Time anomalies in the White House long form PDF

Obama Conspiracy Theories original research

I have seen various reports on the Internet that there are two versions of the White House-issued PDF version of the President’s long-form birth certificate: an original and an unexplained replacement. I am skeptical about these claims because I haven’t seen any good evidence that two versions from the White House really exist.

However, there is one difference that may appear and that I address in this article.

If one uses Adobe Acrobat Reader (or full Acrobat) to display the PDF document properties, a dialog such as the one following appears showing that the file was created at 12:09:24 PM on April 27, 2011.

image

When we open the PDF with a text editor, the only readily-visible occurrence of the string “2011” is this:

image

Adding some punctuation to the date, we get:  2011-04-27 12:09:24 Z00.

According to the PDF standard Page 88 what follows the Z is the time zone.

Some reporters see different dates when they examine the properties of purported White House PDF files using other software. In particular one from the US Pacific Time Zone saw a time of 04:09:24 AM using a Windows XP properties dialog (I’m not exactly sure the software involved).

The time zone 00 is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC1) ,  what some may know as Greenwich Mean Time. It appears that the Quartz PDFContext software used by the White House does not set the local time zone in the file to the correct value of eastern US time. I know other PDF software has this same limitation, such as Image2PDF. Adobe Acrobat Distiller does set the time zone.

So the Adobe software displays the file date as-is: 12:09:24 PM but the “local time” for this on the west coast is –8 hours (in the summer), or 04:09:24 AM.

That is, depending on the software used, a White House PDF may appear to have been created at different times, but this doesn’t mean that the files are different, only that different software in different time zones can display different results.

To be sure a file has changed, use a cryptographic hash function.


1UTC is not a typo. The recognized abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is based on a hybrid English-French version of the phrase.

About Dr. Conspiracy

I'm not a real doctor, but I have a master's degree.
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10 Responses to Time anomalies in the White House long form PDF

  1. Keith says:

    The time zone 00 is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC1) , what some may know as Greenwich Mean Time.

    UTC is not a typo. The recognized abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is based on a hybrid English-French version of the phrase.

    Some folks ‘may know’ UTC as GMT, but they are NOT the same thing. GMT is clock time, UTC is coordinated time. They may actually differ by several seconds (IIRC).

  2. Obsolete says:

    Did Dr. Polland create all of these?
    (I can’t wait to ignore his latest nonsense!)
    😉

  3. Bovril says:

    The Z is also from the military for “Zulu Time” which is GMT

  4. Yeah, I struggled how to write that so that it was literally correct without trying to explain the difference. The Wikipedia link I provided has all that stuff in it, though.

    Keith: Some folks may know’ UTC as GMT, but they are NOT the same thing. GMT is clock time, UTC is coordinated time. They may actually differ by several seconds (IIRC).

  5. No, I don’t think Polland is into faking long forms yet.

    Obsolete: Did Dr. Polland create all of these?

  6. G says:

    I’m just waiting for him to claim he really invented Facebook and the Internet… heck, maybe he’ll claim he was the Navy Seal that shot Bin Laden, despite Obama desperately trying to stop him from taking action…

    Dr. Conspiracy: No, I don’t think Polland is into faking long forms yet.

  7. Odius Prime says:

    File metadata should not be considered reliable.

    View and save this PDF document. The red lines were added to show that it has been altered. I don’t want anyone to think that this is the original. If the red lines had not been added it could easily be believed to be an original.

    http://www.scribd.com/doc/62173067/Birth-Certificate-Long-Form-2

    The file will be removed shortly. Download it and compare to your analysis.

  8. Sef says:

    Odius Prime:
    File metadata should not be considered reliable.

    View and save this PDF document. The red lines were added to show that it has been altered. I don’t want anyone to think that this is the original. If the red lines had not been added it could easily be believed to be an original.

    http://www.scribd.com/doc/62173067/Birth-Certificate-Long-Form-2

    The file will be removed shortly. Download it and compare to your analysis.

    That’s why higher end Canon DSLRs can record a cryptographic checksum in the RAW file for later proof of originality.

  9. Dr. Kenneth Noisewater (Bob Ross) says:

    G: I’m just waiting for him to claim he really invented Facebook and the Internet… heck, maybe he’ll claim he was the Navy Seal that shot Bin Laden, despite Obama desperately trying to stop him from taking action…

    There used to be a guy on my gaming forums until I banned him that was like that. He claimed to have invented pretty much everything for the last 10 years and that everything was stolen from him. Supposedly he had a long 4 hour chat with a high level microsoft executive over xbox live. He recorded it but lost the tapes, and also he supposedly told the guy each and every idea he had. It was hillarious because he claimed to create the story for Mass Effect and made all these predicitions for the next game in the series. When 2 came out we pointed out his claims didn’t even match the storyline so he claims they were saving it for Mass Effect 3. The guy was loopy. Supposedly created the story for Avatar, Windows XP, Iron Man, Fallout, etc.

  10. Obsolete says:

    I would have banned him for creating a lot of crap.

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