Yes, it’s happened already. As so many people predicted, the “birthers”, undeterred by Obama’s decision to release his birth certificate, are pouncing all over it and screeching that it’s a 'shop job. Here’s the argument:
Go to this page on the Whitehouse website and download the .PDF of Obama’s birth certificate.
Open it up in Adobe Illustrator or a new version of Photoshop.
Check the layers box. You’ll see that the image is actually a composite of lots of different layers. Open the layers panel and uncheck a box and “Oops”, the dates vanish. Uncheck another one, and there go the signatures.
I’m not saying it’s a forgery. In fact, the whole “birther” conspiracy is total nonsense as far as I’m concerned. However, I work in a bank and I spend a sizeable chunk of my workday checking identification documents. The reason we never allow customers to submit photocopies or .PDF’s is precisely due to the risk of a fraudster submitting a doctored composite image. If Obama wanted to open a current account with my bank, and submitted this birth certificate as proof of ID, I’d have to reject it. Not that we’d ask for a birth certificate anyway, but…well, you get the idea.
So, what’s the deal with the composite image? And, more importantly, which tailpipe sucking retard thought that releasing anything other than the original or a straight-up certified photocopy was a good idea?
If there is a conspiracy about this, why would they do something that would be easily detectable?
It’s the typical conspiracy theory blind spot – the conspirators are a vast and efficient organization that makes blatantly obvious mistakes. Make up your minds: which is it?
I only see one layer in Photoshop Elements 7.0. But it looks like the security-paper style background has been superimposed, not sure why that would have been done.
If this is the long form, what in the world does a *short *form look like?
Yep, it works fine for me. Although I must admit I do feel a bit stupid, as it’s just occurred to me that OCR (optimal character recognition), which necessitates composite layering, is an available feature on most office scanners. Chances are that the person who scanned the doc forgot to turn it off. The person receiving the doc must have saved it without checking, which is very easy to do as it’s not the sort of thing you would normally check for. Also, on inspection, most of the layers don’t contain anything relevant, just random garbage. In other words, the doc was scanned and compiled in layers but these aren’t layers in the traditional, photo-editing sense. They were created by the program automatically.
Oh well, that’s good enough for me. I’m sure it’ll keep the birthers exercised for another few months, but meh, can’t really do much about that.
See, that’s a much cooler given name - not to mention an awesome wrestler name - and I would vote 5 times for him if that were true. (It’s Chicago, we do that stuff, I hear.)
I’m not even sure it has to do with scanner OCR. I just opened up a selection of random PDFs I have on my computer here in Adobe Illustrator CS5, and all of them open up with various random layers in them. When I say “all”, I mean all–those that were PDFs created from photos, those from scans, and those from “Print to PDF” on the computer. I just printed up this Straight Dope thread using Print > PDF > Save As PDF and when I imported it into Adobe Illustrator, I got a slew of layers.
Look when they turn the layer off, there’s still a watermark of the exact same shape. If it was a forgery, the watermark would likely not be as perfect.
If the vast majority of PDF files are automatically created in layers, as Pulykamell indicates, then harping on that as evidence of fraud is being willfully ignorant and refusing to accept fact.
But then, that’s kind of the birther hallmark, isn’t it?
I totally agree. The obvious solution is for Obama to go door to door across America with the original in his hand and allow himself to be quizzed by everyone who has doubts about his memories of his hospital stay. If he applies himself, he should be able to get it done in a couple of decades. Anything less than that is impeachable.
Of course it’s sloppy! They’re evil geniuses! They know everybody will believe they couldn’t possibly make such a dumb error.
Make no mistakes:
ZOMG! This conspiracy is even deeper. Even <now involved keeper of record/state government/country> <is in on/has a vested interest in> this, they clearly <forged those documents/lied/paid them off>!
Edit: This goes for any intricate crazy conspiracy theory that requires several hundreds of people knowing what’s going on but all being too evil to let it slip. Really? NOBODY involved is going to break and spill the news to the press and retire off of fat book deals and television appearances, while having their names in the history books forever?
A file scanned as a JPG would have probably been better. But the real evidence that the boxes are OCR artifacts is that the background security paper when moved has white holes where the letters were. This is because the OCR has no idea what is behind the letters. If this were a created fake it would have a contiguous background when separated.
