http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s9StxsFllY


Ok so I did just as the guy in the video did and got the exact same results in adobe illustrator. Any explanations to this, other than the one given?

here's the link to download the adobe file from the whitehouse.gov website
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/04/27/president-obamas-long-form-birth-certificate
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf

[Edited on May 4, 2011 at 12:10 AM. Reason : :-]

5/4/2011 12:09:46 AM

Who gives a fuck

The title doesn't even sound interesting

5/4/2011 12:13:15 AM

For fucks sake. Let it the fuck go

5/4/2011 12:13:21 AM

im no birther or whatever they are called

i just saw that video and am trying to get some kind of reasonable explination, especially since I know that what the video is showing was real (that is, there are multiple layers still on the image)

5/4/2011 12:17:39 AM

MULTIPLE LAYERS?!?!?!

OUTRAGE!

5/4/2011 12:20:56 AM

IT DOESNT FUCKING CHANGE ANYTHING. HE WON THE FUCKING ELECTION. GIVE IT UP

5/4/2011 12:22:23 AM

looks like there was some image optimization done (the ink was probably faded)

5/4/2011 12:25:23 AM

Image optimization on a 50 year old document?

NO WAY BUD

5/4/2011 12:26:27 AM

radiohead is gonna be pissed

5/4/2011 12:26:43 AM

favorite part of the video is "I do this for a living"

5/4/2011 12:28:42 AM

Don't you think, if he was going to fake his birth certificate, he'd have picked a better middle name than Hussein?

5/4/2011 12:28:52 AM

lets be honest..anything can be photoshopped, you can counterfeit money if you wanna

is that website really gonna sway anyone? really?

5/4/2011 12:29:13 AM

Haha, the kid sounds like a tool but it's pretty compelling evidence. There is no doubt it was edited, but it may have just been to fill in due to bad original copy.

5/4/2011 12:29:47 AM

Quote :

"it's pretty compelling evidence. There is no doubt it was edited, but it may have just been to fill in due to bad original copy."

agreed. i think given the importance of authenticity in this particular conspiracy, they would have at least released the original copy, as hard as it might have been to read every little bit, and released the cleaned up version next to it or something. this is certainly going to give the crazies a reason to continue along with their conspiracy theories though

[Edited on May 4, 2011 at 12:34 AM. Reason : .]

5/4/2011 12:32:59 AM

Quote :

" is that website really gonna sway anyone? really?"

When you ask a question like that, keep in mind that there are a lot of people who still aren't convinced of Obama's birthplace.

So, yes, of course it will sway some people.

Are those people stupid?

Yes.

5/4/2011 12:34:35 AM

Quote :

"this is certainly going to give the crazies a reason to continue along with their conspiracy theories though"

If it wasn't this, it'd be something else. I mean, how many people still think he's a muslim.

5/4/2011 12:35:46 AM

I'm not a birthed either and really have never cared about it much, but this is definitely strange. I often wonder why he didn't just show the birth certificate after the election instead of letting this whole debate rage on. The fact that he spent $2mil on lawyer fees to work on the "birth certificate case" is strange as well......

5/4/2011 12:36:08 AM

i flat out do not believe that someone so versed w/ graphics that he is charged to forge a birth certificate for obama would not think to flatten the image before uploading it.

so, i don't know. i don't fucking care. he's a dumb fucking president and i hate him. <3 u nader.

5/4/2011 12:40:23 AM

to be clear, the fact that there are layers isn't a problem. a lot of scanning software has Optical Character Recognition technology built into it nowadays, and it'll try to identify and re-optimize text fragments it finds.

but i'd hope Obama's technology team would be aware of this and would have chosen a scanning technique that specifically didn't do this stuff to try avoid this exact "backlash"

5/4/2011 12:42:50 AM

It's a 50 year old document. They probably did whatever they had to in order to get it readable.

5/4/2011 12:48:21 AM

It makes me so, so sad that people actually care about this.

Not saying the OP does, or anyone else in this thread does. But there are people who do, and that is really something.

5/4/2011 12:50:18 AM

Quote :

"Haha, the kid sounds like a tool"

For damn sure

He talks about them altering the date...but what about the date that is written in pen? Wouldn't that also have to be altered if this was really fake? But that date appears to have really been written in pen...not altered on the computer.

[Edited on May 4, 2011 at 12:57 AM. Reason : ]

5/4/2011 12:52:32 AM

Wild Counter-Speculation: The original location where these records were stored was probably an old filing cabinet in a hospital/government office. The county likely digitized all however many hundreds of thousands of records they had all at once by scanning all of the documents at once. These were probably digitized into PDFs either by a bit of automated software or by a person performing hand editing of the certificate. The front side of the birth certificate was centered, and the signed statement (with date) on the back was positioned just below this on the PDF file. It was kept to one page so they could easily print this shit out on a standard color printer.

The shit is all in layers because they had to combine both sides of the birth certificate and to apply some post-processing so that it would show up cleanly on the archived PDF file. I would guess they came up with some sort of procedure to create these files all at once, then reviewed them later to ensure they were legible and all of what was on the original was legible on the final copy. It looks like they applied a filter to all of the scanned layers after converting the scanned certificate into layers with a transparent background. This little bit of yellow (haha, I think it's actually the photoshop default settings for the standard "glow" shadow filter (whatever the piss it was called)) just sets the text layers apart from the document and keeps it from becoming illegible.

If the current administration was going to fake this document they wouldn't have performed what looks like shitty bottom-dollar contractor work that was completed in all of ten minutes. More to the point, I would think they would have tried to make it look like the original birth certificate (like the little green ones we all have at home) and to have just taken photos of the "fake" hard copy as evidence.

5/4/2011 12:55:52 AM

Quote :

"If the current administration was going to fake this document they wouldn't have performed what looks like shitty bottom-dollar contractor work that was completed in all of ten minutes. More to the point, I would think they would have tried to make it look like the original birth certificate (like the little green ones we all have at home) and to have just taken photos of the "fake" hard copy as evidence."

This. If they were really gonna fake it, they could have and no one would have ever known. If anyone has the means to create a fake birth certificate, it is the POTUS.

5/4/2011 12:59:25 AM

Quote :

"It's a 50 year old document. They probably did whatever they had to in order to get it readable."

this



there's no pleasing these morons


if they had released an unrepaired version, they'd be lambasted for it not being readable


aside from letting every shitbrain in america hold his goddamned cert in their greasy-ass hands, there is no other way to prove this. of course this is a copy of the original - it's clearly stated and identified as such.

5/4/2011 1:05:25 AM

Regardless, this was a REALLY idiotic oversight of whoever generated the PDF file to leave it saved as layers.

Not to mention that photoshopping the document doesn't fit the official story of Obama demanding it, the lawyer flying down to Hawaii to get it and rush it back to the Whitehouse.

It's pretty hilarious.

The edits though do look like touchups to make the original actually readable. If they were just blatantly creating new things, you wouldn't see that halo around the touched-up text. They pretty clearly selected the the faded text into its own layer, adjusted the curves, then re-merged the layers.

5/4/2011 1:21:57 AM

Quote :

"anything can be photoshopped, you can counterfeit money if you wanna"

verboten

5/4/2011 1:23:07 AM

Quote :

"Not to mention that photoshopping the document doesn't fit the official story of Obama demanding it, the lawyer flying down to Hawaii to get it and rush it back to the Whitehouse."

tell me how it doesnt? at whatever point it would have still had to be photoshopped to repair it.

just because it was photoshopped doesn't mean that they didn't go get it. come on, now.

5/4/2011 1:24:17 AM

Quote :

"Regardless, this was a REALLY idiotic oversight of whoever generated the PDF file to leave it saved as layers."

If it hadn't been saved as layers the video would've been Obama's Birth Certificate Fake - WHAT IS HE HIDING?

The idiotic oversight was actually thinking that a piece of paper was going to change anything at all.

5/4/2011 1:26:20 AM

Quote :

"tell me how it doesnt? at whatever point it would have still had to be photoshopped to repair it. just because it was photoshopped doesn't mean that they didn't go get it. come on, now. "

You misunderstand what i'm saying. I didn't say they didn't go and get it, someone clearly spent a fair bit of time making these mods. The official story makes it seem like it was rushed straight to the president's desk, but it obviously wasn't.

5/4/2011 1:27:05 AM

Quote :

" If it hadn't been saved as layers the video would've been Obama's Birth Certificate Fake - WHAT IS HE HIDING? "

That's true. It's nearly impossible to make the edits they would need to without leaving behind evidence, and if it were a flat file being passed off as the raw image, people would know they were lying.

5/4/2011 1:28:41 AM

He's been in office for 3 fucking years and he is leading the nation in the right direction whether he was born here or not.

Quote :

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, "

The reason our forefathers didn't want non-citizens in office was set up as a precaution that the democratic people couldn't vote for the president of russia to be the head of the united states or vote rig a foreign citizen in that could potentially have their homeland as #1 in their mind instead of the USA.




[Edited on May 4, 2011 at 1:35 AM. Reason : .]

5/4/2011 1:30:04 AM

^They may have also had the memories of the old royal marriages that united kingdoms; they could easily see King George IV (then the heir apparent) going rogue and trying to become the President of the United States, perhaps after leading a successful invasion (and you oughta admit, he did end up doing serious damage to our capital in 1814, so he could have tried to bully the populace into making him their leader, if only our Constitution hadn't prevented such a thing).

Mindstorm has almost the right idea: Actually the data were entered into a database during a digitization effort in 2001 (the original documents were not all scanned in and converted to PDF), and from then on the Hawaii State Department of Health would provide only a Certification of Live Birth (the "short form") when someone asked for a birth certificate; it was a combination of Obama's clout as the President, the emergence of Birtherism into the Republican mainstream, and the sheer annoyance endured by the government of Hawaii from Birthers and confused individuals around the world that led Obama to ask for a waiver from the state law prohibiting the dissemination of copies of the original certificate, and the state of Hawaii to relent.

Quote :

"The fact that he spent $2mil on lawyer fees to work on the "birth certificate case""

He didn't: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/apr/12/donald-trump/donald-trump-claims-obama-has-spent-2-million-lega/

Also it is surprisingly easy for Acrobat Distiller or some other PDF generator to try to guess what a logical system of layers would be when a document is scanned in, like in that first video it guessed at a background, and then the black marks and the stamp were all in a big group in a single layer.

IMO Obama should let FactCheck in to see one of the two certified copies of the Certificate of Live Birth, as he did for the Certification of Live Birth.

[Edited on May 4, 2011 at 1:40 AM. Reason : more content

5/4/2011 1:36:49 AM

I wouldn't be suprised if he was born in Kenya. His family there say they were at his birth. I don't care either. He is amercan enough for me, and I am not even that fond of him.

5/4/2011 1:47:44 AM

The only person who said that was his step-grandmother Sarah, and that was a result of misunderstanding the translated question of a fundie who was trying to play a gotcha-game with her; after she understood what he meant, she repeatedly clarified that she knew Barack Obama was born in America and that she was not present because she was still in Kenya: http://www.factcheck.org/2011/04/donald-youre-fired/

stop drinking the Birther-ade

5/4/2011 1:58:10 AM

to be one of those birthers I would have to think that he should not be president. I just think they are nit-picking at shit.

5/4/2011 2:10:29 AM

believing this after it has been debunked:

Quote :

"His family there say they were at his birth."

smacks of Birtherism

5/4/2011 2:12:11 AM

you smack of faggerism. stop drinking the gay-o-rade.

5/4/2011 2:13:51 AM

O U~♥

5/4/2011 2:17:24 AM

Quote :

" When you ask a question like that, keep in mind that there are a lot of people who still aren't convinced of Obama's birthplace. "

Some of these people don't believe Hawaii counts as a legitimate state to be born in to qualify for pres though according to the polls. There will always be a way to found another level of doubt for those who want to believe.

[Edited on May 4, 2011 at 2:29 AM. Reason : .]

5/4/2011 2:29:25 AM

i mean there's no way a GODDAM NIGGER MUZLIM could legitimately become president of MAH WHITE CHRISTIAN AMURRIKKKA

5/4/2011 2:43:36 AM

^ true

5/4/2011 4:16:24 AM

The problem with this and any administration is they don't actually care to inform the public. THere are countless ways they could have truly put to bed this issue as well as the bin laden issue. They could have had a forensic specialist analyze the ORIGINAL. Instead, we get something thats filtered for no reason at all. And whether this thing is in fact real or not, that kind of shit pisses me off.

5/4/2011 7:28:54 AM

It would be just another person they would've said was paid off or lying or whatever.

5/4/2011 7:34:52 AM

nobody cares

obama shot osama in the eye

[Edited on May 4, 2011 at 7:40 AM. Reason : even the rednecks will give him a measure of respect for that...especially for a black]

5/4/2011 7:40:15 AM

Hahaha descendents of violent invaders demand certification that you belong here

5/4/2011 7:40:53 AM

Hahaha descendents of violent invaders feces-throwing monkeys demand certification that you belong here

or

Hahaha descendents of violent invaders one-celled organisms living in pond scum demand certification that you belong here

[Edited on May 4, 2011 at 7:44 AM. Reason : ?]

5/4/2011 7:43:40 AM

They did it like this to further speculation and get people riled up about it so that the flame war will continue.

5/4/2011 8:12:03 AM

this would be perfect for Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura

5/4/2011 11:05:51 AM

Gonna go ahead and admit I didn't read any of the posts other than the first, so I assume someone has already pointed this out, but it is pretty standard for scanning software to split scanned images into layers to try and separate the text from the background.

5/4/2011 11:10:22 AM