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Obama's birth certificate

After pressure, Obama finally released an image of his certificate of live birth. What is curious is that there are very visible signs of photoshopping. From The Market Ticker:

You've GOT To Be Kidding Me (Birth Certificate)
Oh do c'mon.... oh Donald, this case is not closed.

You can't possibly by serious.

This document has been altered and whoever did it wasn't even very clever in doing so.

I downloaded the PDF from the White House Web site - the "official copy" right from the "Horse's Mouth." Then I loaded it into Illustrator. Look at these images I then screen-captured - first, the ENTIRE image itself:

What follows are a couple of high-resolution images of the document showing very obvious edits. Here is a screen cap of one of them, cropped to save space: From Market Ticker:

Here's a well-enhanced (at 1200%) version of one of the dates; you can clearly see the difference in saturation. That was cut into the original picture folks.

What is even more curious is that when you export a PDF in Illustrator, the contents of the clipboard are saved in the file as well. From Market Ticker:

By the way, they were dumb enough to leave the cuts in the clipboard too. The bottom part (certification) I can see since it's clearly overlaid on a background. But the content itself?

This document has been altered; it is not simply a photograph of the registrar's book that was dropped into a background, and it also is not simply an agglomeration of two images (the background they constructed, the "certification" and then the actual certificate.)

Now this does not prove that the alterations were actual changes in content. They might not be.

But..... what other reason is there to alter an alleged high-resolution photograph?

Got Illustrator? Don't believe me - check it yourself.

(To get the full list of things on the clipboard, load it and then select "Window->Actions->Links." There they are.)

I do not have Illustrator installed on this office machine but I do have it at home and will be playing with it tonight. If this is true, these people are beyond stupid. Posted by DaveH at April 27, 2011 11:50 AM