The new Obama birth certificate might be fake (but now debunked, hopefully)

 EDITED TO SHOW THIS:

It's called OCR (optical character recognition). Acrobat and many scanners do this by default. It detects letters and words on the page and allows you to add selectable text to the document without having to type it in manually.
Notice how when you hide a layer, it's white behind it? If it was truly forged, you wouldn't see any of the background missing. It's white because it doesn't know what's behind the text BECAUSE THE TEXT WAS THERE WHEN IT WAS SCANNED.

And this:

http://wireupdate.com/video/2011/04/president-obamas-birth-certificate-pdf-has-layers/

I'm not going to say this proves he wasn't born in the US because it doesn't. All it does prove is that the PDF of Obama's birth certificate they posted online is a fake.


If you have a copy of Adobe Illustrator, open the PDF with Illustrator, and the first thing you'll notice in the layers pallet is that there are several grouped layers that were masked. If you select the square right in the middle where the type is, then right click and select "release clipping mask, you'll get like 10 sub-layers each with 2 or 3 sub-layers themselves.

Here are the screenshots I took:

Right after I opened it, I released the clipping mask to reveal all the layers visible in the Layers Pallet.

I turned off all the layers above the bottom one to see what all was changed.

And as you can see, the layers of text can be selected and moved around at will.

First off, I'm not saying this proves anything other than the birth certificate is fake. Maybe someone else is trying to nail Obama by putting such an obviously faked document online. Look, even a novice graphic artist knows to do a "save as..." and flatten his artwork before posting it online. It reduces file size without reducing resolution, for one thing. For another, if you ARE trying to fake something, the easiest way to get busted is NOT to flatten your artwork.


Earlier this morning, I posted an article saying "finally, we can put this behind us" and I believed it. I thought, "That'll show those birther cocksuckers!"


I'm not saying Obama isn't a citizen, but why the fuck did they post a fake birth certificate? And why the fuck didn't the person who faked it flatten the image, so even a schmoe like me wouldn't be able to tell it's fake? Seriously, had I opened it in Illustrator and it was just one solid rasterized image, case closed, it's legit (even if it were done in Photoshop, I'd have given it the benefit of the doubt).


But...they did it in Illustrator, for some unknown reason, and there it is.


I'm going to go throw up now.

This makes me feel a little better. I'm not totally convinced, because I've scanned many documents in OCR mode, and they've never broken into so many layers like that. However, I'm more than happy to be wrong on this.

--jef