While the internal characteristics of the White House PDF have been explained in great detail by blogger NBC, using a simple workflow involving a Xerox WorkCentre office machine and the Mac Preview program, there remains to be studied the issue of “halos.” The halos are basically light areas surrounding the text. Birthers say that the halo effect comes from using the “unsharp mask” in Adobe Photoshop and that it means somebody forged the document.
While I have written a little on halos, I have never considered it significant after I made two observations: a scholarly paper on MRC compression says that halos are one of the things that MRC does, and when I saw a special function in Adobe Acrobat (that also does a form of MRC compression) to remove halos. I also observed that the PDF file from the US National Archives of the Certificate of the California Electoral College vote in 2012 had halos too (it was an Adobe creation) as did a scan of my own birth certificate.
However, rooting around in my emails today, I came across a curious document. It is a JPG created from the White House PDF, sent to me by birther image expert Garrett Papit, and it has no halos. I don’t know where he got this from, or how it was made, but it has no halos (click to enlarge).
So if you can print the White House PDF without halos, one has to ask whether they are actually in the PDF, or whether they are created by the programs used to view the PDF to make the text appear sharper. I don’t know.
In any case, if one wanted an original without halos to scan as a test, the document preceding might be a good candidate.
Update:
Ok, it’s a fake insofar as it is a true print from the White House PDF. You can see that it derives from the White House PDF by looking at the faded “R” in “BARACK”:
However, it’s not authentic because the security paper is positioned differently in relation to the text as can be seen easily in the following comparison (the White House PDF above). Notice particularly the position of the security pattern beneath the word “OF”:
I don’t know whether Papit tried to trick me (more or less successfully) or if he was fooled himself.
Halos in this case are completely software created and have nothing to do with the underlying document. In fact, if you were truly looking for forgery you’d have to examine the metadata and not how the software handles the data to display it on your screen. Of course, the best way is to ask Hawaii to verify all the data matches what they have on file…which is the whole reason for the document anyway.
I enjoyed this:
http://www.safeguardourconstitution.com/news/reagans-birth-certificate.html
“The 40th President of the United States had no trouble producing a birth certificate. In fact it is on display at the Reagan Library.”
Yeah, I mean, it took Obama THREE YEARS to produce his! And here’s one from Ronald Reagan, that, that…
Oh, hmm. One that is dated, uh, 31 years after he was born. Well, then.
Oh, and it was issued in 1991, which would be (counts on fingers) 10 years after he took office.
And I hadn’t seen a “CERTIFICATE O’ BIRTH” before — they have special certificates for Irish-Americans?
So yes, I can see how this just runs rings around Obama’s, which was registered and approved within days of his birth, and which he released a certified abstract of before the general election. But hey… no halos!
I would venture a guess it was made from the PDF but using some tools. Notably, it is missing some parts that are light grey on the PDF, like the pencil marks, the upper half of the “K” in “Kansas” or part of the “S” in “Stanley”.
I haven’t looked at the PDF layers in a while, it’s possible it was created from some of the darker layers.
If I hadn’t made those observations, I would’ve guessed it was a different scan of the actual certified copy.
Ironically, had the WH published a JPG just like this, the whole PDF extravaganza would’ve been spared on us (though birthers would’ve claimed “it’s a forgery because it’s missing some ink seen on the Guthrie photos”).
Pres. Reagan’s birth certificate is proof of delayed registration.
The Halo’s are the one thing that screams geniune to me. The amount of work it would have taken to create those halos would be immence, would have taken hours and would have left me a basket case.
I just want to know why they released it in 1991. Had someone in 1991 come up with some questions about Reagan’s birthplace? Or was there something even more sinister? Remember, Raymond Shaw was a good ol’ Irish-American boy, too, who served his country just like Reagan did, and look what happened there. Why haven’t we heard what the concern is? I need some proof that this didn’t happen. Absence of proof is proof of absence.
It’s a simple question. Why is no one answering it? Why was Ronald Reagan never seen with a deck of playing cards?
Papit’s BC has a different safety paper background.
Look underneath the “OF” in “STATE OF HAWAII” in the upper left corner. On the WH LFBC, the safety paper has two long vertical strokes. On Papit’s it does not; the strokes appear elsewhere.
I would guess he isolated the non-background material, cleaned it up, and superimposed it over a blank safety paper image, so that he could have a more “original-ish” document to test with. I’m actually kind of impressed that he did that.
Note the lighter “R” in “BARACK” that suggests strongly that this is from the White House PDF. Plus Papit says it’s a “print” from the White House PDF. I just don’t know the tool.
I’m sure he got the foreground material from the WH PDF, but he’s put it on a new background.
The overriding facepalm on all this “anomalies” discussion, is that the birthers don’t seem to realize that each supposed anomaly actually goes against them.
Forgers seek to make documents that are completely unremarkable. No anomalies means that no official is going to have a reason to examine the document even more closely. Therefore the competent forger seeks to make the document anomaly free in every respect. Competently forged documents are usually much more “perfect” than genuine documents, if for no other reason than to make sure no one gives them a second look.
The fact that every birther barber, cab driver, and other armchair document “expert” can plainly see dozens of blatant “anomalies” in the pdf, is a solid indication that absolutely no particular care was taken in producing the PDF, which is a solid indication that nobody was trying to forge or hide anything.
Of course the birthers will come back with, maybe Obama couldn’t find a competent forger.
Really?
REALLY?
You birthers are trying to tell us that the most maliciously evil, powerful man in the country, a man also wealthy enough to spend billions upon billions of dollars buying off every Judge, every Congress member, every DA and AG, every member of the Cabinet and Executive, every State Government, all of their staff, and all of their families and staff’s families, all of their friends, and essentially the entire civil service and their friends and families…. somehow didn’t have enough money left over to hire a forger capable of creating a PDF that would pass the casual scrutiny of a used car salesman….
If Benny the Rat, from the waterfront can find a competent forger….
I concur with justlw. Other examples of artifacts from the original WH LFBC PDF: the date stamp where it over laps “Date Accepted by Reg. General” is lighter, the “Non” in “None” is lighter, and so on. Clearly is pasted on a new basket-weave background
Still, it will be very useful for NBCs halo trials.
It is the wrong color for the White House PDF, and the real security paper from Hawaii.
This was absolutely superimposed on a new security background. The basket-weave patterns between the two documents do not align.
The shadow from the paper curvature at the spine of the bound volume has also been removed. I suspect that Doc is right… it is a control document created for testing purposes.
You are absolutely right….it’s ludicrous. The most powerful man in the world (backed up by George Soros, of course) manipulates all to gain the White House but forgets to create a good birth certificate. Sure!
Yep, it’s a pastiche, a mockup, printed and rescanned, which accounts for the gruesome changes in color balance. I created something similar, for S&Gs, way back when. Though far superior, of course 😛 Started with the ABC image.
If this is what Garrett made to test scanners … what an idjit. He’s further processed a processed image. He’s gone from A to B to C, and expecting some scanner or software to take him back to A. Tsk, tsk, image degradation is a 1-way street.
He doesn’t need a scanner; he needs a TARDIS!
But it will be helpful in my quest to understand the halos…
Not sure if these will help or not, but they do talk about it
http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/adjusting-image-sharpness-blur.html
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-interpolation.htm
What isn’t understood?
I just sent Doc an email to point out the security paper misalignment. You folks are good. It is a crude forgery. 😆
I think Papit began with the AP image and erased the visible basket weave on the left margin. The “R” in Barack is slightly lighter in the AP image too. The R looks weird and misaligned in this image. In erasing the basket weave he had to erase the pencil marks. He must have decided to erase all of them to avoid suspicion. Then he printed that image on basket weave paper or layered it on using Photoshop or something like that.
I have no idea why he went to the trouble to do this but I don’t claim to understand their motives.
This makes at least two times the CCP has been caught forging evidence by my count.
The intensity of the white halo and why the background behind the text is mostly white and not ‘filled’ with colors similar to the background itself, as this is what I find in my experiments. You still have x-ray and you can see a color halo but it is not the same. However, I am using Papit’s document which is way to yellow and brightness is way too low.
I see a far less nefarious reason. But I believe that people have inherently good motives.
Oh, they are there… I aligned the foreground with the background in a tedious process using the layer’ed data.
That part is not true. I went to the Reagan Library back in June and the BC was nowhere on display. I asked a few tour guides about it and didn’t get a real answer on it.
Out of the 5 Presidents I’ve seen birth certificates of: Nixon, Kennedy, Reagan, Johnson and Obama. 3 are delayed and one was amended only Obama’s was registered on time with no amendments.
Well, it used to be on display. I found a post that includes a picture of it hanging on the wall at the Raygun Liberry (admittedly, this is on some weird fringe web site), dated January 2011.
…so it’s gone now? What are they hiding? What’s the real story behind Reagan’s so-called “CERTIFICATE O’ BIRTH”? John? “Helen”? Garrett? Bueller?
Well, that settles it. Obama’s is not like the others, therefore it must be a forgery! Real pretzeldents have delayed and amended BC’s, like any real Merican! 😉
Wait till you see ORYR trumpet “Bombshell: Yet ANOTHER Obama BC surfaces at Obot site!”…
I’m a stickler for details I took a picture of every display item at the library so I could reference it later. The libraries do have some good things in them though. Thus far I’ve been to Nixon’s, Reagan’s, Kennedy’s and FDR’s. Nixon had some early letters he wrote as a kid and I think a baptismal certificate. Reagan had some of his college degrees. It was an interesting experience.
Indeed. If Obama’s was like Johnson’s birthers would be whining even more. President Johnson’s first and middle name weren’t on the birth certificate it merely stated Johnson. It was amended in 1961 when Johnson was VP through I think his chief of staff acting as a witness.
Nixon’s was strangely delayed until his 30s where it was put into the record through court order. The copy that is online wasn’t obtained until 2009 well after his death. Also the stamp that says 2009 looks odd it almost looks like it reads 2069.
The link to a photo of the Reagan birth certificate is here:
http://terryfrank.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/dscn0552.jpg
I believe Fogbow also has a copy.
I seem to remember that it was on display not at the Reagan Library in CA but at the Reagan boyhood home in Dixon IL ( http://reaganhome.org/ but I could be mistaken about that, since I haven’t been able to locate a reference backing that up.
I link to a Fogbow post that includes an image of it above — or do you mean they have it in one of their reports, too?
Aha — that would explain why DKN didn’t see it in Simi Valley, and it seems more like something they’d have in a boyhood home than in a presidential library.
Although it sounds like some of the presidential libraries have some pretty eclectic exhibits in ’em these days, like the George W. Bush “See If You’d Pre-Emptively Invade the Wrong Country, Too!” interactive game.
I’ll have to post my Reagan and other library photos later but here is my set of Nixon photos
http://www.flickr.com/photos/62953686@N03/sets/72157634201636143
Continuing with the threadjack, sorry…
Here’s a picture from someone’s Picasa galley, of the RWR BC image hanging on the same wall that other photos of it show:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Ziplocqueen2/ChristmasRoadtripPart2Pictures#5430142427826835474
The metadata in the photo (see the map to its right), as well as the other photos in the gallery, indicate that it was taken at the Reagan Library in 2009.
Dr. N — the gallery shows it’s in a part of the Library that’s entered through a replica of the street arch in Dixon, Illinois. Do you remember seeing that? If not, it may be that they’d redone or temporarily closed that part of the museum at the time you visited it.
Well it wouldn’t be surprising though that it might have been swapped out. They rotate pieces in the library on an ongoing basis. I remember when I was at the FDR library I ended up in the basement and saw a lot of random pieces in storage just sitting around. Also I think they might have removed some stuff from the Reagan library because at the time there was a Abraham Lincoln exhibit. I will post my gallery from Flickr later. I made sure to take pictures of everything while I was there.
Have I missed where the CCP or any birther “expert” has gone beyond halos=forgery to actually try to explain WHY halos=forgery?
I think that it is tied up with the idea that the forger cut out areas of text from an image of a “real” birth certificate and then inserted different text into the holes, but did it poorly. However, the idea that a President would release to the world a document that poorly forged is ludicrous.There are just too many better and easier ways to do it. (Just look at the background of this blog).
No, and they never will, and nobody ever could, because cosmetic variations from an original created by various scanners in the resulting PDF file of an informational image as variously printed by various printers or displayed on various screens, don’t legally constitute an attempt to commit the crime of fraud, when the vital records information which the various resulting images display, have been confirmed by the original’s legal issuing authority, to match those which are on the original document. In this case Hawaii has done exactly that for the LFBC image created by the White House.
I’ve heard Zullo speculate that… while in the same presentation speculating that the typewritten text on Obama’s LFBC isn’t correctly justified for a Hawaiian BC.
Obviously, those two speculations aren’t compatible… not that birthers would care anyway.
Of course, as you say, there are easier ways to forge a BC… especially if the state is in on it… and I’d think they ALL involve creating a hardcopy forgery.
There are other possible workflows as well, after all, nothing prevents a forger from doing exactly what a Xerox WorkCentre would do 🙂 But such an explanation merely results in the conclusion that the ‘forger’ is the workCentre.
Also, alignment is a tricky issue as different people have different habits as to how they may fill out documents and a document need not have been typed in a single session, causing further sessions to lead to small variations in alignments as well.
I have never been too impressed with the typography claims as there are reasonable explanations for them that do not require forgery. Repeating a process that happened in 1961 is none trivial, and perhaps contemporaneous documents to 1961 could be helpful. It’s too bad that the few available are of relatively low quality or have information covered. Still there are some documents from Kapiolani that are from the same time period. So there may be something one can squeeze out of them… But it would be tentative at best.
The explanation so far has been based on something that is called argument from ignorance. We do not know how such a halo could have been created by algorithms or workflows, and since we know forgers can create such halos, it must have been forged. But it is also not phrased as the only evidence either. Zebest showed an example of halos which was done pretty poorly and failed to match with the observed halos on President Obama’s LFBC. Saying that a forger ‘could have done it’ is not sufficient although necessary as a condition to infer fraud.
We know for a fact that MRC can create halos, and we also know that solutions have been proposed to minimize such halos, therefore we can reasonable assume that an MRC like process could have been responsible for the observed halos.
The question now becomes: Can we sufficiently accurately recreate the input document to see how the Xerox WorkCentre deals with it. My WH LFBC shows halos and the x-ray filling however one can reject the halos as they were pre-existing and the x-ray filling may have been informed by the pre-existing halos.
For example, there are still ‘halos’ when scanning in the Papit document but the contrast between the green and white is so low that the resulting document looks more like a smeared yellow/greenish almost grayish color and when lifting the foreground layers, the background, while still showing the x-ray, it is far more pronounced as it starts to match the colors of the smeared jpeg background.
Papit himself describes a document that looks very similar to this one as being of lower quality.
I would be careful here. The AP offers a 1.3 Mbyte version and the resolution does not appear to be as high as the one claimed by the Fogbow version, so it may have been obtained from a source which upsampled the resolution but that does not make it high resolution, if you know what I mean.
The Fogbow version does not contain much of any useful metadata so it is clear that the AP version was touched by something that removed it all. I will see if I can do a better report on it on my blog.
I want to be careful before I accept the latest resolution for the jpeg since it does not fit in very well with the AP workflow. Of course, I am very well be wrong on that one but the Fogbow image shows the same gradients across the top left to bottom right and shows the same letters/image shining through, as does the AP version.
The document was first located at http://www.theobamafile.com/_images/BirthCertificateHighResolution.jpg
And Dr C provided a link.
Let’s see if I can find out more
It is discussed here but points to the WH PDF and does not explain the origin of the high res version
My bad; pronouns and stuff. “It” in this case is “a picture of the Reagan BC hanging on the wall in the Reagan Library.”
Some confusion… Still my comments stand if ‘it’ refers to a high resolution AP image 🙂
It was a scan by Applewhite of ABCNews, of the press handout, originally posted ~9:15am on 4/27/11. It was posted at ABCNews.com, but I don’t know if that page is still up there …
Searching for a story with that date now leads me to:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obama-birth-certificate-released-white-house/story?id=13467977
An end-of-day recap piece, not the “news flash” story that featured the high-res photo … still has a link to their high-res PDF.
Nope, that one has a 200×200 resolution, the document here has 300×300. AP only distributed a 200×200 ppi resolution image so this one is likely created by a 3rd party. The lack of metadata also is quite interesting as the AP jpegs contain a lot of information.
Hey, you’re right. Since they are the same images, I never gave them much thought … The PDF at ABC is well-described, and the image is 13.49×16.17, 200dpi. The “high res” is also 13.49×16.17, 300dpi. I had to go back to an old discussion to assure myself I wasn’t nuts, and that the same file is still at ABC:
http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/ap_obama_certificate_dm_110427.pdf
As for the “high res” version, I wouldn’t worry too hard about its origins. We’re talking about birthers here. Hermitian was rambling on about the AP image, which is hosted at ABC as a PDF. He kept cracking me up because he kept attempting to wax technical, declaring he had ‘analyzed’ the image in Photoshop Elements 9. He said it was 300dpi. Having seen the AP image as a 300dpi JPG elsewhere, I didn’t doublecheck him.
If you open a PDF in a raster editor, it asks you to specify a resolution at which to render the PDF. Common defaults are 72, 150, or 300dpi. Naturally, a nontenchnical person would assume 300 would give them a sharper image ….. LOL!
Anyway, dollars to donuts the origin of the “high res” image is the above. Someone rendered the AP PDF, for whatever reason, and posted it.
Who knows, it could have been Hermitian!
I am not sure if he would be up to the task, he is still struggling to get started…
And every time he fails, my hypothesis becomes a little bit stronger…
I just want to make sure that when discussing images, we do not leave the door open for Hermitian, resulting in a few dozen postings having to explain the details in ever smaller steps, until he just disappears and never admits to being wrong.
He does not appear to be very familiar with a lot of the modern internet. Poor soul… I am sure he was an accomplished PhD in his field, but here he is way out of his leagues.
I am thinking about writing Hermitian to find out if he designed any particular bridges or buildings so that I can assiduously avoid them.
And that can happen easily. I have a degree in mathematics (differential geometry was my major), yet I wouldn’t claim I understand all the intricacies of quantum physics, and even if I read a whole lotta books on that subject, I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on par with somebody who earned a degree in that field. And I certainly wouldn’t go and tell an expert “you’re wrong and you’re lying” based on my limited understanding of the field.
But that’s also a common crank behaviour. I’ve seen this mostly from people who think they understand the law because they’ve got a degree in some other field (interestingly, most cranks with a degree seem to be engineers, at least in my country). As in “I’ve got a PhD in physics and read some law books, that’s not as hard as my field of expertise” and then they go and try to claim all lawyers and judges apply the law wrong…
I agree with the comments, but it is so easy to accept as fact that something is just an error.
Write off the 200DPI or 300DPI as it is not significant because HDOH confirms the data on file.
How could there coould be those differences is not to be questioned.
Here is data, I am writing this on a Lenovo, now I can confirm that , but how can you believe my confirmation that is on a Lenovo rather than a Dell, or Mac.
How can HDOH confirm that the father was Obama, Sr.
Can’t, how can they confirm SADO and Obama Sr. lived at the same address, Can’t.
How can they confirm they were married.
How did the Xerox copy the faded R in Barack in the same detail
None of that is relevant to Obama’s eligibility, but…
1. The birth certificate doesn’s say where Obama’s father was living. It only provides the address of his mother.
2. The birth certificate doesn’t say that they were married. Barack Hussein Obama is listed as the father, but there is no space on the LFBC for the marital status of the parents.
It doesn’t matter of Obama’s father was Barack Obama or Frank Marshall Davis or Malcolm X or Malcolm in the Middle. He was born in the United States, so he is a natural born citizen.
You presumably have a birth certificate which lists the names of your parents. How do you know that it is correct? How do you know that your father wasn’t the mailman? Have you tested your DNA?
Oh, dearie my. Still stuck on “how can anyone ever know anything” after all these years, Trolljack? Basic epistemology, look it up. Again.
Still fixated on that R … but this is your funniest musing on it yet! How did a copier …. copy something???
How Photocopiers Work
http://home.howstuffworks.com/photocopier.htm
I believe what you mean to ask (for the 1,071st time) is why that ‘R’ was passed over by the MRC algorithm. For the 1,071st time, you again choose to ignore all of the other characters the algorithm passed over. And again, for the 1,071st time, the ‘R’ is a faint impression in the original; contrast with the surrounding image is below the threshold for edge detection. It was literally “passed over”.
If that’s beyond your grasp after all this time, time for you to retire. Educated, rational, experienced adults are talking. Adults capable of learning are listening.
How is any of that relevant?
My BC doesn’t prove my parents were married or living at the same address and I am just as eligble as Obama.
So once again- how is that relevant to establishing eligibility?
How did you satisfy your concerns of eligiblity for Bush? Or Romney?
Former Sen. Don Nickles introduced the Natural Born Citizen Act in 2004 to define the term, natural-born citizen, to include people who derived citizenship at birth from a U.S. citizen parent and to children under 18 who were adopted by U.S. citizens.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, went a step further, introducing the Equal Right to Govern Amendment in July 2003 to allow immigrants who had been naturalized for at least 20 years to run for president.
in the future there will be discussions of people born due to in vitro fertilization, or snowflake babies, or from closed adoptions, due to rape, etc
in fl, the judge asked birther attorney, larry klayman, “what about kids who were born after their fathers’ died”
how many qualified people do some wish to exclude due to a confusion over natural born/native born v. naturalization and only for the president & VP?
That one was a new term to me; you learn something every day. But don’t worry — I’ve been studying up!
On that, I agree with you. Parental marriage is central to holding office. Here’s the perfect example, when a candidate’s parents were not married at the time of birth:
“That bastard could not get elected dog catcher.”
Better than “terror babies”: Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) has beens sounding the alarm about a new and insidious plot involving so called “terror babies.” Infants are sometimes known to be terrors in their own right, but this diabolical plan involves terrorists sending pregnant women into the US to birth their America-hating spawns. The mothers and their kids then return home where, the congressman says, the children “could be raised and coddled as future terrorists”— and later, “twenty, thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.”
Read it to believe it:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2010/08/rep-louie-gohmerts-terror-baby-meltdown
A few years back there was an article in Scandinavia reporting on a study which said that as many as 15% of the children born there were fathered by someone other than their mother’s husband. Jo Nesbo, a wonderful Norwegian writer (hey, I’m on planes a lot) took that thread and turned it into “The Snowman.”
Lord knows what the troll Helen would do with that information. DNA tests. Limited, of course, to Black people. Because Helen, you’re a racist.
A few days ago, when i asserted that it was only the mother was a sure thing, and therefor, under the only possible ‘natural law’ interpretation, citizenship should follow the mother, you claimed that the father was simply believed, so citizenship followed the father.
Good grief, that’s so 2001!
And it was colossally stupid then. As if “hating America” is a genetic trait LOL
The Poky little Puppy is only $2.39?! SCORE!
That’s a fundamental facet of the asinine bigotry and delusional paranoia behind birtherism.
Citizenship follows soil, or if born abroad a more complex formula.
Simple… No need to have to establish paternity, just location of birth.
So simple… and yet, so hard to accept by some.
Woudn’t it be far easier to just have a good fake documents guy whip up passports for the terrorists?