Why the Daily Kos / FightTheSmears document is a forgery
Pardon me for repeating myself for present company.
Why the Daily Kos / FightTheSmears document is a forgery
http://images.dailykos.com/images/user/ ... ficate.jpg
What makes the Daily Kos image so important? It is the original from which FactCheck, FightTheSmears, Politfact, etc., derived the images they published later. The Daily Kos image has random dust specks at specific locations, for example, below the "E" in the "CERTIFICATION OF LIVE BIRTH" heading, at (x,y) = (893,185). Those random dust specks appear at the same locations on the other images, showing that they are copies of the first Daily Kos image.
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FATHER'S RACE
AFRICAN
This is an anachronism. It is out of place on a 1961 document. The term used then was "Negro", or perhaps "Colored". "African-American" was an unknown term forty or fifty years ago.
Besides, "African" is not a race; it is a native or resident of the continent of Africa. "African" includes significant populations which are Negro or colored, Caucasian or white, Mongoloid or Mongolian, Semitic (Arab or Hebrew), Aryan or Hindu, Polynesian, Hispanic, penguins, and probably anything else except Eskimo and Native American.
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DATE FILED BY REGISTRAR
AUGUST 8,1961
AUGUST 8, 1961 (note the additional space) is how this date should appear, and that is how the date does appear on other Hawaiian Certifications of Live Birth. But the forger made a mistake and left out the space between the comma and "1961".
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At the upper right of the form, the Certificate No. is redacted or blacked out. The warning at the bottom reads, "ANY ALTERATIONS INVALIDATE THIS CERTIFICATE". This Certification is invalid or VOID; it cannot be used for any legal purposes. (Although it does seem to have been used for illegal purposes.)
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The printed security border is not like real security borders printed between 2006 and 2008. The forged copy is not one continuous border, but a patchwork of pieces, each 240 pixels long, cut-and-pasted together to simulate an authentic 2007 security border, so as to match the "JUN 6 - 2007" date stamp.
"Dr. Ron Polarik" (a pseudonym) wrote, "However, both the embossed Seal and the State Registrar’s Signature stamp do not match the same elements found on a real 2007 COLB, but perfectly match those found on a real 2008 COLB; or, in other words, something that would never happen in real life."
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Genuine Certifications are horizontally centered on the paper, within 15 pixels, plus or minus. This forgery of a Certification was "printed" 75 pixels off center toward the left, more than 5 times the usual maximum variation on the genuine article.
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It is Hawaii Div. of Vital Records policy to release Certifications only as laser printer hard copy. But "printed" above is in quotes because this image did not originate as a paper copy printed on a laser printer. Rather, the forger generated it, or at least manipulated it, as an image in Photoshop. Opening the image file in a text editor reveals that the image file header has the following characters of EXIF identification data:
[Software ] = Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh
[DateTime ] = 2008: 06:12 08:42:36
In other words, the image was filed on a Macintosh computer using Adobe Photoshop CS3 software at 8:42 AM on 6/12/08, the date that Daily Kos published the computer image on their website. It is no longer the original scanner file scanned from an Hawaii Div. of Vital Records paper copy.
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The Daily Kos image has dimensions, 2427 x 2369. The printed security border has dimensions, 2372 x 2312. So the image is nearly square, 97½% square, to be more exact. But the printed security border is skewed on the paper, 15 pixels higher on the right side than on the left, and 3 pixels further left at the top than at the bottom. A vertical difference of 15 pixels in the right and left sides would normally indicate a paper misfeed by the printer, normally resulting in a paper jam, or at least wrinkling of the paper.
If the border were 97½% square like the image, it would be skewed 3.077 pixels higher and 3 pixels further left, 15 pixels higher and 14 5/8 pixels further left, or anywhere between, proportionately. But it isn't. The skew is 15 and 3. This printed image does not have right angled corners, not even in the computer program that supposedly generated it for Hawaii Vital Records. In the real world, programmers do not create trapezoidal official documents. This document is not the real world, folks. It is fantasy world.
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It is also Hawaii Div. of Vital Records policy to only release Certifications that are folded twice horizonally for mailing in a standard letter envelope. The Daily Kos image has a horizontal crease through the State Seal as evidence of the upper fold. There should be a horizontal crease near "MOTHER'S RACE CAUCASIAN" as evidence of a lower fold. Maybe you can find it; I couldn't. That's because it's not there, and it's not anywhere else, either. Couldn't this copy - just this one - have left Vital Records without a second fold? Not possible, says Vital Records. Every Certification is double-folded and placed in a letter envelope. Every one. Without exception.
Unless it didn't come from Vital Records.
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Another Hawaii Div. of Vital Records policy is to only release Certifications with a date stamp, the Registrar's signature stamp, and the embossed seal of the State of Hawaii Department of Health, all on the reverse side. For whatever reason, Daily Kos did not provide an image of the reverse side. I shall not presume to know why they didn't; you can draw your own conclusions.
Normally, there is bleedthrough of the date stamp; the Daily Kos image has JUN - 6 2007 from the reverse side plainly visible on the front. Sometimes, but not always, there is some slight bleedthrough of the Registrar's signature stamp; there is none on the Daily Kos image, and that is OK. Often, but not always to cursory examination, the seal embossed on the reverse side is noticable on the front; not so on the Daily Kos image.
However, under sufficient magnification and with edging enhancement to bring out the embossing, an imaging professional can show up the deformations of the anti-counterfeiting green bars in the front side background, caused by the embossing on the back. This green paper is very thin by design, and any embossing on the back inevitably causes some deformation on the front. I do not see any crimping whatsoever at 3X magnification, and that is suspicious. Even with edging enhancement, those bits of a seal that can be brought out are fuzzy and look like a blurred 3rd or 4th generation copy, not crisp like an original.
FactCheck pasted an image of an embossed seal onto their images later. Those images are the latest generation of revisions of the original Daily Kos image. Since June 10, 2009, Mr. Obama's accessories have been scrubbing all earlier versions from the internet.
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The seal of the State of Hawaii at the top is not a sharp, original laser printout, either. It is a blurry, pixelated copy from another COLB.
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Text is overlaid by cut-and-paste rather than printed on the anti-counterfeiting, green patterned background. The result (under magnification) is pattern mismatches, stray pixels, "haloes" of pixelization around the cut-and-pasted letters, and between letters, white space where there should be green pattern - very different from the neat printed text on genuine COLBs.
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AtlasShrugs quoted TechDude saying,
"Upon very close inspection portions of the security border also repeat every 240 pixels. By mapping this repeating pattern it becomes apparent that the pattern is laid out as a 240 x 240 pixel square that can be accurately extrapolated to the next position by simply counting 240 pixels. This type of tiling effect is commonly seen when an image has been modified by filling an area using an image editing application’s tile or pattern fill function.
. . .
"The (Daily) KOS image security border pattern does not match any known specimen from any known year. [Given the impossibility of proving non-existence, there may be border pattern specimens which TechDude has not seen.] It does not match the pre-2006 nor does it match the post-2006 certificate patterns. The placement of the text in all of the pre-2006 and post-2006 certificates are almost identical pixel location matches while the image's text placement does not match any known specimen from any known year. The shape and kerning of the fonts used in the 2006 through 2008 certificates are identical while the shape and kerning of the fonts used in the image does not match any known specimen. The KOS image shows clear signs of tampering such as the mismatch in RGB and error levels, visible indications of the previous location of the erased security border, easily detectable patterns of repeating flaws around the new security border, EXIF data that says the image was last saved with Photoshop CS3 for Macintosh, and finally a technician from Hawaii who confirms it just looks wrong." http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atla ... usive.html