Posted on 07/21/2008 8:39:38 PM PDT by Red Steel
Barack Obama may be on a world tour surrounded by a fawning media, but yesterday an expert in electronic document forensics released a detailed report on the purported birth certificate -- actually a "Certification of Live Birth" or COLB -- claimed as genuine by his campaign. The expert concludes with 100% certainty that it is a crudely forged fake: "a horribly forgery," according to the analysis published on the popular Atlas Shrugs blog. (photos and close-ups, with detailed report)
The purported birth certificate was published by the left wing Daily Kos blog on June 12 in response to unconfirmed reports that Obama was not in fact born in the United States (Canada and Kenya were suggested as the possible locations of his actual birth). Since he would in that case not be a natural born US citizen (his mother was not present in the US sufficiently long as an adult to pass American citizenship on to him automatically), he would not be eligible to be president. Israel Insider has followed the story and uncovered evidence, most recently, of admitted forgery among Daily Kos bloggers, tolerance of electronic forgeries on the blog site, as well as efforts by a blog administrator to conceal the admission of forgery.
The latest examinaton of the purported documents is by far the most detailed and technically sophisticated to date.
Atlas Shrugs publisher Pamela Geller reports that the expert analyst, who goes by the screen name "Techdude", is "an active member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, American College of Forensic Examiners, The International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners, International Information Systems Forensics Association -- the list goes on. He also a board certified as a forensic computer examiner, a certificated legal investigator, and a licensed private investigator. He has been performing computer-based forensic investigations since 1993 (although back then it did not even have a formal name yet) and he has performed countless investigations since then."
The pseudonym was apparently inadequate to prevent Techdude's identity from being exposed. He reports that last week one or more persons "decided to track me down and vandalize my car and hang a dead mutilated rabbit from my front door in a lame attempt to intimidate me from proceeding with releasing any details of my analysis. They did succeed in delaying the report by a few days but instead of deterring him they really angered him. To their credit, he says, the extra days enabled him to locate the most damning piece of evidence, the remnants of the previous security border."
Techdude's detailed report, which runs more than 3000 words and 20 pages with extensive magnified illustrations and comparisons, reaches the following conclusion about the documented that was first published on the Daily Kos extreme left-wing blog and subsequently publicly endorsed by the Obama campaign, both in statements by official spokesmen, and featured on its "Fight the Smears" website. Here are some of conclusions:
"The (Daily) KOS image security border pattern does not match any known specimen from any known year. It does not match the pre-2006 nor does it match the post-2006 certificate patterns. The placement of the text in all of the pre-2006 and post-2006 certificates are almost identical pixel location matches while the image's text placement does not match any known specimen from any known year. The shape and kerning of the fonts used in the 2006 through 2008 certificates are identical while the shape and kerning of the fonts used in the image does not match any known specimen. The KOS image shows clear signs of tampering such as the mismatch in RGB and error levels, visible indications of the previous location of the erased security border, easily detectable patterns of repeating flaws around the new security border, EXIF data that says the image was last saved with Photoshop CS3 for Macintosh, and finally a technician from Hawaii who confirms it just looks wrong."
The evidence, he says, allows for two possible scenarios by which the document was fabricated:
"There are two obvious scenarios used to create the image that can be ascertained from evidence. Either a real COLB was scanned into Photoshop and digitally edited or a real COLB was first scanned to obtain the graphic layout then blanked by soaking the document in solvent to remove the toner. After rescanning the blank page to a separate image the graphics from the previously obtained scan could then be easily applied to the blank scan after some editing and rebuilding. It would also explain why date stamp bleeds through the paper and the various bits of toner located around the image as well as the remnants of the previous location of a security border."
After more than a month of controversy and demands that the Obama campaign produce a paper birth certificate for analysis, this damning new evidence raises the stakes for the democratic party and its front-runner.
Will Obama and his people continue to stonewall in the facing of the mounting evidence of forgery, and provide paper proof of an authentic, original birth certificate or even a genuine secondary Certificate of Live Birth? And will the mass media and mainstream pundits, which so far have hesitated to touch the hot potato, finally address the loaded issue of his possible unfitness to meet the basic Constitutional requirement for a President?
Perhaps the outspoken Israeli press corps will be able to do what their American counterparts have failed to do so far. Obama's visit this week to Israel will be an opportunity to begin asking the tough questions, however unpolitically correct, about his apparently forged birth certificate and what that means for his citizenship status and Constitutional fitness to be the next leader of the free world.
I don't know any way to adjust any known-good birth certificate so as to make the borders or letter spacing match. The white fringes between the letters, however, can be produced pretty well by setting the chroma compression factor to about 500 and the luma to about 100 (use the 'custom...' button. Not a perfect match by any stretch, but good enough to demonstrate that such fringes can be produced purely as a result of JPEG artifacts. The same method, BTW, causes a lack of green in the inverse text in the top and bottom borders--an effect which is also noticeable in the Kos image.
Editing the image at the pixel level would also produce similar results. But, is that really plausible?
Why would anyone want to make it less like the original by monkeying around with settings about which they are probably clueless?
I lean towards Occam's Razor here.
Also, this is "Show and Tell" time. I've shown you mine, now you show me yours. ;-)
Editing the picture at the pixel level would be just grounds for an accusation of forgery, since any part of the picture that it is edited in such fashion would no longer be derived from the scanned document.
Why would anyone want to make it less like the original by monkeying around with settings about which they are probably clueless?
Although most programs that save JPG files just have one 'quality' setting, the quality setting in fact sets two parameters. Different programs may set the parameters somewhat differently in response to a "quality" slider control. Certainly it would not be unreasonable for someone who is producing an image for web display to crank down the quality setting to reduce file size.
I lean towards Occam's Razor here.
Careful. In the case of the Rathergate memos, there was no possible explanation for the way the documents were formatted that was consistent with them being genuine. It wasn't merely unlikely that genuine documents would have been forwarded that way--barring the existence of time travel it would have been absolutely impossible. One would not only have to believe that the author of the memos (1) had access to extremely fancy and expensive equipment; (2) would have used it, rather than a pen or pencil, in producing a 'memo to file'; and (3) would have written such memos to file anyway. One would also have to believe that either (1) Microsoft designed Word based upon common settings and behaviors of a typesetting machine that nobody's ever seen, (2) Microsoft designed Word based upon the typesetting conventions of some obscure memos whose existence would not be generally known until years later, or (3) the author of the memos decided to use many typographical conventions that would have made no sense in 1972, and just by coincidence happened to stumble upon the details and behaviors of Microsoft Word's default settings. Or else one would have to believe that the documents are the only observable evidence of time travel.
The Obama COLB has nowhere near that level of mendacity. It exhibits no features that had clearly not been invented until after it was allegedly printed (in 2007). It would seem unlikely that the Hawaiian records office would have made a change to the formatting (including the border) and then reverted that change, but absent testimony by the people responsible for such things, stating that no such changes have occurred, I could not regard such a thing as impossible. Further, while I don't know of any JPEG programs that would yield the fringing seen on the Kos COLB without deliberate independent adjustment of Chroma and Luma quality settings, I would not be surprised if such a program exists. While it's impossible to imagine someone like the 'author' of the Rathergate memos having access to equipment that would be obscure and horrendously expensive, it's not hard at all to imagine that some Kos or Obama staffers would include some rather obscure software in their repertoire. I know I use some software few people have ever heard of, and I doubt I'm the only one.
The Obama COLB smells fishy to me, but unlike the Rathergate memos it could possibly be genuine. A number of improbable events would have had to occur for it to appear as it does, but the odds aren't so low as to banish the possibility into fantasyland.
Just a thought.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.