I would like to follow up to my comment and your response from yesterday. I copied part of two of your comments (without naming you) on Obama Conspiracy Theories. I edited as follows:
I shortened two comments by someone at FREEP (leaving out judgmental and speculative parts) to ask anyone with expertise if this is true:
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The BW image used by the WH matches the current posted image at Snopes …
… the WH … use[d] a BW image that is clearly just an Explorer browser screen print (the headers and footers formats are default Explorer settings) instead of fresh new scan and photos of the actual COLB.
This response followed:
Epectitus August 10, 2011 at 11:11 am (Quote) #
charo:
Assuming we are referring to the WHitehouse release of the LFBC on April 27, 2011.
1. The BW image of the COLB posted on tthe Whitenouse web site is a browser print of an image stored on the Snopes server. It is not a print of any image stored on Ron Polland’s photobucket account.
2. The BW image of the LFBC handed out in packets to the press in attendance is a photocopy of one of the two certified copies sent from Hawaii.
3. The high resolution BW Associated Press scan is a scan of one of the BW photocopies handed out in the press packets.
4. The color PDF is direct (optimized) scan from one of the two certified copies sent from Hawaii.
5. The Savannah Guthrie photographs are of one of the two certified copies sent from Hawaii.
Ron P. posted this later:
Dr. Ron Polland August 11, 2011 at 1:03 am (Quote) #
Epectitus: Assuming we are referring to the WHitehouse release of the LFBC on April 27, 2011.
1. The BW image of the COLB posted on the Whitenouse web site is a browser print of an image stored on the Snopes server. It is not a print of any image stored on Ron Polland’s photobucket account.
Buzz. WRONG!
That is MY image on THEIR server. Snopes has been using my image since June 2008, and it makes no difference where it was on the day the WH copied it (April 25). It is still my image,
Snopes has always used my image, either from their server or from my Photobucket account and the direct to my image on Photobucket has never been changed.
Only the image itself has been changed.
More than 5,900 views to my forged image came from Snopes on April 27, and the people posting that link all thought that it went to a copy of Obama’s “genuine COLB scan.”
I can prove that Snopes continued to use my image and only my image from June 22, 2008 until Aug 1, 2011.
Sometime between Aug 1 and Aug 3, however, they resampled and resaved the image. Although it looks the same, and the luminance values are the same, the chrominance values are higher because of chroma subsampling. Before the change both tables had nearly the same quality values. The file size was also bumped up to 113k and the DPI had not been set.
I saved the previous image at 44% quality using IrfanView, It is 1024 x 1000 pixels, @300 DPI, 33,634 color count, approx. 110k, and has the same metadata found in the Kos and Factcheck images (the Kos came from a Factcheck-sized image).
FYI: I imported the metadata from the Kos image into my image using ExifTool after saving it.
The current forgery clone with the tilting “prima facie” statement is a replacement I put in its place last year to see if anyone would notice the “obvious flaw.”
Nobody did. Now if I knew that the WH would be using a b&w copy of my previous image in the future, I would have left it alone.
After April 27th, I sent out a number of Twitter feeds alerting people to the swap I had made.
The bottom line is still that the WH used a COLB image they found on Snopes to make copies and distribute it to the press, saying that it is Obama’s Certification of Live Birth, when, in fact, it was the image I made.
Either way you slice it, they did not have any scan images to submit, nor a real COLB to copy – yet, they claimed to have submitted a scan they made of Obama’s actual COLB they also claimed to have received in June 2008, copied, and then pasted on Fight The Smears.
Lying about it will not change the reality of it. Get used to it.
Dr. C. responded as follows:
Dr. Conspiracy August 11, 2011 at 10:16 am (Quote) #
While it is within the realm of possibility that a fake COLB image created by Ron Polland got copied and circulated around the Internet and even ended up on the Snopes.com web site and from there to the White House web site, that doesn’t imply that no original COLB exists. It would always be easier for some White House functionary to get an image off the Internet than to figure out who has a physical document, go through the hassle of getting it and then scanning it.
Certainly Ron Polland didn’t create the high-resolution color images released by the Obama campaign in June of 2008
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I was expecting Dr. C. to tear apart all aspects of Ron P’s newest statements with technical reasons and claim them rubbish. What Dr. C. did was to say that even if it were true (the COLB is Polarik’s fake), the reason is it was too much bother for a staffer to find the original COLB and scan it. There are many commenters at OCT who appear to have the kind of expertise to take apart Pollard’ comment point by point. So far, no one has, except for a couple of insults. They could be just ignoring him, but that is VERY difficult to believe because they normally can’t resist that kind of thing. There could be a flurry of them later.
My comments are based on direct analysis of the forged image from Pollards photobucket site that WND linked and claimed was the the image or copy of the image that used to be on the Snopes website. I compared that with a download I took off the WH website on April 27th. It is obviously not the same image. Using Photoshop and overlaying the images shows this in a matter of minutes. The black and white house image seems consistent with the Daily KOS ‘scan’. But as very low resolution black and white image it is hard to make an absolute declaration of such.
Again, is it not very very strange that a screen print of an image on Snopes is used? Supposedly someone has that real 2007 COLB. Or do they? Once it was used to forge a passport record was it discarded?
I have to laugh at the ‘optimized’ pdf explanation. At least they did not claim it was due to the use of OCR. I guess that attempt has finally fallen its face. An optimize step may create a file with some of the characteristics but nothing like this file. Experts have shot the optimized and OCR theory so full of holes these is nothing left that explains the file other than it was manufactured digitally.
An optimized file would have created a replicated background image after extracting the text. This file has the entire background image still in it. That is NOT optimized. That is cut and paste.