the basket weave background clearly.
As I have said before, just a bunch of crank with preposterous, half-baked theories.
Yes, exactly. Go to the HI DOH website and actually read their entire statement. They are not referencing the PDF, which is only an electronic copy, but the ACTUAL physical document. Their statements as the originators of that document are as expert a validation that can be made.
http://hawaii.gov/health/vital-records/obama.html
They’ve attested to its authenticity as much as anything can be attested to. Yet for you, that will never be good enough and you want to make believe in some vast conspiracy that somehow all existing evidence is wrong and everybody is in on it, just because, for whatever reason, you emotionally can’t accept the president for who he is.
Yet somehow you know better than the entire government and all officials who actually deal with such things, don’t you? Yep, you have some special secret knowledge and the entire rest of the world is wrong and all evidence to date has somehow been planted over the past 50 years to support some super vast secret conspiracy that nobody has leaked on, yet you have magically cracked.
There is a term for nuts like you: delusions of grandeur.
FIFY
I think our friend Arnash, a drive-by birther, ought to tell us exactly where the goal posts are. As I understood Mr. Farah’s campaign, it was “where’s the birth certificate?” Now its does the document have folds or not, what do you see if you blow it up to 5000% resolution, and why won’t Hawaii officially verify the certificate for the 103rd time (because 102 statements that the President was born in Hawaii are well known to be legally insufficient).
The President was born in Hawaii. Get over it. Stories that he was born elsewhere were, are and always will be false.
You need help.
And the photographs taken by the NBC reporter of the LFBC? It has a raised seal, and is on security paper and not surprising it contains the same information as the pdf.
“The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God—it’s full of stars!”
And the rabbit hole just goes deeper and deeper.
http://thedailypen.blogspot.com/2011/07/obamas-birth-certificate-image-is.html
The Daily Pen blog site lost any last tiny remaining vestiges of hope of being taken seriously a few months ago when, to go along with their previously existing claim that people born overseas could get Hawaian birth certificates stating that they were born in Hawaii, they then invented a private investigator who had allegedly found lists of hundreds of people born in foreign countries and included in the Hawaii DOH birth announcement lists sent to the newspapers.
Clearly a completely fabricated story as despite repeated requests they then couldn’t come up with a single actual name of any such person from those alleged “hundreds”. No such people, no such report, no such investigator. A site operated by a shameless liar.
Foldin’ & Sealin’
Why would anyone assume the original birth ceritficate, which purportedly has always been on file in a book in an archive, was ever folded? Why would it have been folded? Just because copies may be folded in transit from a state to an individual, or while in an individual’s possession, because people are careless with their legal documents, in no way implies the original, which no one sees after their parents sign it, would necessarily be folded.
Further, just because they choose to fold their copies, why must the White House fold copies of President Obama’s? I do not understand teh obsession with folds. Any folds / lack of folds is completely incidental.
And the seal is visible in the LFBC PDF:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0BwbVB7E55h6GMTI4YWY0ZWItNjUzYy00NDY1LWIxNjItMjM2OWEyYTI1Mjc4&hl=en_US
It doesn’t look that great, but it you were a colorless deformation in a sheet of paper, and you have been reduced to 150dpi and then further degraded by an arbitrary compression algorithm that had file size over image quality in mind, neither would you. 😛
Harrison’s “White Dotted Butterfly” occupies the 3- to 6 o’clock slice of the seal. Thanks, Harrison!
The Daily Pen site was posted on Dr. K(h)8 as the God’s Honest Truth. I rarely go there, but was looking for an accident to gawk at.
John Reilly
“…why won’t Hawaii officially verify the certificate for the 103rd time ” Two deficiencies in your viewpoint.
1. No Hawaiian official has ever made a single statement under oath, so everything they’ve said has been unaccountable to any law. It is not a crime (nor perjury) to lie in conversation or interview, unless speaking to the FBI.
2. “officially verify the certificate” What certificate? I keep trying to remind everyone that no certificate has been displayed for the public nor seen by any neutral expert. The PDF can’t be proclaimed to be a certificate because it is nothing more than a digital file of unknown origin viewed as an image on a computer screen. I seriously doubt that there is any such things as a digital certificate, though I could be wrong. But even if there is such a thing, the WH PDF is not one. No one has “authenticated” it, nor has anyone been allowed to compare it to whatever the Hawaiian records office produced and certified. That fact raises questions all on its own. One of which is “Is it the file that Hawaii used to print certified copies?” If so then the White House would be innocent of any wrong doing (unless they somehow doctored the original Hawaiian records before the PDF was constructed).
“The President was born in Hawaii. Get over it. Stories that he was born elsewhere were, are and always will be, false.”
You are expressing an article of faith, not a fact supported by any hard evidence. Same with any claim that he was NOT born in Hawaii. It would be a logical assumption that if he was not born in any Hawaiian hospital, then he was born at home, which is not an unusual thing. One indirect way to logically “prove” that would be to examine the State Dept records to see if his mother had not obtained a passport prior to his birth. Without a passport she could not have traveled to another country like Kenya (except Canada or Mexico) . The only reason it matters where he was born is because his mother was too young to have passed her citizenship to him if he was born to a foreign father outside the US.
“The Daily Pen blog site claim[ed] that people born overseas could get Hawaiian birth certificates stating that they were born in Hawaii, ”
I’ve read the Hawaiian regulations on the subject about a month ago and it is true but with the requirement that the mother was an American citizen who was out of state/country at the time but lived in Hawaii. There were also other specifications that had to be met.
Foldin’ & Sealin’
“Why would anyone assume the original birth certificate…was ever folded?” No one would. But a fold in a document will almost always be visible in a scan. The presence of a fold adds to the appearance that an image represents a real document, -not just a digital creation. The WH PDF doesn’t have any visual cues that indicate a paper document. Having no expertise in scanned documents, I can’t proclaim that the PDF absolutely can’t be an image of a real paper document, all I can argue is that it certainly doesn’t look like one to my unbiased eyes. How about yours? I assume the reason is that the text layer is a layer without any background, (see the photos of the copies handed out to the WH press -no background) which was then placed on a security-paper background. This was done in a computer, hence it is a purely digital image, not an image-capture of a paper document. While thinking that over, take a look at the PDF with the text layer removed. It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v77/arnash/StarLight_Galleries/th_ObamaBirthCertificate_BKGND2.jpg?t=1312250188
“And the seal is visible in the LFBC PDF:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0BwbVB7E55h6GMTI4YWY0ZWItNjUzYy00NDY1LWIxNjItMjM2OWEyYTI1Mjc4&hl=en_US
J.Potter
Thanks for that. It’s the first time I’ve seen that pointed out. I checked my image folder of COLBs and found one from Alan Booth which curiously has the same faint impression in the same strange location. Perhaps it was placed off-set to the side to leave room for amendments and additions in the center. But what seems odd is that there is absolutely no deformation of a horizontal line that it transects when you would expect that, when enlarged, some kind of warping would be seen. But no, it’s straight as an arrow even at high magnification.
It appears that is evidence that the faint embossing on the background image was only on the background image, -as a separate layer on which the transparent text-layer was over-laid. I have to conclude that the background image is a single template that is used to create the security-paper appearance for all the Hawaiian COLBs. But that indicates that Booth’s COLB also lacked any clearly visible embossment on the paper itself. Is Hawaii cutting corners by leaving off the legally required State Seal? It is very visible in the center of Booth’s short form “Certificate of Live Birth”. Check it out, and see what an image of a real paper document looks like;
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v77/arnash/StarLight_Galleries/?action=view¤t=Hawaii-Short-form-BC2.jpg
Notice it is not label “Certification of Live Birth” like Obama’s, but “Certificate”. That means something significant but only those in the Hawaiian records office know what it it.
G
“Go to the HI DOH website and actually read their entire statement. They are not referencing the PDF, which is only an electronic copy, but the ACTUAL physical document. Their statements as the originators of that document are as expert a validation that can be made.” http://hawaii.gov/health/vital-records/obama.html
I shouldn’t have used the word “statement” when I meant “comments” (verbal). I believe I recall a comment validating (directly or indirectly) the WH PDF. As for the original certified copies that they state they observed being made, those copies would be self-authenticating, (even if fakes) because of the authority invested in the officials and their offices. No one could legally argue that they need to be closely examined by a forensic document expert. Since they would be official productions of the legal authorities, they would be self-authenticating.
The problem is that no one knows that anyone has seen them and not just a print-out of the PDF, -with the addition of some kind of embossed seal. If the person, a female reporter that was on friendly terms with the WH, who was shown a purported original, was my sister and also a document expert, I would believe her. But she isn’t an expert and wouldn’t even know what to look for to determine authenticity. And also, she wasn’t even suspicious to begin with so her observation would not have been with a skeptical eye. Hence, I can’t presume that the original copies have been seen by anyone outside the inner circle.
“you want to make believe in some vast conspiracy that somehow all existing evidence is wrong and everybody is in on it,”
If there is a conspiracy, it is the opposite of vast, it would very tiny, need-to-know basis only, “…just because you emotionally can’t accept the president for who he is.”
The President is a good man who believes in some ruinous approaches to government and regulation. And I can tolerate him a lot more than his predecessor. It all depends on what he says. He gave two of the greatest speeches ever given by any President, at the Noble Prize ceremony and at the funeral for the victims of the mass shooting in Nevada. But respect can’t be an excuse to turn a blind eye to logical suspicions.
“Yet somehow you know better than the entire government and all officials who actually deal with such things”, FYI, there are no officials to deal with such things, this is uncharted territory. There is no road to follow. The buck stops nowhere… unless you want to argue that it stops at the President’s desk. That would be strange, being responsible to investigate yourself.
I was very impressed with Mr. Zatkovich’s paper. while he was clearly asked to find evidence of alterations, and that is clear in the slant of his report, it is clear that he did his job professionally and presented all possibilities for the causes of such alteration in as clear and concise manner as possible.
No wonder WND didn’t want to release the report.
To:Arnash
Arnash (in reply to me)…..“The Daily Pen blog site claim[ed] that people born overseas could get Hawaiian birth certificates stating that they were born in Hawaii, ”
I’ve read the Hawaiian regulations on the subject about a month ago and it is true but with the requirement that the mother was an American citizen who was out of state/country at the time but lived in Hawaii. There were also other specifications that had to be met…….
Me to Arnash in reply to the above……..You are either lying or you had better go back and read them again. There was and is no such thing as any facility for Hawaii to issue a birth certificate stating the place of birth as Hawaii for children who have been reported to Hawaii as having been born while the mother was overseas. None. Nada. Zilch. Not ever.
This claim has been ignorantly and disingenuously made by various birthers over and over again yet Hawaian Laws exclude that possibility and not one single documented example of it happening has ever been unearthed by birthers.
Hawaian Law (after 1981) allowed for Hawaian birth certificates to be issued in respect of children born to Hawaian resident US citizen parents whilst overseas…..however those birth certificates would have stated the place of birth to be wherever the birth actually took place ie Mombasa or Madrid or Mogadishu or whatever. There is no evidence that even that limited birth certificate facility was available to Hawaian residents having children overseas prior to 1981.
For heavens sake……why is it that most birthers propensity for holding forth on any given subject seems to be in inverse proportion to their knowledge of that subject?
Actually, it may reflect a change due to the birthers claiming that a certification is not a certificate. Dr. C. did an article on the change sometime back.
Here is a very recent COLB
http://nativeborncitizen.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/img_0035-small.jpg
And here is an older COLB
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2713796/posts
@arnash
“But what seems odd is that there is absolutely no deformation of a horizontal line that it transects when you would expect that, when enlarged, some kind of warping would be seen. But no, it’s straight as an arrow even at high magnification.”
really? at high magnification there is plainly seen breaks in the black level. Just how much deformation are you expecting from a seal raised a tiny fraction of an inch when viewed straight on? Typical birther evasion. Tap away, arnash, tap away!
And the double down on the folds….you agree but then compare fresh unfolded copies acquired by the White House to older, worn, folded copies? *sigh*
FIFY
Judge Mental wrote:
“Hawaiian Law (after 1981) allowed for Hawaiian birth certificates to be issued in respect of children born to Hawaiian resident US citizen parents whilst overseas…..however those birth certificates would have stated the place of birth to be wherever the birth actually took place ie Mombasa or Madrid or Mogadishu or whatever. There is no evidence that even that limited birth certificate facility was available to Hawaiian residents having children overseas prior to 1981”.
Allow me to repeat myself, I read the official Hawaiian law/regulation on the subject and it was very clear and legally proper. Any claim made about the subject would have been based on the law that I read.
On the other hand, perhaps I read the law that you pointed out, one from 1981. I don’t remember. But my point wasn’t to agree with your quote that such a birth certificate would show Hawaii as the place of birth, though my wording gave that impression. I merely meant to agree that one could obtain a Hawaiian BC even though not born in Hawaii. I assume that past or present, it would state the true birth location. That “fact” is what fuels the suspicion that the Obama LF COLB was tampered with, altered to change the location of birth.
J.Potter
@arnash I wrote:
“But what seems odd is that there is absolutely no deformation of a horizontal line that it transects when you would expect that, when enlarged, some kind of warping would be seen. But no, it’s straight as an arrow even at high magnification.”
You seem to have replied before finishing reading what followed the above statement. I concluded that there is no deformation because the extremely faint circle on the background was exactly that and nothing more. -NOT the appearance of actual embossment on a hard-copy, but a faint image added to or inadvertantly left on the background security-paper image that is used as the background template for all Hawaiian COLBs. As for your statement about deformation being visible in the horizontal line transecting it, you must be seeing something I didn’t notice, but you didn’t bother to describe where to look. The line I looked at showed not a single pixel or deformation.
You wrote:
“And the double down on the folds….you agree but then compare fresh unfolded copies acquired by the White House to older, worn, folded copies? *sigh*”
Again you missed being accurate. I didn’t claim that the WH copies were folded, I said that IF they were folded, the result would very probably be visible, and no one has disputed or disproven that assumption. Any visible fold would be evidence that the PDF image was the result of a scan or photo of a real document, since you can’t fold a digital creation, though you could super-impose the appearance of a fold, or remove one. Both are possible but there is no reason to think that such alterations took place. The absence of folds presents an absence of evidence to disprove the assumption that the PDF is NOT a scan of a certified hard-copy document. If one agrees with that assumption/conclusion then one must wonder why that would be, and if there is a difference between the PDF and the Hawaiian copies.
No it doesn’t. There are officials in charge of such things. In this case, that is clearly the HI DOH. As they have consistently stood behind the document, which as you have admitted is self-authenticating from them, answer resolved – period. There is no concern here that any reasonable, rational person has in doubting them.
ALL evidence that exists in the matter backs up the very same info on the COLB and LFBC – the 2 contemporaneous birth records, info released from various files dug up on Obama’s parents, all official statements, etc.
NOTHING points to ANY other origin for his birth other than Honolulu, HI. You seem to pretend that this man didn’t spend most of his entire life here in school, college, work, state and federal political office, etc. He’s had a mortgage. He’s owned cars. He’s had a passport. He’s paid taxes. He has a marriage licence. Etc.
Just like any other citizen, he would have provided his proper documentation for each and every one of those situations. The paper trail by the authorities who are legally given access to such things would be huge. Just because YOU, some nameless citizen isn’t privy to any other person’s personal records doesn’t mean that all the authorizing bodies don’t have it and that well funded political operatives or reporters wouldn’t be able to dig it up.
No actual dirt has turned up on Obama. Neither HRC nor McCain’s campaign could find any merit to claims of his birth being anything other than what he’s always said it is and what his COLB clearly states. ALL real evidence that has turned up all supports every bit of data that we already were exposed to when his campaign released his COLB and all matches what he wrote about in his autobiographies.
NOT ONE single member of Congress is going to waste any time on this issue…and pretty much everyone in the GOP has displayed a visceral animosity towards Obama and would leap at any flimsy strand they could to smear him or take him down. Yet they all ignore all of the constant stream of harassing letters, calls, packages, faxes, etc. that Birthers have been incessently flooding their offices with over the past 3 years. That should tell you something – there is no value and no merit to the Birther claims. It is all pure bunk and wishful thinking by a bunch of unhappy people who don’t want to accept reality.
I’m sorry, but you claim that such a conspiracy would only be a small amount of people…yet all of Congress, all of HI DOH and 2 Governor administrations, all judges at all levels who hear the matter, all of his political opponents, etc…. ALL of them would have to be “in on it” if there was any “conspiracy” involved here at all.
Yet you wish to cling to NO existing evidence other than a forged BC from a convicted forger and internet rumours from malcontents to somehow believe that a pregnant teenager somehow could afford and would be allowed to take a late-term flight half-way across the world to a land she’s never been to, where her husband has another wife in order to quickly have a baby in a Mombassa hospital nowhere near where he even lived in Kenya and then rush back to make the baby look like he was born here… All this from a woman for where there is NO evidence that she even had a passport at that point in her life!
Absolutely NOTHING about that crazy scenario makes any sense at all and as others have shown, isn’t even possible in the timeframes of the birth registration record, is highly implausible in terms of time and cost and serves no logical purpose, as NBC only is a requirement for the office of POTUS. You really want to tell me that in 1961 that there was some plot afoot to install a future President? Wow, the level of conspiracy required for that kind of crazy long-term scenario just boggles the mind!
The summary big picture is simple and follows the old truism that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Each component of the Birther nonsense has its own flaws and problems and NONE of the evidence that exists supports any of their crazy claims – they ONLY point to the SAME conclusion – that the story of his birth is simply what he’s claimed it to be all along. Birtherism is completely ludicrous when you look at the big picture instead of myopically obsessing over irrelevant nits.
He’s the troll we had before, straight-shooter.
Not legally in 1961. Please stop wasting our time.
Arnash has declined to tell us where the goal posts are. That’s because Arnash has them on wheels. Amplifying on what G said, if there was any traction to this story, at least one Congressman would introduce an impeachment motion. If there was a real fact or two, there might even be a subcommittee hearing. There is nothing. There has never been anything. Instead, folks like Arnash are going to turn off independent voters from supporting a Republican, and we’ll have four more years of President Obama. I know that thrills some folks here (and I know Misha will say then we will have 8 years of Cory Booker), but for those of us who would like to elect someone else other than President Obama, I wish the racists would climb back under the rocks from whence they came and leave the rest of us alone.
[PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE TROLL. Doc.]
The significance of the smiling face~
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v77/arnash/StarLight_Galleries/?action=view¤t=smile.jpg
The appearance of an alteration to the cursive letter “A” in the stamped signature of Alvin Onaka -the Hawaiian State Registrar, seems to be something more that an odd coincidence. The alteration happens to have the appearance of a smiling face. It’s isn’t some stretch of the imagination to see it. When people see “the Virgin Mary” in a stain on a wall, it’s because it is a clearly visible image. But it isn’t a miracle, it is pure natural coincidence. But the smiling face appearance is not a natural phenomenon, and since it looks like it is the result of a very carefully place alteration, (like the number “3” upside-down), one must suspect that it was deliberately caused. Any shift left or right, up or down, of the “squiggle” that forms the face would not create a perfect smiling face. The odds against it being the result of something like dirt are astronomical. Therefore it is justified to speculate on what was behind its formation. Allow me to speculate.
Putting on my Sherlockian forensic profiler’s hat, I have a theory that might not be the truth, but makes perfect sense. It begins with the presumption that it was deliberately made. Accepting that proposition, leads to imagining a reason to do that. It can be assumed that it would only have been done by someone who had responsibility over the PDF image, not a child or an interloper. The facts behind putting such a thing on an important document must include that the person who did it a). had unlimited access to it, b). had a reason to do so, and c). thought it would not be noticed.
B. ~A reason to do so~. There is only one logical reason to do it, and that is that it was meant to be a secret fact that could be pointed to one day to prove that the handler had a hand in working on a very significant document, one with historical significance. Like a painter who, after working for hours or days or weeks on a work of art, finally adds his personal signature -written small in an unnoticeable spot down in a corner. That provides the artist with proof that it was their own creation, -no unrewarding anonymity. For someone to be similarly motivated in putting such an effect onto the PDF would require that they had a connection to it similar to that which an artist has to his painting. That would mean that he worked on it. What would that imply?
It would imply that he made changes to it, working “digital magic” to change something of great significance. He was responsible for the result for which he could never claim credit. No one would ever know that he was the master of the greatest forensic coup/ counterfeit successfully perpetrated since some pre-teen sisters created photos of themselves interacting with fairies in their backyard back near the beginning of the last century. Millions of people believed in them, a movie was made about it (John Goodman), and they didn’t admit the truth for 60 years. But who would want to have to wait that long to get credit for their handiwork? No one. He wanted, sometime sooner than that, to be able to share his accomplishment with some present or future significant other, but any claim couldn’t be believed unless something that no one else knew could be pointed to as proof.
How did he come up with the smiley face idea? His name also begins with the letter “A” and he picked up the trick while in a graphics class, or while doodling during endless hours of boredom while sitting in classes all day, -a perfect touch to serve as a unique covert signature.
C. ~it would not be noticed~ If you check the “Properties” of the PDF file, you’ll see that it was last “modified” at 4:09 AM on the morning it was posted to the internet. “Modified” translates to the last time it was saved after being altered. The “alterer” probably worked on it until the wee hours of the morning, and by then was like I get at that hour when editing photos for 8 hours. One’s mind isn’t too sharp and one forgets things, like turning off lights, locking doors, bringing ones keys to the bedroom in case of having to escape from a fire during the night. The alterer forgot to convert the document image to JPG by choosing to “Export” it, instead of “Save”ing it. He picked “Save”, and the program being used was set as default to Save in the PDF format, so it would have been saved, and then uploaded to the White House website in PDF format. Once it was already posted and downloaded by a significant number of people, it was too late to change it. Then when they clicked on it to open it, and it opened with Adobe Reader as a multi-layer PDF image with numerous peculiarities, the “cat was out of the bag” and the speculation and suspicions began as people were inspired to examine it very closely, greatly enlarged. Eventually someone noticed that which was expected to never be noticed.
But even if everything I’ve guess about is true, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans since there is no way to prove any of it.
“Fertile imagination” you say? For sure. But here’s my challenge; before rejecting it, come up with another reasonable explanation. Good luck, time to put on your thinking caps. http://obama–nation.com
arnash,
1. The Hawaii Department of Health has said on multiple times that this is. However, let’s take your self-authenticating ones. Hate to tell you this, but the COLB is self-authenticating as well. It’s also prima facie evidence of the facts of birth, including the location of birth. But the official statement authenticating Obama’s birth certificate: “I certify this is a true copy or abstract of the record on file in the Hawaii Department of Health. Alvin T. Onaka, Ph.D. State Registrar.” You can read the official statement right here: http://www.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/birth_certificate_9.jpg
2. Obama’s done everything humanly possible, and yet the Birthers are still not satisfied. To quell rumors, he took his birth certificate and scanned it in so that people could see it all around the country. All the Birthers did was call it a forgery, of course with absolutely no proof. They then said that it didn’t actually prove anything, despite repeated statements from the Hawaii Department of Health, and us proving that the State Department accepts it as proof of citizenship. Then they said that it didn’t matter anyways, because he’s ineligible despite nobody except for a few cranks ever hearing about the two-parent theory until 1 day before the election, and not hitting the mainstream of the birther movement until after the election.
Obama then allowed the press to come up to the Campaign Headquarters and touch the birth certificate, photograph it, and write about it. The Birthers decided that one of the most reputable fact-checking organizations is obviously in the Obama camp, because they actually would have to be in order for them to say that it’s not real. They then claim that this fact-checking organization is easily duped, or part of the conspiracy.
Obama writes to the Hawaii Department of Health in order to get the Director of the Hawaii Department of Health to issue a special exception to the policies in order for him to get his long-form birth certificate. He then presents this birth certificate to the Press, allow them to touch it. He allows them to touch the seal, see the signature, and do anything that they want to it. He furthermore passes out photocopies of the birth certificate to the press (where the white-background copies), and further scans it and releases it on the web for the entire world to see. He also releases an affidavit from the Hawaii Department of Health stating that she saw these copies be made, and that they are a true copy, just as the statement from Alvin T. Onaka which adorns the birth certificate. The Hawaii Department of Health then links to the birth certificate, saying that this is Barack Obama’s birth certificate from their very own website. What do the birthers do? Despite this document having a unimpeachable chain of custody, they call it a forgery. They then say that it doesn’t actually prove anything. And then they say that it doesn’t matter, because Obama’s ineligible no matter where he was born.
Obama’s done the same thing twice, and got the same result. Why should he ever believe that if he does the same thing over again, that he’ll get a different result? Einstein defined doing the same thing over and expecting a different result to be insanity.
Arnash….”On the other hand, perhaps I read the law that you pointed out, one from 1981. I don’t remember. But my point wasn’t to agree with your quote that such a birth certificate would show Hawaii as the place of birth, though my wording gave that impression. I merely meant to agree that one could obtain a Hawaiian BC even though not born in Hawaii. I assume that past or present, it would state the true birth location. That “fact” is what fuels the suspicion that the Obama LF COLB was tampered with, altered to change the location of birth.”
Unfortunately for that attempted train of logic your “fact” isn’t actually a fact in the first place. If, by your own admission, that “fact” is indeed what fuels the suspicion then the suspicion is being fuelled by a myth not a “fact”.
Prior to 1981 there was no facility for anyone born overseas to obtain a Hawaian birth certificate, not even one stating birth in Kenya. Therefore any vague notion of such a certificate from 1961 possibly providing some kind of a template to be tampered with in 2011 is therefore utter nonsense with no logical basis or credible practicality.
What we have reached here is a very simple and straightforward stage in this discussion so at this point I want to ask you a simple two pronged question. Just once I’d appreciate a simple straight honest answer from a birther without deflection, shooting off at a tangent or goalpost shifting. That question is…..do you understand the above and do you now agree with me on this one point?
No, not a fertile imagination (unless by fertilizer you refer to bovine excrement), but an attempt to prove that you’re smart by making really smart people waste their time answering your non-committal, ever-shifting position. It’s not time to put on my thinking cap. It’s time to put out the
DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS
sign.
Crickets! Maybe even cicadas this time of year.
A troll formally known as straight-shooter unable to give a straight answer. What a shock.
Actually, Jerome Corsi wrote that it looked a little like a butterfly. I wrote that they appeared to be — and I said I was just guessing — early attempts at editing the visual image, pushed aside and forgotten because they almost disappear when the group is not selected (highlighted).
The interesting part about the white dot groups — the 1st and 2nd image groups in the document, and one is nowhere near the other — is what they do NOT show: the normal scan artifact of a single color at each location, for under them is not white or transparent, or the rendering of the boundary pixel colors, but undisturbed “safety paper”. They also do not display those inevitable boundary pixels, where a scanner would see part safety paper and part white dot, resulting in pixels that are neither removed for scan optimization to a single-color image mask, nor colored just like the background.
Once you grasp the impossibility of a scanner seeing (1) an undisturbed color from the background under a foreground color on the same spot, and (2) never — not even once — imaging a boundary pixel at the edges of those white dots, you will look at the rest of the pdf with different eyes.
Indeed, why don’t you try it yourself: create a background of safety paper, or some such varied background, and create some sort of irregular blob of white on top, in PhotoShop or some such application, then print, scan, and optimize it to a pdf with the application of your choice. If you actually DO have an image mask layer containing only the white dots, turn them off and observe what is underneath: it sure won’t be your background layer, undisturbed. Then look at the edges where the extraction occurred: you will see pixels that match neither your white blob nor your background. Odds are, though, that you won’t see any extraction to a layer at all, especially if the white area is small like the white dot groups are.
A little more food for thought:
— Ask yourself why the NRO “refutation” document posted by Nathan Goulding displays as one layer containing many groups, while the White House document displays as one layer, containing one group, itself containing 9 image groups, all controlled by a clipping mask.
— Then ask yourself this: why does any scan/optimize procedure simply eliminate a large area of background complex color image around the edges? Note the clipping mask applied to the whole White House document, thus obscuring not only a couple of apparent hand-written dark gray characters on the right edge of the document, but also some of the white dots of 1st image group. No such phenomenon in the NRO document, because there is no clipping mask applied which obscures otherwise-visible information.
I had hoped the document presented by the White House was genuine. When I got annoyed enough by the turmoil to review it for myself, it took only a short time to realize that those white dot groups are impossible to generate from a scan/optimize process. Obama may have a birth certificate, but this is not it.
Tom Harrison,
This site will answer all your questions:
http://hawaii.gov/health/vital-records/obama.html
It is a good thing that we can see what the issuing body says about this- They confirm Obama’s LFBC is genuine and document the chain of custody.
Somehow you are getting obsessive over a mere internet image, not the real paper.
So do tell Tom,
Did you “test” (and I use the word in its widest possible sense) this hypothesis of yours using the same equipment as the original?
For a start, a Mac, using the Quartz library to do a scan?
Did you run a comparison of your “thesis” against OTHER pdf files from the White House site and see if THEY had comparable artifacts?
The answer is, well we know the answer, it’s NO and as such your thesis has as much value as every other Birfoon thesis, too whit, bugger all squared.
Do try better, yiur attemopts are getting particularly sad.
Not to mention you, as with all feckwit Birthers, have an inability to grasp the base fundamentals. It doesn’t matter one iota what you think or what your pathetic playing shows or does not show on a third hand copy of an image.
The ONLY document that matters is the hard copy ORIGINAL
The ONLY people who count when they say this is a BC is the DoH of Hawai’i.
Read the REAL Constitution, not the Birfoons seditous imaginary version, I’ll give you a hint…”Full Faith and Credit”.
Now off you go back to Birferstan and tell the rest of the sad children how you “wupped”: the Obot’s
You are absolutely correctt, Tom, the pdf is not a birth cetifiicate. The paper document issued by the State of Hawaii, however, is.
Similarly, if I scan a $100 bill and make a pdf, I can’t use that to buy groceries. I can, however use the actual $100 bill.
Gentlemen: would it really be your thinking that I have somehow not considered what you have mentioned, before this? I have been in the world of science and engineering all my adult life, and there the first duty is to attempt to disprove one’s own hypothesis.
Hawaii’s page does not take responsibility for the currently presented document, but instead refer readers to the White House. The rest of the page is description of Hawaii law regarding documents. You may take that argument to others, since I am only interested in what I observe directly, and Hawaii’s statements do not in any way affect that.
Since the document info can be overwritten, the origin and chain of processing is not useful. Pejorative descriptions and condescension are also not useful. What is useful is understanding about limitations of scanning technology: no scan is perfectly aligned to every pixel of the original, and no scanner has x-ray vision. The white dot groups on the White House document present data that is opposition to that, and it frankly does not matter which scanner, OS, or post-imaging software is claimed.
And let me rephrase, for those whose demand for literal language is more severe than mine: Obama may have a birth certificate verifying eligibility — and I certainly hope he does, given the Constitutional crisis that will necessarily follow any proof to the contrary — but the pdf file presented by the White House is not a scan of such an original document, but rather has been constructed to rather poorly appear like one.
As far as “whupping” goes, there is only one true loser in all of this turmoil: the people of the United States, who deserved more respect from the very beginning of this misadventure, when it would have been easily put to rest. Is it not at least sobering to consider all the energy and money spent on concealing documentation, and wonder what there is to hide?
Yes it is. As are the jpeg images and the photos taken by reporters who have seen the
paper document.
Even in your entirely fiictiional scenario, there would be no crisis whatsoever. The Constitution provides that Congress determines whether a presidennt-elect is eligible and they have done so. After that person takes office, there are provisions for impeachment. That would not be a constitutional crisis, since it is in fact provided for in the Constitution.
What on earth are you smoking? The HI DOH was about as clear as it can get in its statement, validating the documents and Obama’s birth in that state.Their very own news release says exactly that in about as explicit as they can get.
http://hawaii.gov/health/vital-records/News_Release_Birth_Certificate_042711.pdf
Here, just some of those crystal clear excerpts that you seem to be willfully ignoring:
It is my contention that you have not considered it,,, in a rational, unbiased, and informed manner. It is my contention that you do not have the expertise that you purport. The reason for that contention is that you display a complete ignorance of the workings of imaging technology. The things you claim pixels cannot do, for instance, are done every day. The things you say are not possible were not possible 20 years ago, but imaging technology has advanced considerably in that 20 years.
Everyone reading your puerile claims on a computer screen is in the world of science and engineering. The Janitor who cleans the ducts in my server room is in the world of science and engineering.
Unless you are a certified and credentialed forensics expert, which you are not, you don’t have a leg to stand on. If you were a forensics expert you would realize that the pdf simply isn’t relevant, period. That fact that you spend so much time belaboring pixels in a pdf simply shows that you don’t have a clue.
What part of
are you failing to grasp?
Tom…
Official statement from the Hawaii Department of Health: “I certify this is a true copy or abstract of the record on file in the Hawaii Department of Health. Alvin T. Onaka, Ph.D. State Registrar.”
You can read the statement here: http://www.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/birth_certificate_9.jpg
(shrug) Then we disagree. I would be happy to entertain your demonstration of how to obtain the two white dot groups from an image file, such as would be the result of a scan of a paper document, in refutation of my position. I have not yet seen such a demonstration, only an assertion. Have a nice jpg image file prepared? Or even a BMP? Remember now: it must be printed, then scanned and optimized, yielding similar image mask results.
That, sir, does remain to be seen.
Having never smoked anything — and certainly not that crystal stuff — I can only wonder at what you might think that would be. However, to the point: Hawaii may assert all day long that they have delivered to the White House a valid birth certificate, but I have never debated that fact. What I assert is that my analysis of the pdf document in question shows that it is not the scan of any paper document, but a created collection of images. To that assertion, Hawaii has not spoken. Indeed, how can they, given that their custody of such a paper transmission has ended?
Your definition of rational, unbiased, informed, and expert analysis then depends on agreeing with you? That is at best unpersuasive. Pixels contain information, but not layered information. Nor do the raw image files that contain that information, either 20 years ago or today. An undisturbed background image covered by foreground white pixel groups indicates construction not scanning. The absence of any boundary dithering because of inevitable scan alignment mismatch is frosting on that cake, and the presence of a clipping mask on the whole document, concealing parts of the image from view, is the decoration.
Besides, my scanners aren’t that old, even if the prevailing image file formats are, but not even the newest one has x-ray vision to see underneath the surface color.
LOL! Cute, though hardly useful. My history was written about in the WND article; I won’t bore you with repetition except to say that although I do take care of my currently one-man office — thus, the janitor — my only career activity since my freshman summer in 1971, when I worked as a management trainee for the computer operations center of US Nat’l Bank of Oregon, until today, has been computing and electronics, designing software and hardware solutions, and consulting. I’ve used Illustrator since it was on 5.25″ floppy disks, with my latest project with it being graphic overlays for a video display control product. (shrug) That’s surely enough time-in-grade to look at something as simple as this image file, or does one need a PhD in Political Apologetics to satisfy you?
Fascinating, if somewhat circular, argument. I am not a paper document analyst, but have never claimed to be one. Indeed, I was asked by one party to accompany a team to Hawaii to examine the paper document in the archives, and I declined for precisely that reason: not my field. I was further asked to examine other image files for content issues, and again declined, because there was no pixel artifact issue.
Let me repeat for you: I have not said that Obama does not have a birth certificate, I have said that the pdf is not a scan of such a document, because the artifacts preclude that origin.
What part of my claim — that the pdf does not represent a scan of a paper document — have you missed? Let’s not be ships passing in the night. No amount of claims that Obama has a birth certificate affect my analysis, nor have I extended my claim to claims about whether or not he has one. I have stated that the White House behavior is at best disrespectful, if this is some sort of extended joke. But do try to argue on point. A demonstration with a proper, scientifically-repeatable starting point — like a jpg image, for example — would be nice.
Now, I have actual work to do, so I’ll just have to make do with an occasional response, and you can make of that what you wish. It has been, at least, entertaining.
Yes, you have asserted that. You haven’t proven it though. Not a shred of proof. Zero, zip, nada.
And what part have you missed of the only thing that matters is that physical paper document and the authenticating agency vouching for it?
You are wasting time tilting at windmills arguing about meaningless scans of a document, when the actual source document has been validated and attested to. End of Story.
The only person playing meaningless games here is you. Obviously, you have some pre-conceived personal bias issues that drive your motivations to live in denial and see only what you want to see and pretend away everything else.
Let us suppose for just a minute that what you suggest here is what actually happened: 1) the Hawai’ian DoH supplied a legitimate, certified copy of the LFBC to the President, exactly as they claim, and that inspite of being in possession of that legitimate, ceritfied copy of the LFBC, the President chose to have someone create a fake LFBC to show the public.
The first obvious question is what on earth would be the point? But lets ignore that question, because that question is itself vulnerable to an unfounded objection from the point of view of ‘incredibility’ (even though I can’t imagine why he would do it, doesn’t mean he didn’t have reason to do it).
But let us not forget that the important thing about the Birth Certificate is NOT the form of the certificate, or the title used on the form (‘Certificate’ v ‘Certification’), or whether or not the images shown to the public are JPEGs or PDFs or layered or created on a Mac or a Windows PC or Brother Multifunction Printer or anything what-so-ever to do with the physical presentation.
The important thing about the Birth Certificate is the INFORMATION documented on that Birth Certificate and its relationship to the Constitutional eligibility of the individual named on that Certificate. Specifically, the date of birth and the place of birth are the ONLY about the document that have any relevance to anything what-so-ever. End of Story. Period.
So it doesn’t matter whether or not the PDF is a mash-up or not, (though I repeat it makes no sense what-so-ever for such a fake to exist), the FACTS reported on the image are absolutely, 100%, CONSISTENT with every statement ever made by any Hawai’ian spokesperson on the matter, whether official or informal or sworn, by the President himself, and by the original Birth Certificate released before the 2008 election.
It just makes no sense to deconstruct an image pixel by pixel when process of the creation of that image is trivially, moronically, irrelevant.
Tom
do yiu have an inability to read anythiong that does not conform to yiur value free worldview?
Not to mention you, as with all feckwit Birthers, have an inability to grasp the base fundamentals. It doesn’t matter one iota what you think or what your pathetic playing shows or does not show on a third hand copy of an image.
The ONLY document that matters is the hard copy ORIGINAL</strong?
The ONLY people who count when they say this is a BC is the DoH of Hawai’i.
Read the REAL Constitution, not the Birfoons seditous imaginary version, I’ll give you a hint…”Full Faith and Credit”.</blockquote
That’s easy. Hawaii DOH officials look at the pdf document which the White House posted online and compare it to the original document in the archives. Both documents contain the same information, so Hawaii DOH provides a link to the pdf document, accompanied by this statement:
“On April 27, 2011 President Barack Obama posted a certified copy of his original Certificate of Live Birth.”
The obvious conclusion – indeed, the only rational conclusion – is that the copy posted by the White House is identical to the original.
The problem with your comment is that it is your opinion about how scanning and optimization works, rather than what scanning and optimization really does.
To prevent any future embarrassment, watch this short video. There is no charge for admission, but apologies are gladly accepted.
http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2011/08/how-optimization-creates-layers-video/
Orrrrr………
An undisturbed background image covered by foreground white pixel groups indicates the use of adaptive optimization.
Adaptive optimization removes data from a file in order to conserve file size. The details of the missing date are extrapolated from the remaining data, which gives a good analog approximation of the image, but at a much reduced file size. The same principle is used whether it’s a PDF or a JPEG (not the same process but the same principle). IN the case of the PDF this process shows up as multiple objects in the “page”, which Illustrator renders as “layers”, because that’s what Illustrator does with objects in PDFs.
The effect of some individual pixels looking as if they’d been constructed is exactly because they have been. The process extrapolates the missing pixels, making a “best guess” of what they should have looked like. The reason they’re not exact pixels is because they don’t have to be. Nobody but a fool would look at a jpg or a pdf image of a tree and say “that’s not a tree, because that one pixel there is wrong”. The same with the PDF of the LFBC. We expect some pixels to be not exact because we know it was optimized. We expect it to be optimized. Nobody in their right mind would send it out without it being optimized. The image as a whole is still a faithful reproduction of the document it was scanned from. Your uneducated and non-professional whining notwithstanding.
I’m sorry, how many times did you say you’ve used Illustrator? Have you used up your trial period yet on the free version?
Birthers only use pirated software because they are Taxed Enough Already, and stupid liberals make computers and software in Marxist California and Mooslim Washington State, and Al Gore was on the board at Apple, so they stick it to the Man.
Oh, yeah, and Acorn!
Scientist: I have witnessed the impossible artifacts regarding the white dots (more on that below), certainly enough to warrant an actual forensic examination of the original. I have noted the full-page clipping mask, which obscures data. I have suggested that others — both here and elsewhere — could help me see your point of view by providing an flat image file — a jpg, perhaps — constructed like the purported birth certificate (that is, dark form and characters on top of a variegated background which could be fed through image optimization and would yield similar results, and none is forthcoming. I’ve noted with great amusement a often-cited YouTube video where the narrator claims to have gotten the same “layer” result from his own optimization of the White House document, and gone through the video frame by frame to see that what he actually ended up with was a whole bunch of Path elements — lines, ’cause they’re so much easier to create and replicate without causing any visual changes to occur, by simply not giving them either stroke or fill — and just one image layer, containing the whole document. Similar to the result I got doing the same thing, except my runs only obtained a few line elements, while he seemed to get dozens. And yet, you say I’ve proven nothing? Fascinating threshold of blind acceptance you have, given your self-ascribed moniker.
G: With the characteristics of this pdf, the years of litigation defending the concealment of personal records, the several false documents presented to attempt to take searchers off the scent, and the propensity of politicians to bend the truth — I intend that to be a non-partisan accusation — to satisfy a narrative and defend a warped view of national interest, you still do not grasp the need to “trust but verify”, and claim that only one side displays personal bias? A mirror would be useful.
Keith: Same comments as to G, adding that since this pdf is not a scan of an original document, but as assembly of documents shoddily made to look like one, the deconstruction of the image serves the purpose of forcing the debate back to the real issue: forensic analysis of the original document in the Hawaii archives, if there is one, before a masked copy onto safety paper and rescanning (claimed but not yet proven).
Bovril: LOL! “Value-free”? How novel a description! I do, all the time, read and ponder things I do not agree with; why else do you think I’m posting here? Indeed, as with many people, my most profound changes of opinion come while being in the middle of intense defense of the opposite view. But, sir, how is it you have forgotten the fundamental principle of a free people governed by their consent: challenge authority, never blindly accept. You will note, if you read, that I do not parrot any other analysts’ views regarding the White House document: I don’t stand in defense of that which I cannot demonstrate myself. Is that not a value worth living with?
Rickey: Blind trust in politicians is not a virtue. The pdf is not a scan, demonstrated by the impossible artifacts, therefore the statements in defense of it are meaningless.
Dr. Conspiracy: LOL! I watched that video before I even began to look at the document myself. If you do not see the reasons to laugh at the methods he used, I am astounded. Let’s begin with the most obvious: white background, far too large a “halo” around items claimed to be layer-extracted, most of the document NOT extracted to a mask layer, and contextually organized “optimization”, when optimization doesn’t care on bit about the human-connectedness of various layer parts.
Daniel: Perhaps a trip back to the Adobe manual would help. Or perhaps you can point me to a nice tutorial demonstrating why the optimization process, intended to REDUCE file size, would produce a mask layer without reducing complexity of the color layer. In the meantime, before you run off and do that, note that the options set for optimization are global, and the white dot groups demonstrate far different background processing features than the other assembled artifacts in the document: some of what you say regarding the white dots is simply disproved by the other mask coverings.
About Illustrator: my latest copy — I’ve not upgraded recently — is CS3. I did try a trial of CS5, but only to verify that there were no serious screen differences, because I’ve recommended publicly that people download a copy to look at the document for themselves, and I included screen-shots of CS3 to help them do that. My first Illustrator was “Windows Version”, on 5.25″ floppy disks, purchased retail in the 80’s (’88, perhaps?). But what does that have to do with artifacts created outside of Illustrator, other than to make an unsupportable accusation?
obsolete: How very humorous. And here I thought it was the left who coined the phrase “stick it to the man”. Oh, that’s right: the left has taken to calling “Tea Party” members “terrorists”. Doesn’t that turn of attributes make you dizzy?
I do have a couple of Macs, though older purchased for early networking and conversion purposes, and I don’t care who’s on the board — that’s their business. Gee, I even have some Marxist friends, though we have far more civil debates than were found here.
As a side note: I was offered a pirated copy of CS5 — I have no idea whether he was a Marxist, and turned the offer down flatly. After years of counseling my own customers to avoid the liability of such theft, and the full expectation that God will judge, it’s easy to say no, actually.
All: Nice pejoratives, though. It’s always humorous to be labeled in such a cavalier manner by people with whom I have made the attempt to have civil debate and exchange of opinions. But again, I actually work, so I’m back to it. Thanks to all for passing me more arguments with which to hone and improve my own; it was very instructive to see how little ammunition there is.
No worries there, bro.
Well if you don’t know much, like Tom, write lots.
Sorry Tom, but I’ve wasted enough time on you, so I’m not going to do any more of your homework for you. You’re not going to ever admit you don’t know what you’re talking about, but since myself and several others have already shown that you don’t, that’s really the important thing.
When you get actual credentials as a forensic document examiner, as opposed to a “guy who says he uses illustrator”, you be sure to come back here and let us know all about it, OK?
Legitimate scientists tend to avoid saying “impossible”. In real science, we can only reject the null hypothesis at a given level of probability. We can say something has a less than 5% or less than 1% chance, but we cannot say impossible or 0% chance. The famous example of the postulate that “all swans are white” was accepted as true for centuries until black swans were seen in Australia.
You assert that white dots are “impossible”, yet you provide no emipirical evidence whatsoever to support your assertion. How many typed documents scanned into pdfs have you examined? How many different types of scanner software, hardware, and methodologies have you tested before making such a categorical assertion? What published literature have you cited?
A real scientist would do all that and more and present the data in a way that others could examine it and critique it. Even then, he/she would be leery of concluding “impossible”. I can only conclude that you are no scientiist.
What does Marxism have to do with software piracy? is there actual data as to the political views of the sellers and users of pirated software? Do you even know what the scientifiic method is and the requirement that assertions be tested empirically?
Sef: It is a good thing, is it not, to finally be shorn of opinion and error, and see the truth plainly. We all await our turn to be corrected.
Daniel: You have shown me tortured paths littered with leaps of logic, but not a demonstration, as I have requested, of a scan image of similar construction that will yield optimization results displaying the same mix of artifacts found in the White House offering. Such a simple thing, one would expect, from those claiming such mastery over the process. I have not found it, nor has anyone here or elsewhere pointed me to it. Happy to be convinced, for I seek answers, not propaganda. Unhappily, no such path has come from this group.
Scientist: The white dots are impossible as the result of scan/optimization because: no boundary pixels as evidence of a scan, no presence of disturbed background (let’s be clear here: the other image masks in the document display quite different results). One does not need to consult literature to know that a color scan always generates such artifacts at significant color boundaries, one need only do lots of color scanning. Have fun with the word play, if you like, but this is like a shaken box of parts becoming a pocket watch, set to the correct time — for reasons already cited. What are those gray symbols in the right margin made invisible by the clipping mask, anyway?
Did you not follow the thread, to read that “obsolete” referenced avoidance of Marxists as a trait of birthers, and then chastise me for a tongue-in-cheek reference to his humorous pejorative description, going so far as suggesting it was a violation of the scientific method? LOL!
So, “Scientist”, where’s your reproducible experimental construction of this issue? Shall we see it presented?
At least when I presented my case for the white dots on WND, I actually provided a way for people to observe the phenomenon for themselves instead of taking my word on it. It was you who made the unsupportable assertion that the White House pdf is necessarily a scan of an actual authentic birth certificate (8/8; 12:45pm), and that is certainly not a scientific statement — you have no such experimental knowledge — let alone a probable one, given the artifacts in the pdf.
Oh, I really must work now. So much fun, though.
Besides you who says so? What EMPIRICAL DATA do you have to support this? I need DATA. You are the King of Assertions, but don’t even make a Pawn of Empirical Data. “Becayse I say so” mught work with small children, but not with scientiists.
So, you are the first to say so? Then why not submit your discovery to a peer-reviewed journal? Important discoveries such as yours shouldn’t be hidden away on obscure blogs (sorry, Doc, but this place, wonderful as it is, does not qualify as a peer-reviewed E-publication in image science).
Please. First you claim “Hawaii has not spoken” and then you say not to trust what has been said.
Here is what I know, Both a Republican governor of Hawaii and a Democratic governor of Hawaii have confirmed that Obama was born there. Hawaii DOH has attested to the fact that they made two copies of Obama’s original birth certificate in April, certified them and handed them to Obama’s attorney. The White House subsequently showed one of the certified copies to reporters, and Savannah Guthrie of NBC News took a photo of it. Photocopies were made and handed out to the reporters who were present. A PDF of the birth certificate was then posted on the White House website. Hawaii DOH then took a look at the PDF and placed a link to it on the DOH website. If there was any evidence of tampering, Hawaii would not have linked to the PDF.
Now, I don’t care if the PDF was created pixel-by-pixel or even if it was made from a hand-drawn copy. All that matters is that it obviously and irrefutably contains the same relevant information as the original which is held by Hawaii DOH – namely, that Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, You can spin it anyway you please with your unscientific, unsubstantiated assertions, but everything you have said about this is inconsequential.
One does not need to consult literature to become a marine biologist, one need only catch lots of fish.
Does that sound right to you too?
Sorry Tom, you’re trying to convince us that not only have you found evidence of tampering that all the real experts have missed, but that you’re better than the experts because you haven’t got the education or experience.
It’s a typical ploy from someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but is desperate to have people think he does.
The only people you could possibly convince are weakminded birthers…. and you’re pretty far back in line of faux experts in that group
Since he was offering a pirated copy, he may be a Marxist? Oh the irony:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20084409-245/tea-party-leader-arrested-on-piracy-charges/
Good job in turning it down, no matter who it was from, pirated software is stealing. .
When you actually scan a birth-certificate-like document using the Mac software indicated in the White House PDF properties, wake me up. Until then, you’re just flouting your ignorance and I’m not interested.
I really have no idea what you are talking about here. You show your obvious pre-conceived biases with these statements, showing that you just swallow whatever rumors you are sold from certain sources without checking into them.
1. There have been no efforts to “conceal” any documents. Birthers have attempted a bunch of frivolous lawsuits without merit, that is all. Obama released his COLB, which is the official HI BC early on in his campaign. Nobody else running in such an election up to that point had ever done that. Any other records you might be referring to are simply protected by the same privacy laws that protect all of our info and are not something that he’s required to provide to the public at all. There simply is no “concealment” going on. If you’ve fallen for that bogus claim that he’s spent “millions” or whatever defending things, then you have simply been duped.
2. What false documents are you talking about? The only false documents are several fake foreign BCs that Birthers have fallen for and promoted. Blame them.
3. You need to stop being such a hypocrite and apply your sanctimonious “trust but verify” to all your birther rumor sources. That is where there is absolutely no credible evidence that holds up. Yet you gullibly buy into it without question. You do an awful lot of projection…maybe that is why you don’t feel you need to hold a mirror up to yourself; you already perceive the rest of the world as you behave. How sad.
4. “The propensity for politicians to bend the truth”… wow… nice meaningless generalization to use as a weak excuse to cover for why you make up conclusions to support your own petty pre-conceived biases instead of actually have any factual evidence to back them up. How lazy. Hey, most humans tend to “bend the truth”. BFD. Such braod brush generalizations are really useless unless you have direct and concrete examples that connect directly to a specific individual. Without that, you are just doing baseless mudslinging to glibly discount anyone you don’t agree with. It only shows how hollow your arguments are and makes you look like nothing but a brainwashed tool.
Well said, G.
The fact is Obama has now released two certified copies of his birth certificate, which is two more than any other President has done.
Birthers such as Tom Harrison can’t come to grips with the fact that personal records are, well, personal. We’re not entitled to see them. I personally would have loved to have seen John McCain’s military records, and in particular his fitness reports. It struck me as highly unusual that he reached the rank of Captain but was never given a sea command. I suspect that the Navy had reservations about his temperament and judgment. However, I wouldn’t go so far as to accuse him of concealing anything, because those records are privileged. As long as he is alive, nobody outside of the military has the right to see McCain’s records other than McCain himself.
Hey, you’re the one who makes a claim of “impossible.” Either that claim is well-founded or it is frivolous. If you haven’t done the experiment yourself with the same software the White House used, then your claim is frivolous. It requires no response.
Now Zatkovich has credentials as an expert, so just him saying something requires a response. When he said that he knew of no optimization process that separated a PDF into layers, a response was required, and an example of PDF optimization creating layers was presented.
When you say something is “impossible” it carries no weight.