Jenny Warburg for The New York Times
PEN PAL Using a video spectral comparator, Emily J. Will can tell if writing that looks uniform to the naked eye came from more than one pen.
Posted on 09/22/2004 10:40:06 PM PDT by neverdem
THE firestorm over the memos that figured in the CBS News report on President Bush's National Guard record featured a parade of expert document examiners who weighed in on font types, proportional spacing and superscripts. That kind of scrutiny is common enough that those who perform it have an occupational name: questioned-document examiners.
Ordinarily, document examiners' cases are far more mundane than the CBS case. Examiners are hired by lawyers, police departments and individuals to analyze contested wills, determine whether medical or insurance records have been altered and authenticate handwriting and signatures in letters and contracts.
Document examination, like virtually every other line of work these days, has been fundamentally changed by computing. But many in the field say that digital technology has created nearly as many problems for them as it has solved.
"For us, the computer has been both a blessing and a nightmare," said William Flynn, a Phoenix-based questioned-document examiner with 36 years' experience. "With the imaging software and hardware packages available today, we can make much more precise measurements of a document's characteristics than we could in the past. But the downside is that computers make it much easier to make convincing forgeries."
The document forger's job has been made much simpler with the help of image-editing programs like Adobe Photoshop. Documents created in a word-processing program can be cleaned up, blurred, resized, or otherwise manipulated using Photoshop's arsenal of drawing and painting tools, special effects and filters. A forger can electronically copy a signature from an authentic document, tweak it in Photoshop and then paste it into a new document. To the untrained eye, the fake composite is often indistinguishable from the genuine article.
But document examiners have several counterweapons that can help detect sophisticated digital cut-and-paste forgeries. One is a digital image analyzer, a high-resolution digital microscope connected to a computer with image-analysis software that can distinguish and measure microscopic characteristics of the document - everything from the wicking qualities of the ink to pen pressure.
A binocular or stereo microscope is routinely used to examine questioned documents, with a still or video camera connected to a third viewing tube to capture images. Most handwriting and signature analysis is done using the stereo microscope, which gives examiners a three-dimensional view of details such as ink striations and pen movement.
"I've had people say to me, 'This looks like my signature, but I don't remember signing this document,' " said Sandra Homewood, a San Diego-based document examiner who has been in private practice since 1991. "And sometimes after I look at it through the stereo microscope, I'll tell them, 'Actually, this isn't your signature.' "
Another favorite device of the document examiner is the video spectral comparator, a digital imaging system that subjects documents to a wide variety of wavelengths, from infrared through ultraviolet. The device is particularly useful in cases where information in a document has been written over, crossed out or typed over. When a document is subjected to a range of infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths, some inks will become visible while others will seem to disappear, based on differences in chemical formulation.
"A lot of cases we get involve legitimate documents that were altered it some way after the fact, like a medical record," Mr. Flynn said. "Somebody dies in a hospital or nursing home, and then someone on the staff goes back and makes additions or changes to the medical chart to make it appear they've given certain treatments." With the spectral comparator, he said, "even if a chart was written with a black ballpoint pen and someone alters it with another black ballpoint pen, you can almost always tell that the two inks are different."
Contested wills, the bread and butter of many professional document examiners, are frequently subjected to spectral analysis. One common fraud involving wills is page substitution, in which one or more bogus pages are inserted into an otherwise legitimate will containing the decedent's authentic signature. Even if all the type fonts in the document seem to match, a spectral analysis may reveal that different printers produced different pages in the will, evidence that the document wasn't produced in a single sitting.
Many cases of altered medical or insurance records have been cracked with the help of an electrostatic detection apparatus, a device that can detect indented impressions left from writing on an overlying page. The apparatus consists of a vacuum unit topped by a porous metal plate. The document is placed on the plate and covered with a thin sheet of protective plastic film. The vacuum unit is activated, pulling the document down tightly against the metal plate, and an electrostatic charge is applied. Then a special toner powder is sprinkled over the protected document. The toner adheres to the electrostatically charged indentations on the plastic film, and often, a previously invisible message suddenly appears.
"I had a case where there was a dispute over whether a signature had been forged on a document," said Emily J. Will, a document examiner based in Raleigh, N.C. "When I ran the document through the machine, I found dozens of writings of the signature all over the paper. Obviously, someone had been practicing."
The electrostatic apparatus frequently comes into play when examiners are trying to determine whether a sequence of dated documents was produced legitimately or was reconstructed at a later time.
Medical and insurance records, for example, are sometimes altered after the fact in an effort to limit liability or increase the amount of a claim. An analysis can reveal that these changes left indentations on other pages of the record that did not exist on the supposed date of entry.
The procedure is also commonly used when trying to determine if a specific person sent an anonymous note. "It's not at all usual for someone to write an anonymous nastygram to his boss on a writing tablet and then rip off the page," Mr. Flynn said. An examiner can use an electrostatic detection apparatus, on the suspect's tablet, "and frequently you'll see the latent impressions on the next blank sheets of paper," he said.
If nothing else, the "60 Minutes" case demonstrates the limits of the analysis technology. Ms. Will, who inspected the documents for CBS News before the Bush report was broadcast, said she was asked to do so from faxed photocopies that lacked the detail needed to authenticate a document.
She has said that she warned CBS that it would face questions from documents experts. CBS News officials said she did not advise the network against using the report.
"Because the documents were copies, I couldn't see fine details in the signature, like was a letter made clockwise or counterclockwise, or was the pen lifted," she said. "Without more information, like the original document or more handwriting samples of the signature, there's no way you could have authenticated those documents."
Jenny Warburg for The New York Times
PEN PAL Using a video spectral comparator, Emily J. Will can tell if writing that looks uniform to the naked eye came from more than one pen.
Yeah. We saw that a couple of weeks ago. That was a toughie, all right.
Anyone else notice that none of these "experts" bothered to roll over to the couch, don the ol' PJs and get to work roasting See?BS!'s fraud? But they're first in line for the LameStream Media to interview, to promote their "essential" skills in this area.
Maybe the Pajamahadeen needs to go to work on this story, just for practice.
Anybody else think she's just hanging a light bulb behind that check?
I'm no expert, but that diploma on her wall looks phoney.
Yeah! Good eyes.
Check her out - there's no way that typeface existed in 1926.
The Times hasn't told us which experts can determine if a document is "fake but true." That's the topic I'd like to hear them explain.
If this case gets to court, some of this stuff may come into play as it appears that criminal laws were violated in making fraudulent military documents, their transmission and possibly election laws.
""I've had people say to me, 'This looks like my signature, but I don't remember signing this document,' " said Sandra Homewood, a San Diego-based document examiner who has been in private practice since 1991. "And sometimes after I look at it through the stereo microscope, I'll tell them, 'Actually, this isn't your signature.' " "
An expert who discovers a forgery, after being told of it?
How do I get a job at CBS?
There are other lab test that can be run too, like the rag content of the paper, the composition of the ink. Both would be different from 30 years ago vs today's paper and ink. And typewriter ribbon ink would be different than printer ink. The most obvious would on an original would be the fact that a moderm printer SPRAYS the ink on the surface of the paper, where as the typewriter key strikes the paper and EMBEDS the ink leaving a indentation on the paper. Also with modern word wrap there will be no hyphenated words that were the norm with typewritten documents. Also typing rules in the 70's were you doubled spaced after every ending puncutation such as . ? ! or : This was obvious in the Pentagon example vs the c-BS forgery that the Wash Compost side by side showed.
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