Right, and I was asking her about whether she would tell law enforcement if somebody was using what she knew was a forgery. And as I understand it, somebody who knows a felony is being committed and fails to report it may be guilty of misprision of felony. Her response seemed to me to be saying that by reporting that something was a forgery she would be revealing something about the genuine BC (if there is one) because it reveals that it’s NOT exactly what the forgery has.
The legal status of the BC is also supposed to be public, since anybody is supposed to be able to receive a non-certified copy of somebody’s COLB. But the HDOH said they couldn’t reveal index data from a certain index such as the Delayed Birth Certificate Index (which is an indext that exists; they have it listed as one of the indices they are supposed to check, in the “For Office Use Only” portion of their BC copy request form), COHB, Pending, etc. They don’t want to reveal the legal status of the BC, which is supposed to be public information.
As it stands, we have no idea what all records they include in their general birth index. We have no way of knowing whether a name that shows up in the index is because there is a legally-valid BC, or whether it’s just a note on a kleenex saying “Obama was born here” (like the cartoons people post here and my kids and I laugh our fool heads off over. lol)
The legal status is printed on the front of the document, that is, that the document "serves as prima facie evidence of the fact of birth in any court proceeding." If it turns out that the authenticity of the document is in question, and that the HDOH refuses to acknowledge that a document in question is fraudulent when they know it to be, because of "privacy," then no document's authenticity in Hawaii can be trusted.
-PJ