Forensic Investigation Obama Birth Certificate

Document forensics expert: Obama "birth certificate" a "horrible forgery" By Israel Insider staff July 20, 2008

Barack Obama may be on a world tour surrounded by a fawning media, but Sunday an expert in electronic document forensics released a detailed report on the purported birth certificate -- actually a "Certification of Live Birth" or COLB -- claimed as genuine by his campaign. The expert concludes with 100% certainty that it is a crudely forged fake: "a horribly forgery," according to the analysis published on the popular right-wing Atlas Shrugs blog. The purported birth certificate was published by the left wing Daily Kos blog on June 12 in response to unconfirmed reports that Obama was not in fact born in the United States (Canada and Kenya were suggested as the possible locations of his actual birth). Since he would in that case not be a natural born US citizen (his mother was not present in the US sufficiently long as an adult to pass American citizenship on to him automatically), he would not be eligible to be president. Israel Insider has followed the story in five previous articles (the previous one here) and uncovered evidence, most recently, of admitted forgery among Daily Kos bloggers, tolerance of electronic forgeries on the blog site, as well as efforts by a blog administrator to conceal the admission of forgery. The latest examinaton of the purported documents is by far the most detailed and technically sophisticated to date. Atlas Shrugs publisher Pamela Geller reports that the expert analyst, who goes by the screen name "Techdude", is "an active member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, American College of Forensic Examiners, The International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners, International Information Systems Forensics Association -- the list goes on. He also a board certified as a forensic computer examiner, a certificated legal investigator, and a licensed private investigator. He has been performing computer-based forensic investigations since 1993 (although back then it did not even have a formal name yet) and he has performed countless investigations since then." The pseudonym was apparently inadequate to prevent Techdude's identity from being exposed. He reports that Perhaps the last week one or more persons "decided to track me outspoken Israeli down and vandalize my car and hang a dead mutilated press corps will be rabbit from my front door in a lame attempt to intimidate able to do what me from proceeding with releasing any details of my their fawning analysis. They did succeed in delaying the report by a American few days but instead of deterring me they just really counterparts have pissed me off. To their credit, if I had not taken a few failed to do so far. days off from the analysis I would have missed the most Obama's visit this damning piece of evidence -- the remnants of the week to Israel will previous security border." be an opportunity to begin asking the tough questions -however unpolitically correct -- about his apparently forged birth certificate and what that means for his citizenship status and Constitutional fitness to be the next leader of the free world.

Techdude's detailed report, which runs more than 3000 words and 20 pages with extensive magnified illustrations and comparisons, reaches the following conclusion about the documented that was first published on the Daily Kos extreme left-wing blog and subsequently publicly endorsed by the Obama campaign, both in statements by official spokesmen, and featured on its "Fight the Smears" website. Here are some of conclusions: "The (Daily) KOS image security border pattern does not match any known specimen from any known year. 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." The evidence, he says, allows for two possible scenarios by which the document was fabricated: "There are two obvious scenarios used to create the image that can be ascertained from evidence. Either a real COLB was scanned into Photoshop and digitally edited or a real COLB was first scanned to obtain the graphic layout then blanked by soaking the document in solvent to remove the toner. After rescanning the blank page to a separate image the graphics from the previously obtained scan could then be easily applied to the blank scan after some editing and rebuilding. It would also explain why date stamp bleeds through the paper and the various bits of toner located around the image as well as the remnants of the previous location of a security border." The purported birth certificate was published by the Daily Kos on June 12 in response to unconfirmed reports that Obama was not in fact born in the United States (Canada and Kenya were suggested as the possible locations of his actual birth). Since he would in that case not be a natural born US citizen (his mother was not present in the US sufficiently long as an adult to pass American citizenship on to him automatically), he would not be eligible to be president. After more than a month of controversy and demands that the Obama campaign produce a paper birth certificate for analysis, this damning new evidence raises the stakes for the democratic party and its front-runner. Will Obama and his people continue to stonewall in the facing of the mounting evidence of forgery, and provide paper proof of an authentic, original birth certificate or even a genuine secondary Certificate of Live Birth? And will the mass media and mainstream pundits -- which so far have hesitated to touch the hot potato -- finally address the loaded issue of his possible unfitness to meet the basic Constitutional requirement for a President? Perhaps the outspoken Israeli press corps will be able to do what their fawning American counterparts have failed to do so far. Obama's visit this week to Israel will be an opportunity to begin asking the tough questions -- however unpolitically correct -- about his apparently forged birth certificate and what that means for his citizenship status and Constitutional fitness to be the next leader of the free world. This is the sixth of a series on the purported Obama birth certificate. Here's where you can find Part 1, 2, 3 4, and 5. Other articles about Barack Obama are linked on the upper left of this article. Join our cool new (N)Obama Club, where you can stay up to date with constantly updated videos, photos, and news streams about Barack H. Obama and discuss him in infinite depth and detail with other fans and critics.

© 2001-2004 Koret Communications Ltd. All rights reserved.

Obama campaign claims suspect "birth certificate" as genuine item By Reuven Koret June 21, 2008

In response to mounting media questions about the failure of the Barack Obama presidential campaign to produce the presumptive Democratic nominee's birth certificate, an official spokesman of the campaign has endorsed as genuine the image of a document purporting to be his "birth certificate." But some who have examined that image in high resolution claim inconsistencies and irregularities which suggest that the purported document is a forgery. Its high profile use by the campaign, they claim, suggests an attempt to conceal the truth of Obama's birth circumstances and citizenship qualifications from the American people. The campaign has posted only a low-resolution image of that document, which it claims is his "birth certificate," on its "Fight the Smears" website, along with purported proof of why the claim that Obama may not qualify as a "natural born citizen" is false: --Lie: Obama Is Not a Natural Born Citizen Truth: Senator Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, after it became a state on August 21st, 1959. Obama became a citizen at birth under the first section of the 14th Amendment "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside...." --Contrary to the campaign's claims, the issue of when Hawaii became a state and the wording of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, are not at issue. Rather it is Article Two, Section One of the Constitution which requires that the President be a "natural born citizen" and not simply a naturalized citizen. The issue is whether there is proof that Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, the legal status of his mother at the time, and what exactly is written on the original birth certificate -- if it in fact such a certificate exists. Some bloggers have claimed that the purported official State of Hawaii document, originally published by the radical left Daily Kos blog, is a fake, and a poorly executed one at that. Examination of the higher resolution of the image indicates irregularities which suggest to some that the purported "certificate" may be a forgery produced or modified by Photoshop or another image-editing software, and not a genuine item. The evidence, presented in greatest detail by the blogger Polarik at TownHall, includes: "I can confirm that that is Sen. Obama's birth certificate." Ben LaBolt, an Obama campaign spokesman, to the

1. Use of a second generation reproduction of the seal of the State of Hawaii at the top 2. Blacking out of the Certificate number in an attempt to prevent it from being traced 3. Absence of any official signature or seal which typically

spokesman, to the Los Angeles Times.

appear on such documents 4. Crudely arranged borders inconsistent with a professionally produced official document 5. Crude overlay of the textual items on top of the patterned background, indicating that the background was produced first and then the textual images laid on top of it by a graphical program rather than being scanned from the original. 6. Failure to use the double-S symbol before the listing the relevant statute (HRS 338-13b) as appears in official uses of the State of Hawaii. 7. The appearance of the backward facing text "Jun 6, 2007" that appears to come from a stamp in the lower right hand portion of the document. 8. The description of his father's race as African, when the term Negro was reportedly used at the time of birth. 9. The use of an identical typeface for all text items on the page. Even if one or two of the above irregularities may have an explanation, they claim, the aggregate points to an amateurish attempt to manufacture an official-looking document that may not exist in the official records of the state of Hawaii. On its face, this document does not even presume to be a copy of the original birth certificate -- contrary to the claims of the Obama campaign -- but rather a secondary Certification of Live Birth, which may be used when the original birth certificate can't be located, and can be produced after the fact with just the affadavits of a family member, or even the child himself. The Obama campaign, however, has not even produced a paper version of this document, and indeed it does not even publish the high resolution version that appeared on the Daily Kos. It has not fulfilled the media's persistent requests to produce the original Birth Certificate, or to respond to media questions about the birth certificate controversy. What could be the Obama campaign's motive for withholding the original birth certificate and passing off instead a crudely forged facsimile of a "Certification of Live Birth"? Speculation in the blogosphere and mainstream media is rampant that the concealment is for one or more of the following reasons: 1. 2. 3. or 4. 5.

There is no proof that Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961. The father listed on the birth certificate is not Barack Hussein Obama. The father's race is listed as something other than African, perhaps Muslim Arab. The mother was no longer at that time an American citizen. The child's name is not listed as Barack Hussein Obama II.

Jim Geraghty, reporting on the Campaign Spot blog of the National Review and one of the original writers on the controversy, cited the "rumor" that Obama was born not within the United States, but elsewhere, possibly Kenya. Geraghty stated that "If Obama were born outside the United States, one could argue that he would not meet the legal definition of natural-born citizen -- because U.S. law at the time of his birth required his natural-born parent (his mother) to have resided in the United States for '10 years, at least [f]ive of which had to be after the age of 16.'" He then points out that Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, was 18 when Obama was born "so she wouldn't have met the requirement of five years after the age of 16." According to FindLaw.com, cited by Geraghty, the requirements that were in force from Dec. 24, 1952 to Nov. 13, 1986, encompassing the time of Obama's birth, state, "If only one parent was a U.S. citizen at the time of your

birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least 10 years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16." Geraghty said the Obama campaign could "debunk" the rumors about his birth simply by releasing a copy of his birth certificate, but the campaign has so far chosen not to do that. The seriousness of this latest controversy cannot be underestimated. Unlike the scandals related to Obama's various associations with unsavory characters, or claims about his Muslim upbringing, the issue here relates to his citizenship and legal qualification to run for President of the United States. One would have thought that the most basic documentary proof of the location and date of his birth should be a basic and non-controversial requirement for any presidential candidate, and part of the public record, much more so than one's tax return or annual checkup. It is almost incomprehensible that they would withhold this information -- unless there is something to hide. Ironically, a similar controversy surrounded Obama's likely opponent in the Presidential race, John McCain. McCain was born to two American parents, one of whom was serving in a US military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone. This Washington Post column on "Citizen McCain's Panama Problem?" examines the issue: "McCain was indeed born in the Canal Zone, and Article II of the Constitution plainly states that 'no person except a natural born Citizen... shall be eligible to the Office of President.' "Some might define the term 'natural-born citizen' as one who was born on United States soil. But the First Congress, on March 26, 1790, approved an act that declared, 'The children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond sea, or outside the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural-born citizens of the United States.' That would seem to include McCain, whose parents were both citizens and whose father was a Navy officer stationed at the U.S. naval base in Panama at the time of John's birth in 1936." But the issue is not legally closed, and therefore this year, as reported in the legal column of the Wall Street Journal a non-binding resolution was introduced and passed affirming that McCain qualifies as a "natural born Citizen," as specified in the Constitution and is therefore eligible for the highest office in the land. Ironically, the resolution was co-sponsored by Barack Obama. About McCain, of course, there is no question about the facts surrounding his birth, but over their legal significance. He is not denying that he was born in Panama, or posting certificates that claim he was born in Florida. Obama's campaign, on the other hand, seems intent on evading the need to produce and submit to public scrutiny the official document that could prove that his qualification to run for President according to the Constitution. The cloud of controversy, of course, could be dispelled with ease, of course, if Obama would release the real documentation of his birth, or even the original printed version of the online document the campaign claims as genuine. And yet the campaign is sticking by its guns, despite the evidence from the blogosphere pointing to the forgery and inadequacy of the proffered image of the non-birth certificate. Ben LaBolt, an Obama campaign spokesman, told the LA Times: "I can confirm that that is Sen. Obama's birth certificate." Validation for the authenticity of the image is provided by a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, who reportedly emailed the image and got a confirmation from an official in the Hawaiian Department of Health. "It's a

valid Hawaii state birth certificate," spokesman Janice Okubo is quoted as telling the reporter. Israel Insider is checking into this report and will report back on its findings. © 2001-2004 Koret Communications Ltd. All rights reserved.

Unstamped certificate suggests Obama may not be "natural born" US citizen By Reuven Koret June 24, 2008

The "birth certificate" claimed by the Barack Obama campaign is not certified as authentic and appears to be a photoshopped fake. The image, purporting to come from the Hawaii Department of Health, has been the subject of intense skepticism in the blogosphere in the past two weeks. But now the senior spokesman of that Department has confirmed to Israel Insider what are the required features of a certified birth document -features that Obama's purported "birth certificate" clearly lack. The image became increasingly suspect with Israel Insider's revelation that variations of the certificate image were posted on the Photobucket image aggregation website -- including one listing the location of Obama's birth as Antarctica, one with the certificate supposedly issued by the government of North Korea, and another including a purported photo of baby Barack -- one of which has a "photo taken" time-stamp just two minutes before the article and accompanying image was posted on the left-wing Daily Kos blog. That strongly suggests that Daily Kos obtained the image from Photobucket, not the State of Hawaii, the Obama family, or the Obama campaign. Photobucket is not generally known as a credible supplier of official vital records for any of the fifty states, and the liberties that other Photoshoppers took with the certificates confirms this. Some of these oddities surfaced in Israel Insider's previous article on the subject, but new comparative documentary evidence presented below, and official verification obtained by Israel Insider from a senior Hawaiian official, provides the strongest confirmation yet. An authentic Hawaiian birth certificate for another Hawaiian individual has since surfaced which, using the same official form as the presumptive Obama certificate, includes an embossed official seal and an authoritative signature, coming through from the back. Obama's alleged certificate lacks those features, and the certificate number referencing the birth year has been blacked out, making it untraceable. Janice Okubo, Director of Communications of the State of Hawaii Department of Health, told Israel Insider: "At this time there are no circumstances in which the State of Hawaii Department of Health would issue a birth certification or certification of live birth only electronically." And, she added, "In the State of Hawaii all certified copies of certificates of live birth have the embossed seal and registrar signature on the back of the document." Compare the top image presented by his campaign as evidence of Obama's 1961 birth and the other certifying the birth of one Patricia Decosta.

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So if he were registered as being born in Hawaii, Barack Obama -- because

only he or another member of his immediate family could by law request a "Certification of Live Birth" -- must have a certified paper copy, with embossed stamp and seal, or he could request one. But what his campaign has put forward as genuine, according to the senior spokesman in the relevant department of the State of Hawaii, is not in fact a certified copy. It is not valid. Whereas the uncertified Obama document provides the date "filed by registrar", the certified DeCosta document provides the date "accepted by the registrar." The difference between filing an application for a Certification of Live Birth and having it accepted may be key here. The Obama campaign, however, continues to flaunt the unstamped, unsealed, uncertified document -- notably in very low resolution -- on its "Fight the Smears" website, with campaign officials vowing that it's authentic, sending the image around as "proof" to reporters, and inviting supporters to refer to it as they battle against supposed distortions and calumnies against their candidate. However, the campaign refuses to produce an authentic original birth certificate from the year of Obama's birth, or even a paper version with seal and signature of the "Certification of Live Birth." Nor has it even published an electronic copy with the requisite embossed seal and signature. The failure of the Obama campaign to do so, and its willingness instead to put up an invalid, uncertified image -- what now appears to be a crude forgery -raises the dramatic question of why the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate might have to hide. Until now, it has been thought that there might be some embarrassing information on the real certificate: was the candidate's name something other than Barack Hussein Obama II, as it is claimed? Was no father listed because of the uncertainty over Obama's paternity? Was his father's race listed as Arab, or Muslim, rather than African? These revelations might be embarrassing, and further undermine his credibility, but he could disavow and downplay their significance. Would revealing such embarrassment outweigh the far greater risks involved in perpetuating a palpable forgery, or passing off an uncertified official document as being certified? There is one possibility, however, which alone might justify the risk that Obama and his campaign seems to be taking in putting forward the uncertified document image: Obama was not in fact born in Hawaii and may not be an American citizen at all, or at least not a "natural born citizen" as the Constitution defines the requirement for the nation's chief executive. Real original birth certificates, circa 1961, have all kinds of verifiable information that would confirm Obama's origins, or throw them into doubt should they be lacking. Research has since uncovered the law, in force at the time of Obama's birth, that were he to have been born in another country, his young American mother's youth extended time abroad would not suffice to make him a "natural born citizen." Even if he were naturalized later -- and there is no evidence that he was -- he would not be eligible to run for the office of president and -- if forgery or misrepresentation were involved -- he and his staffers might find themselves facing stiff federal and state charges. But if, at this late date, Obama has no proof of being a US citizen by law, natural born or otherwise, then he or his advisers may be tempted to try to "tough out" the allegations about his "birth certificate" or the lack thereof. He and his campaign have gotten through other embarrassments: maybe this one will go away, too. Because the consequences were he to admit, or should it come out, that he was not born in Hawaii would be so grave as to make it tempting to take the

gamble and hope that no one dares call his most audacious bluff by demanding proof. Talk about the audacity of hope. But now the State of Hawaii has dashed those hopes by clarifying that a certified birth certificate must have an embossed seal and signature, features his claimed birth certificate image lack. The longer Obama waits, the graver grow the consequences of waiting. There is one simple way for the candidate to clear up the issue once and for all: produce for public inspection and objective analysis the paper copy of his original Hawaiian birth certificate -- if one exists. If he's lost the original, he can request a certified copy. Ordinary citizens are required to produce one to get a passport or a driver's license. Surely it's not too much to ask from a man who aspires to hold the highest office in the land. The issue is not whether Obama is black or white, Christian or Muslim. It is whether he was born in the USA and thus a citizen eligible according to the Constitution to run for President. If proof of citizenship does not exist, then surely it would be wiser to admit it now. Because if Barack Hussein Obama II does not produce definitive proof of his "natural born" American citizenship with original, verifiable documents, he will be setting the stage for a very public battle over his personal credibility, the basic legitimacy of his candidacy, and its possible criminality. UPDATE 6/26: Janice Okubo, in response to an Israeli Insider question on Tuesday, would not confirm nor deny whether she had told a St. Petersburg Times reporter whether she had said the birth certificate was "real", citing the statutory stipulation that "Hawaii state law (HRS !338-18) prevents disclosure of information contained in vital statistics records except to those people who have a direct and tangible interest in the record as defined by statute." This would, however, seem to negate the propriety of any disclosure by her of confidential information. Jim Geraghty of The National Review Online, following up on this Israel Insider report, said he had contacted Okubo: "I spoke to Ms. Okubo late Wednesday afternoon, and she said she had seen the version of Obama's certificate of live birth posted on the sites. While her office cannot verify the information on a form without the permission of the certificate holder (Obama), she said "the form is exactly the same" and it has 'all the components of a birth certificate' record issued by the state. In other words, she sees no reason to think the version posted on Obama's web site and Daily Kos is not genuine." "The 'embossed seal' in question is, she said, probably on the back of the document provided to Daily Kos, but not visible (as in another certificate posted on Israel Insider for contrast). She thinks the difference in visibility can be attributed to the pressure used when applying the seal." Geraghty's interpretation of Okubo's comments is inexact and tendentious. First, her observation that "the form is the same" is not contested, here or elsewhere. No one is doubting that the form that appears on the various websites (including this one) is a replica of that used for valid certificates. Therefore Geraght's interpretation that follows "In other words" is clearly his own conclusion, not hers. Indeed, Okubo confirms to Geraghty that the image is lacking the "embossed seal" (and the official signature) that are required for the certificate to be

valid. While "she thinks" that the difference in visibility might be attributed to varying "pressure," she admits that she does not know and has not seen the original. Contrasting the purported Obama image with the DeCosta sample, it is hard to imagine the embossed seal and signature being of such light pressure that they would become completely invisible. An inked date of June 6, 2007, in reverse, does come through. But in any event, Okubo's confirmation that the premsumptive birth certificate is lacking the required stamps makes it all the more imperative for Obama to release the original paper certification, the only valid kind, and not an easy-to-photoshop electronic facsimile thereof. It should not be hard to produce, since Hawaii provides for family members to request them. Even though Geraghy notes that Obama "initially refused to provide his birth certificate," he has suggested that it is "rather unlikely" that Obama was born in Kenya, since it would require that the candidate and his family do a lot of lying. In fact, there were reports of Kenyati relatives claiming he was born there, and there is the mysterious disappearance of his grandmother, who may indeed know something about this subject. After all, being born in Hawaii is part of the "family legend" and it would be unreasonable to expect this to vary from interview to interview, especially when a non-Hawaiian birth would invalidate Obama's run for the presidency. It is indeed hard to believe that Obama could have gone through his life without having to prove that he was an American citizen. But the credulity with which the mainstream media has automatically accepted as valid the image that appears on the radical left Daily Kos blog and on the Obama campaign's polemical "Fight the Smears" website makes it clear that many have been unwilling, now and in the past, to demand proof of an authentic document. They prefer to accept on faith that the candidate or his campaign would not lie about such a thing, assuming he has nothing to hide and no motive to lie. But until the certified paper birth document is produced -- either by media pressure or a legal challenge in any state -- the fact remains that Obama has not proven that he is a "natural born citizen" eligible to be President according to the Constitution. Join our cool new (N)Obama Club, where you can stay up to date with constantly updated videos, photos, and news streams about Barack H. Obama and discuss him in infinite depth and detail with other fans and critics.

© 2001-2004 Koret Communications Ltd. All rights reserved.

As Obama stonewalls on uncertified birth certificate, official doubts mount By Reuven Koret June 28, 2008

A senior official in the State of Hawaii's Department of Health, Director of Communications Janice Okubo, confirms that the image published and circulated by the Obama campaign as his "birth certificate" lacks the necessary embossed seal and signature. Backing away from a quote attributed to her that the image on the campaign site was "valid," she told the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times in an article published yesterday: "I don't know that it's possible for us to even say beyond a doubt what the image on the site represents." Barack Obama has claimed in writing to have a valid printed document: In the first chapter of his book Dreams From My Father, describing his origins, he wrote about finding a local Hawaiian newspaper article about his Kenyan father: "I discovered this article, folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I was in high school." So where is that birth certificate? It got lost? The dog ate it? No matter. Barack Obama or an immediate family member can plunk down $10 ($11.50 if he orders online) and have Hawaii mail a certified document to him within a week or two. But more than two weeks have passed since the Obama campaign adopted the suspect, uncertified image of a purported birth document published by a left-wing blog Daily Kos, and nothing certified and nothing on paper has since has been forthcoming. Nor has there been any official comment about the issue from the campaign. They may cling to the hope -- however audacious -- that the one issue that could disqualify their man constitutionally from gaining the presidency will just go away. Amy Hollyfield of the St. Petersburg Times, and a reporter for the paper's "Politifact" blog, said that she has been seeking the birth certificate "for months." She was frustrated: "Hawaii birth certificates aren't public record. Only family members can request copies, so when the campaign declined to give us one, we were stalled." Finally, the campaign released the image (resembling the one at the top of this article). Hollyfield e-mailed it to the Hawaii Department of Health, which maintains such records, to ask if it was real. "It's a valid Hawaii state birth certificate," spokesman Janice Okubo told us. Then the firestorm started. Israel Insider contacted Okubo several days. She could not refer to Obama's specific case, she said, because no one but an authorized family member can do so. But she did confirm that a valid "certification of live birth" would need to have an embossed seal and signature and that it can only be printed and mailed. There is no such thing as an electronic only certification. In our previous article on this subject we published an example of a certified birth certificate of another Hawaiian citizen, Patricia DeCosta, reproduced below. The stamp and signature are reversed because the embossing is done from the back as per law, as Okubo noted is required by law.

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Speaking to National Review Online, Okubo admitted that the Obama image lacked those required features but thought that perhaps the embossing was applied too lightly. Maybe so, but all the certificates we have seen have the embossed imprint clearly visible, as well as horizontal fold marks. We got an email yesterday from Bryan Suits who has a radio show on KFI Los Angeles. He writes: There's only one "I have just received my State of Hawaii certified birth way for Obama to certificate for my 1964 debut on the planet earth. It show he's a looks....nothing like Obama's. We've scanned it at 72dpi, natural born 300dpi. Nuthin. We can't make the emboss disappear. citizen eligible to Also, we can't make THE FOLDS disappear!! How did be President: FightTheSmears do it? produce the paper proof.

I got curious when I compared his (with the 2007 date bleed) to my old beat-up1986 copy. then I went online on June 13 and ordered the thing. It got here yesterday tri-folded in a state of hawaii envelope. I called the State and asked if I could get an unfolded copy. No dice. Hollyfield brings up other issues that her readers raised, although she does not address them or explain them [bracketed comments from Israel Insider]: Where is the embossed seal and the registrar's signature? [Required for validity]

Comparing it to other Hawaii birth certificates, the color shade is different. Isn't the date stamp bleeding through [in reverse] the back of the document [image] "June [6] 2007?" (Odd since it was supposedly released in June 2008.) There's no crease from being folded and mailed. [Hawaii requires printing and mailing, according to Okubo. Electronic images are never released, she assured us, nor are they valid.] It's clearly Photoshopped and a wholesale fraud.

Hollyfield, frustrated by failing to access the required original, being refused by the Obama campaign, and finding only secondary documents from his subsequent career, asks what's "reasonable" and then claims that skeptics about Obama's published birth certificate believe that there's a conspiracy afoot: Because if this document is forged, then they all are. If this document is forged, a U.S. senator and his presidential campaign have perpetrated a vast, long-term fraud. They have done it with conspiring officials at the Hawaii Department of Health, the Cook County (Ill.) Bureau of Vital Statistics, the Illinois Secretary of State's office, the Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois and many other government agencies.

But Hollyfield is mistaken. There would be no need to invent a conspiracy among officials. All Obama needed to do would be to pass off an uncertified document as being certified. He may have done so unwittingly. Then the rest can follow without any need to conspire with any other official. They just take it on faith that the person is an American citizen. They don't check about the embossing requirements of the State of the Hawaii. They believe Obama. Why should they doubt him, certainly after he becomes a lawyer and a state senator? The officials believe that the claimed document is authentic, and therefore issue other documents, based on the phony one, buried deep in the documentary chain. Unwitting or not, however, the high stakes for basing one's citizenship on an uncertified birth certificate must be pretty obvious to the campaign now. Nothing else explains why Obama's campaign refused to release the original paper document, to make this distracting controversy go way. Because Hollyfield is right about one thing: "If this document is forged, a U.S. senator and his presidential campaign have perpetrated a vast, long-term fraud." U.S. citizens who have written to Israel Insider or have posted on the Internet are not satisfied. Ordinary people are compelled to produce certified paper birth certificates to get a passport or a driver's license. Why, people are asking, doesn't Obama needed to show one to run for President? In a follow-up contact by Hollyfield, Janice Okubo backtracked and qualified, pointing to the main issue that Israel Insider and others have brought into focus [our comments in brackets]:

"I guess the big issue that's being raised is the lack of an embossed seal and a signature," Okubo said, pointing out that in Hawaii, both those things are on the back of the document. "Because they scanned the front -- you wouldn't see those things." [But of course, as in the DeCosta sample and others, you can see it clearly.] Okubo says she got a copy of her own birth certificate last year and it is identical to the Obama one we received. [Well, "identical" cannot be correct. Her name is not Obama, Her certificate number was not blacked out, and her certificate had the required embossed certification. So she can only be saying that the form looked the same, as she said to the National Review Online's Jim Geraghty.] And about the copy we e-mailed her for verification? "When we looked at that image you guys sent us, our registrar, he thought he could see pieces of the embossed image through it." [Except that she received only what was published on the Internet and circulated by email, and no "pieces of the embossed image" do come through that. We have published the highest resolution available and there is no trace of embossed seal or signature. Readers can see for themselves.] Still, she acknowledges: "I don't know that it's possible for us "to even say beyond a doubt what the image on the site represents." And there you have it. Okubo can't "even say beyond a doubt what the image on the site represents" because she is not allowed access to Barack Obama's personal records. State law prohibits it. Only Barack Obama (or another immediate family member) can authorize the release of the paper birth certificate, and submit it to objective analysis. He refuses to do so, even though it would seem to be in his interest to do so, to silence the skeptics, to show that they are wrong and he is right, to settle once and for all that he is a "natural born citizen" entitled by the US Constitution to be President of the United States. Yet there is only silence and inaction from Obama and his campaign on the subject. The palpably uncertified document remains online, with an explanation that refers only to the date of Hawaiian Statehood and an irrelevant passage from the Constitution. Admitting her failure to obtain a demonstrably authentic birth document for the candidate, Hollyfield falls back at the end of her latest article into her reliance on the "straw man" of a conspiracy theory. And there's the rub. It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice [sic] of the world's biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything's possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what's reasonable has to take over. There is not one shred of evidence to disprove PolitiFact's conclusion that the candidate's name is Barack Hussein Obama, or to support allegations that the birth certificate he released isn't authentic. Here Hollyfield is again incorrect. He didn't release a birth certificate, but an image of a purported "certification of live birth" that contains dubious features, lacks a traceable certificate number and -- as the Hawaiian state official Okubo

admits -- lacks the stamp and signature required to make it valid. There need be no conspiracy by state or federal officials, just a willingness to believe Obama and accept an image that might look real but might not be. If Obama is confident that he has a valid paper birth certificate from Hawaii, it is unreasonable for him to be withholding it. But if he lacks a valid US birth certificate, and therefore cannot prove that he is an American citizen, then he would have good reason to put up a smokescreen and stonewall as long as he can. He would have good reason to try and slide by, as he may have done in the past, by putting up something that would pass as legitimate to the untrained and uninformed, as the one posted by the left-wing Daily Kos blog did, and which much of the media accepted as such, on his say-so. Because if Obama lacks a valid birth certificate from Hawaii, it would mean that he has been living a lie his whole life: an illegal alien born outside the country who never obtained American citizenship, never became naturalized, and yet has been passing himself off as a citizen to the Illinois Bar, the Illinois Legislature, the US Senate and now, as a candidate for President. To give Obama the benefit of the doubt: he may not know that he was not born in Hawaii. This may also be part of the family legend his mother communicated to him. As he himself admits in the first chapter of his Dreams, this would not be the only half-truth or outright life his white family told him. The chapter skips over completely anything about the circumstances of his birth or what preceded it: "First the baby arrived, eight pounds, two ounces, with 10 toes and 10 fingers and hungry for food." Subsequent reports have him born in two different hospitals. Has Obama -- by the "white lie" of claiming to be born in Hawaii (whether the lie came from him or from his mother) and not Kenya or Canada as some have a suggested -- been misrepresenting himself -- wittingly or unwittingly -to the people of his state and his nation all along? If it is unwitting, it is tragic. If it is witting, it is criminal. Either way, knowing the potential damage of this revelation, he would have every reason to put up a web site accusing his critics of conducting a smear campaign to avoid answering valid questions about his identity and background. He would have every reason to accuse political opponents of planning a campaign that raises these questions -- as if to ask whether a candidate for US President is in fact a US citizen is an illegitimate question. To this day, the question about Obama's national origins remains unanswered, because the proof offered to date is inadequate, even according to the responsible Hawaiian state officials. The question is not whether he's black or white or somewhere in between. The question is not whether he's a Muslim or Christian, a Democrat or a Communist. The question is whether he can document that he was born in Hawaii and thus meet the requirements of the Constitution. Yes, the question about whether the candidate is a natural born American citizen is legitimate. But is Obama? There is one loophole that may yet qualify Obama as natural-born, even if he could not prove he was born in Hawaii: the fact that his mother was US-born. "A child born abroad on or after December 24, 1952 and before November 14, 1986 to one U.S. citizen parent and one non-citizen parent can acquire U.S. citizenship at birth if the U.S. citizen parent can demonstrate that he or she was physically present in the United States for a minimum of ten years, at least five of which were after the age of fourteen, prior to the birth of the child." Because Barack's mother -- born November 29, 1942 -- bore him at the age of 18 years, eight

months plus, she could not possibly qualify for the five year requirement. (A subsequent law reduced the five years to two, but only for children born after 1986, and made provisional retroactive exceptions favoring parents serving in the military or for international organization. Neither applies to Obama). Thus the bottom line is this: If Obama can't prove he has a certified Hawaiian birth certificate, he's not a natural born American. If he's not a natural born American, he can't be president. That's the law of the land. This is a matter of US national security. Because there are people in this world who know the truth and can prove it. They would be able to hold that knowledge and proof over his head to make him do their bidding, or else expose him as a fraud, liar and, yes, an illegal alien. That is not a risk that it is reasonable for the American people to take. Beyond the vulnerability to blackmail, there is a more fundamental question that must be asked if Obama is not forthcoming in producing the requisite documentation of his citizenship: does the American people really want to elect a man who would conceal his past and identity? Does it want to elect a man who would withhold the full truth and stonewall legitimate questions in his pursuit of the presidency, all the while claiming to be a victim and accusing others of fraud? There's only one way for Obama to show he's a natural born citizen eligible to be President: produce the paper proof. If there's a seal and a signature, no problem, he qualifies. Whether from popular pressure or a legal challenge to his credentials, it is essential that Obama be forced to release for objective analysis the birth certificate he claimed in own book to possess. Each American, at watershed moments in his or her life -- to get a driver's license, a marriage certificate, a passport -- must produce a paper birth certificate for official inspection and analysis. Now it's Obama's turn. Join our cool new (N)Obama Club, where you can stay up to date with constantly updated videos, photos, and news streams about Barack H. Obama and discuss him in infinite depth and detail with other fans and critics.

© 2001-2004 Koret Communications Ltd. All rights reserved.

Blogger manipulates birth certificate image, undermining Obama claims By Israel Insider staff July 3, 2008

Jay McKinnon, a self-described Department of Homeland Security-trained document specialist, has implicated himself in the production of palpably fake Hawaii birth certificate images similar to the one endorsed as genuine by the Barack Obama campaign, and appearing on the same Daily Kos blog entry where the supposedly authentic document appears. The evidence of manipulation of images of official documents, triggered by Israel Insider's revelation of the collection of Hawaii birth certificate images on the Photobucket site and the diligent detective work of independent investigative journalists in the three weeks since the publication of the images, implicate The Daily Kos, a "progressive" blog site, and the Obama campaign's "Fight the Smears" website, in misleading the public with officiallooking but manipulated document images of doubtful provenance. Moreover, the blog and the campaign have been negligent in allowing the promotion of obviously fake official documents together with the purported image of Obama's birth certificate. ORIGINS OF THE SUSPECT IMAGE ON DAILY KOS The blog entry, posted by the site founder Kos (Markos Moulitsas), is presented as a response to a request by Jim Geraghty of the National Review Online, who had, three days before, called for the Obama campaign to release the candidate's birth certificate: Having done some Obama-rumor debunking that got praise from Daily Kos (a sign of the apocalypse, no doubt), perhaps the Obama campaign could return the favor and help debunk a bunch of others with a simple step: Could they release a copy of his birth certificate? Reporters have asked for it and been denied, and the state of Hawaii does not make such records public [...] So Kos aka Moulitsas goes out and gets one. One impressed commenter on the site asks Kos where he got it. He answers: "I asked the campaign. This 'journamalism [sic] thing actually works sometimes." But why would a presidential campaign that has its own "Fight the Smears" website rely on a radical left-wing blog like Daily Kos to post its official documents, especially one as sensitive and controversial as a birth certificate? A few days later the Obama site would post a very low resolution, barely legible image -- it still is there on the site, with no reference to the one first posted at the Daily Kos. Yet the service of Daily Kos to the Obama campaign raises some questions: Who in the campaign would be authorized to release a personal document of Barack Obama's birth certificate? Was it a paper document that they sent to Kos to scan, or did the Obama campaign scan the original and send it to Kos? If so, why not just post it on the Fight the Smears site? Or is there another possible source for the document? There is no documentation of the provenance of this image, from whom and why it was transmitted to Daily Kos, and in which format. None, that is, except for the say-so of Markos

Moulitsas, who said he simply asked the Obama campaign for it. The perceived unreliability of the image has provoked petitions and widespread demands for Obama to submit for objective inspection the paper versions of the "birth certificate" he claimed in his book Dreams from My Father was in his possession, as well as the paper version of the Certificate of Live Birth for which the image on the Daily Kos and the Obama "Fight the Smears" website was supposedly generated. Without a valid birth certificate, the primary record of US birth, Obama cannot prove that he fulfills the "natural born citizen" requirement of the Constitution, throwing into doubt his eligibility to run for President and throwing the race into turmoil. His presumed Kenyan-born father was foreign-born, and his mother was too young at the time of birth to confer natural born status by virtue of her American citizenship. Thus his citizenship comes down to proving he was born in the USA, and his campaign has staked its credibility on the authenticity of the Daily Kos-derived birth certificate image. (These aspects of the case are covered extensively in the previous article in this series.) WHO IS OPENDNA/JAY McKINNON? Jay McKinnon ask opendna, who says he is 25-30 years old, operates a website called opendna.com and uses the opendna screen name on various web sites and blogs, including his comments and diary on The Daily Kos. In recent years he has divided his time between Long Beach, California and Vancouver, British Columbia. He is a Democratic political activist, frequent contributor to the left wing Daily Kos blog, and a fervent Barack Obama supporter. opendna posted on his Photobucket album two versions of a "Certification of Live Birth" document image, here and here. Both, as demonstrated in the respective blogs of analysts Polarik and JimJ, have a common visual signature (a dot that appears on all four images) with the images posted on the Daily Kos site image that the Obama campaign has endorsed as genuine on its "Fight the Smears" website and has distributed to news media as the "real" birth certificate of Barack Obama. The signature dot appears on that one, too, when magnified, albeit a bit ... smeared. Here's the same anomaly appears in Jay Mckinnon/opendna's images (highlight added by JimJ:

View the larger image. One image created and posted by opendna is what he describes as a "blank template" of a State of Hawaii Certification of Live Birth. Only two data fields are filled in: the ISLAND OF BIRTH ("Oahu") and the HOUR OF BIRTH (7:24 PM). Neither of the images have a posted date stamp, but embedded EXIF information contains the time stamp of June 12 at 8:24am, the same day and time Daily Kos posted the purported Obama birth certificate. Both images lack two salient characteristics present in the Barack Obama birth certificate images claimed by the Daily Kos blog and Obama's "Fight the Smears" site. The Field under CERTIFICATE NO is blank whereas on the purported "Obama birth certificate" that area is blacked out as if to conceal a real number. In addition, the two documents posted to the opendna account lack the reversed date (June 6, 2007) that appears at the bottom of the purported "Obama birth certificate." However, the ISLAND OF BIRTH and the HOUR OF BIRTH is identical on the "Haye I.B Ahphorgerie" and blank certificates as well as the purported "Obama birth certificate," which also claims 7:24 pm as the HOUR OF BIRTH and Oahu as the ISLAND OF BIRTH. The odds of an identical time occurring by chance in two certificates is 1440 to 1. Either the former is derived from the latter, or the latter is derived from the former. If "Haye I.B Ahphorgerie" were derivative of the purported "Obama birth certificate," it would have meant that -- in a matter of minutes on the morning of June 12, 2008, opendna would have had to tracelessly erase all fields (save ISLAND OF BIRTH and the HOUR OF BIRTH), and to painstakingly remove the blacked out area near CERTIFICATE NO and the reversed date that appears at the bottom of the purported "Obama birth certificate." Given the complexity of the background pattern, it would have been difficult to do this without leaving behind traces of the extractions. For what motive would one want to do this? Given that this is an official state document, the risks of altering and tampering with it, or offering it for the express purpose of creating a forgery, or promoting it on a website, would seem to be rather high for fun and games. The second possibility is that the blank document preceded the purported Obama birth certificate, serving as a "master" for the other. Either one would find a "blank document" and fill it in, or one would scan or photograph an authentic document and then "clean it" to create a blank document that would be filled in with personal details and the necessary stamps and signatures. One might be inclined to leave in type for two rows for alignment purposes and to ensure that the font type and size are consistent. Later one would fill in the blank areas with the desired data and "authentic" markings. McKINNON's VISUAL CONFESSION ON THE DAILY KOS The significance of opendna's manipulated birth certificate template can be discerned by looking more closely at the Daily Kos blog entry in which the purported Obama birth certificate first appears. Indeed, the document image was initially posted with a resolution of 1024 x 1000. Only later, after it was discovered that the document stamp and official signature were lacking from the document image, Kos replaced the image with the much higher resolution in which it is claimed that, after a series of complex image manipulation steps using special imaging software, a faint image of something the website claims is the missing seal appears. (Even if there is a seal, it's not clear it's a seal from an Obama birth certificate, and there is no visible registrar signature, which is also required for a certified document.) But it is impossible to make out with the naked eye, and the manipulation is illegible and useless for verification purposes.

A possible answer for some of these anomalies is provided in banter between opendna and other commenters in the discussion thread of the blog post. At 12:41pm, a prior request for a "font expert" is answered by opendna: "How about a certified DHS [Department of Homeland Security] document expert?" And by 1:35pm opendna comes up with a suggestion for a new birth certificate for John McCain: "Why don't you just print one up for him? Here's a blank template." And sure enough, there in the comments stream, he provides the "almost blank" Hawaii birth certificate image that appears on his Photobucket account, with just the information for the island and hour of birth. Of course, it's absurd to include a Hawaii birth certificate for John McCain, but what's striking is the availability of a "blank template" as McKinnon calls it. The next commenter is impressed: "why can't Geraghty find this stuff? (but bloggers like you have it at thier fingertips? No wonder print media is in total collapse."

Now, as the time stamps would have it, opendna's suggestion is out of synch, appearing 4-5 hours after the initial posting of the purported Obama birth certificate document. That doesn't make much sense: Kos doesn't need a birth certificate for Obama -- one was already posted! So why would OpenDNA post this? What explains his suggestion that Kos "print one up" with a "blank template"? Is he just trying to be funny? Is he trying to impress the other commenters? For this did he go through the trouble of removing all the text and the reverse date-stamp? Or was the blank template "just lying around somewhere" on his computer or in some corner of the Internet, just happening to have the identical information as the purported Obama birth certificate?

A hint may be found here (click the image to open one in higher resolution):

"Corvo", a very frequent commenter on Daily Kos, had written at 10 am: I'm sure that every forgery includes a note that essentially says "Hey! I'm a forgery!" At 01:27:12 PM PDT, some three hours later, under the subject "!!!" and without any further comment, OpenDNA posts a crop of his Haye I.B

Ahphorgerie image. In other word, in response to Corvo's comment, McKinnon makes a visual "joke" -- "Hey," the document is saying: "I be a forgery!" Remarkably, though, the Ahphorgerie crop appears seven minutes before opendna posts the "blank template" birth certificate image with the suggestion to "print one up" for Obama. So opendna was working on the image at that time. Of course, the almost-blank "Haye I.B Ahphorgerie" birth certificate is not a particularly useful counterfeit but, as McKinnon suggests, it could be put to good use by "printing one up" using the "blank template." It's as if opendna couldn't resist boasting, after the release of the "official" Obama version, of his own role: "Hey, I be a forgery!" It is certainly worthy of note that the "Haye I.B Ahphorgerie" image and comments were subsequently excised from the discussion thread, something that could only have been done by a site administrator or Kos himself. However, the management failed to clean up in the site archive from where these images were pulled and, as of this writing, is still publicly accessible. The suppression of the comments indicates that one or more persons at Daily Kos were involved in the attempted cover-up. ON THE UNBEARABLE EASE OF BIRTH CERTIFICATE FORGERY None of this is not to imply that McKinnon himself forged the Obama document, with all the fields filled in with information about the presidential candidate but lacking the visible stamp and signature that alone would make it an authentic document. Nor is their proof positive about how the almost-blank "Oahu 7:24pm" document is related to the one endorsed by the Obama campaign that features those exact details. The presence on the Daily Kos blog of the admittedly forged almost-blank templates of the document, and the admission of forgery by opendna in that same blog entry, should cause the Obama campaign to reassess its reliance on the image of the birth certificate published by the Daily Kos. If the website is the home for a self-admitted federally-trained document specialist, with examples of forgery posted concurrently with the image they claim as authentic, is that a venue appropriate for a presidential candidate to showcase the only available high resolution purported image of his vital records? If the birth certificate endorsed by his campaign turns out to be a fraud -- and the overwhelming evidence assembled points to it being precisely that -- what would that say about the credentials and judgment of the presidential candidate it purports to represent? Let alone his Constitutional eligibility to serve. Yet the Obama campaign, three weeks later, continues to run a derivative of the Daily Kos posts, and insists on its authenticity while refusing to submit any paper proof of birth for official or independent inspection, as if proof of Constitutional fitness to serve is of no consequence. In the summer of August 2006, blogging on the Daily Kos, opendna aka Jay McKinnon showed off his DHS-derived knowledge, discussing under the heading of "The Perfect ID Card" the ease of forging US documents, birth certificates in particular:

"Most Americans have worse ID than illegal immigrants. So, you have a letter from a notary that says you told him you're a citizen. Is that supposed to mean something? I'm certain he would sign one saying I told him I'm a carrot. Birth certificates, are you serious? Take a look at yours. Chances are I could counterfeit it at Kinkos." Jay McKinnon may not have had to go that far. In the course of my subsequent email exchange with McKinnon -- more on that in the next article -- he at last agreed to release the following statement: "I believe there is overwhelming evidence that Senator Obama is a natural born US Citizen, and I have no evidence to contradict that belief." He did not relate to the veracity of the Obama birth certificate images. This is Part 4 of a series. Here's where you can find Parts 1, 2, and 3. Other articles about Barack Obama and his mysterious background are linked on the upper left of this article. Join our cool new (N)Obama Club, where you can stay up to date with constantly updated videos, photos, and news streams about Barack H. Obama and discuss him in infinite depth and detail with other fans and critics.

© 2001-2004 Koret Communications Ltd. All rights reserved.

Birth certificate "painter" mocks Obama claim that image proves authenticity By Israel Insider staff July 7, 2008

In a rambling interview with the Daily Kos -- the blog site that published the supposedly authentic Barack Hussein Obama birth certificate and his own birth certificate manipulations in the same June 12 post, Jay McKinnon, aka opendna, says he manipulated the Obama birth certificate to create a blank Hawaii birth certificate as a "template," supposedly for a John McCain birth certificate. But he says it was not an attempt at deception but a "lame joke" that he now regrets. But in trying to avoid legal trouble by diminished the significance of manipulating electronic images, he further undermines the explicit claims of the Barack Obama campaign and the Daily Kos itself that the posted images of his purported birth certificate prove that the candidate was Hawaii-born. McKinnon, who says he was trained in document analysis by the Department of Homeland Security, says it's impossible to assess the authenticity of a birth certificate from image files rather than paper documents. "It should be selfevident that a JPEG [image file] of a scanned official document cannot be valid." While that conclusion echoes and strengthens the calls of those who have been demanding that Obama provide paper proof, McKinnon undermines his own credibility from the get-go when he claims that he first encountered the Obama birth certificate issue "around June 12, 2008" when "As I recall, someone sent me an email containing two images. One of the Decosta birth certificate and the other from Fight The Smears. The subject line was 'Birth Certificate Appears to be "Invalid." The only trouble with that statement is that McKinnon had already created the blank Hawaii birth certificate template for John McCain and the "Ahphorgerie" joke on June 12 before Fight the Smears had even published the birth certificate. Kos had published it that morning, about four hours earlier. Patricia DeCosta's birth certificate surfaced in the blogosphere only a week later, on June 19. So how did he compare the documents? And why would he say it was the first he'd heard of the birth certificate controversy when he had already posted his own patently fake certificates. In any case, McKinnon says, comparing two images to determine the validity of one or the other is a patently ridiculous task: "It was a kin [to] comparing two photocopies of dollar bills to determine if one of them was counterfeit." There's another oddity. The Fight the Smears image is a low-resolution image which has been proved to be derived directly from the Daily Kos scan. The former would have been useless for McKinnon to look at. So why didn't he look at the Daily Kos scan instead, which he had to know was the source for what appears on Fight the Smears? It doesn't make any sense. His explanation of the blank template is even more convoluted. "I made another joke about people making allegations of fraud: If people are allegedly faking birth certificates for Obama why shouldn't they fake one for McCain? In fact, why shouldn't both Senators be born in the same place at the same time? I would have left the date of birth in but it was too late to UNDO. Again, I thought it was self-evident what I'd done, how I'd done it and that the motivation was satire. But like I said, they weren't very funny jokes." Anyone who cares to read the comment thread can see this is a lie. No one

was making allegations of fraud at this time: Daily Kos had just published the "real thing" just hours before. They were having fun, showing the Dead Sea scrolls as McCain's birth certificate and other cheap shots. McKinnon is projecting this into the past to rationalize his own suggestion: "Why don't you print one up for him? Here's a blank template." He was just having fun. And while McKinnon may claim that no one took it seriously, the real point is not whether his blank template could be used to create a passable paper document but whether that blank template may have been used to create the birth certificate image file of Barack Hussein Obama, as the Daily Kos produced that very day, and the very same day that McKinnon produced his fakes. Clearly it could have been, by the exact same technique that McKinnon used: stripping one birth certificate and "It should be self- adding new text for the desired data. We carefully did not evident that a accuse him of doing this, but as he proves, supposedly JPEG of a scanned with Microsoft Paint (!), it would have been easy enough official document to do it. (It's still not clear why he went to all the trouble cannot be valid." to make his "lame joke" or why a document specialist Jay McKinnon, DHS- with extensive accounts at Photobucket and Flicker is trained document using Microsoft Paint.) specialist and Microsoft Paint power user

The dubious origins of the BHO birth certificate on the Kos site, without a logical explanation other than that the Obama campaign provided it, strengthens the likelihood that the so-called birth certificate was produced in a similar way, and then "adopted" by Fight the Smears. The process of using Daily Kos as a production and publication facility is beyond irregular, especially given the highly tendentious content on that site, including most recently its promotion of fake press passes. McKinnon was asked: Weren't you worried someone would download your images and make fake birth certificates? "Not in the slightest. Anyone who tries to pass off a forgery from those JPEGs deserves the jail time they get. (Again, my respect to Hawaii's Department of Health: they've done a commendable job.)" "I believe a reasonable person would conclude that the intent was satire, humor or virtually anything but fraud. Furthermore, I am confident in ability of 11 and a half out of 12 human beings to distinguish between an image on a computer screen and a physical, printed, stamped and sealed government document (no matter how poor the quality)." Here, too, McKinnon puts forward a red herring: the issue isn't whether someone is going to use his JPEGs to produce a phony paper birth certificate. Of course it was clear that "Haye I.B Ahphorgerie" was a lame attempt at humor. The issue is whether McKinnon or someone else at Daily Kos used a blank template of a Hawaii birth certificate to create one for Obama. The fact that McKinnon, who prides himself on being so much smarter than everyone else, or at least 11 and a half out of 12, doesn't seem to address that issue only adds to the sense that he is being disingenuous and concealing the real timeline of events. Though McKinnon's interview is transparently intended to exculpate himself, his critique raises the obvious question. There is no evidence that anyone at Daily Kos received Obama's paper birth certificate. So what did they receive? Another JPEG, at most. And after what he says in his Daily Kos interview, why should anybody believe that JPEGs produced by Daily Kos are authentic? As McKinnon himself says, any JPEG can be faked. So why doesn't Daily Kos take seriously the comments of their interviewee and acknowledge that the supposed image of Obama's birth certificate is of no validity in ascertaining the document's authenticity? So how does McKinnon justify his belief that Obama is "natural born"? By the

fact that he used a passport! But how did Obama get his passport? By producing, one presumes, a birth certificate. So where is it? Why is such a problem to produce it? Why should the wannabe President play hide-and-seek with the prime Constitutional requirement for a US President? McKinnon personal attacks on me deserve only a brief answer. He refuses to discuss anything without his lawyer and asked me to provide the questions in writing. Then, instead of answering, he told me to call "the office", which turned out to be the Public Relations department of CSIS, the "Canadian CIA." I had not said anything about the CSIS or FBI before that. I had submitted, at McKinnon's request, the following question: "What was the role of Kos (Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas) in the preparation and publication of the documents?" McKinnon responded: "When you finally write your article, don't forget to recognize Uncle Mark's hard work. He'd be really hurt if you forgot him." Another McKinnon joke? Perhaps. But I am not sure Markos Moulitsas will find it amusing. Finally, McKinnon claimed I didn't include the quote he provided for publication. I guess he didn't read to the end. But to bring things full circle, let's come back to another lame joke by McKinnon, a comment from June 28 with the surprising title: "Obama's not a citizen, and I prove it." He writes: Even if we assume that Barack Obama's father is unknown, even is we assume that the father was not a citizen and was a alien from another country or planet, the following statement is still false: Research has since uncovered the law, in force at the time of Obama's birth, that were he to have been born in another country, his young American mother's youth extended time abroad would not suffice to make him a "natural born citizen." (Reuven Koret, IsraelInsider) Let's look at the applicable law, shall we? The Immigration & Nationality Act, Section 301(g) [8 U.S.C. 1401]: "a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years;" McKinnon then launches into a convoluted and rambling discourse on what Stanley Ann Dunham would have had to do to avoid being in the country. The only trouble is that the law he cites refers to children born after 1986. Here is the 1952 law in question, applicable to those born between 1952 and 1986: The Immigration and Nationality Act of June 27, 1952, 66 Stat. 163, 235, 8 U.S. Code Section 1401 (b). (Section 301 of the Act). "Section 301. (a) The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth: "(1) a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof; ... "(7) a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States, who prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than ten years, at least five of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years.

So my earlier quote and argument stands, and McKinnon's attempt to prove Obama is a natural born citizen by virtue of his mother US citizenship goes the way of his other lame jokes. It's one thing for a document specialist to use Microsoft Paint, but if you're going to be lazy in your research, at least don't be so smug about it. Once again we get to the main point, that even those who are inclined to believe that Kos of all the blog sites in the world had access to the paper Obama birth certificate and faithfully scanned it. If Obama has the proof of his Hawaiian origin, now is the time to produce it. Because the legal standard, let alone skeptical public opinion, isn't going to be satisfied by what appears on Daily Kos, because even the DHS-trained document analyst says what common sense and Hawaii statutes tell us -- a JPEG image has no legal validity. Obama's eligibility to be President thus hangs on a thread: the need to prove he has a valid paper Hawaiian birth certificate, signed, sealed and delivered. With all due respect to those who claim that they have "busted" the image analysis of one or another of the birth certificate blogger-skeptics, powerfully joined most recently by "techdude" on Atlas Shrugs (which previously rejected the fake birth certificate thesis) they are missing the point. It isn't the obligation of a journalist or a blogger or an imaging professional or a DHS-trained self-proclaimed document specialist to disprove that Obama is a natural born citizen. Obama owes it to the American people: he is required by the Constitution to fulfill that condition and to do that every citizen must do from time to time: produce the birth certificate. He prides himself on transparency, so why is he concealing and stonewalling legitimate demands for proof of? If he lacks one, and can't prove he has one, he can't be President. He wrote about having one in his book, Dreams from My Father (Chapter One) and he presumably had to have one to get a passport. So what's the problem? Why the hesitation? Yesterday the National Review Online, which got this whole thing rolling with a request for Obama's birth certificate, a request supposed fulfilled by Daily Kos, weighed in again for the first time in weeks: Is There Legitimate Doubt About Obama's Eligibility to be President? [Andy McCarthy] I had not caught up until today with this apparent controversy over whether the Hawaii birth certificate proffered by Obama's campaign is a forgery and whether there are legitimate questions about whether he was born in the United States -- if he wasn't, he almost certainly would not be qualified under the Constitution and relevant immigration statutes to be president. Our Jim Geraghty seemed to pooh-pooh the birth certificate controversy about a week ago, but according to the above cited report (at a site called DougRoss@Journal) and a new one from Israel Insider, there are new developments, and the Obama campaign appears to be stonewalling. Shouldn't it be a fairly easy matter to prove he was born in Hawaii if he really was? Why wouldn't Obama just end this quickly?

Obama's "Fight the Smears" website, at least on this subject, is an embarrassment. Just look at it. As if when Hawaii became a state is at all an issue, or as if the 14th Amendment of the Constitution has anything to do with the criteria for a natural born citizen. And, really, what is the point of putting up a low-resolution image of an image that could be mocked up by anybody with Microsoft Paint and 10 minutes on their hands? No explanation, no provenance information, no reason to believe in its veracity.

Why, indeed, does not Obama make this issue go away? At this point, there's no good reason -- unless he doesn't have a birth certificate, or has one he feels compelled to hide. But now, after more than three weeks, with the affirmations of his campaign spokesman that the Fight the Smears birth certificate image is "real", he is in an even tighter corner: the real paper birth certificate of the candidate for President had better look a lot like the one on the web site, or he'll have a lot of explaining to do. It is a matter of time now before a legal challenge is issued in one of the 50 states, or the call for paper proof is issued by a major pundit, publication, or political figure. The longer the candidate waits, the higher the risk. It's unlikely that this time Jay McKinnon's excuse of "lame joke" will pass muster for Barack Obama. This is the fifth of a series on the birth certificate. Dear Obama campaign, can you please produce a paper birth certificate so that we can return to our regular beat? Here's where you can find Part 1, 2, and 3 and 4. Other articles about Barack Obama and his mysterious background are linked on the upper left of this article. Join our cool new (N)Obama Club, where you can stay up to date with constantly updated videos, photos, and news streams about Barack H. Obama and discuss him in infinite depth and detail with other fans and critics.

© 2001-2004 Koret Communications Ltd. All rights reserved.

Atlas Shrugs Friday, July 04, 2008

EXCLUSIVE: Atlas Tech Expert Declares Obama Birth Certificate Forgery This bombshell was made by Atlas reader techdude in the comment section (oh and btw, techdude, send the screenshots): As a real forensic computer investigator (board certified, investigated thousands of cases, access to a full forensic computer lab, yadda yadda...) I decided to jump into the fray over the fake vs real discussion a week ago when a friend of mine challenged me to see what I could find (since according to him, the document was clearly a real one). He is what one would call a slightly rabid Obama supporter – he even has the tattoo to prove it. First things first...I used the latest online KOS version (downloaded 6/29/2008) as it was supposedly the first released digital copy and the Decosta certificate from Israel Insider's blog (also downloaded 6/29/2008) as an exemplar of a real certificate. Of forensic interest on the KOS version is the EXIF metadata (encoded in the digital image data) showing that the KOS certificate was modified or created with "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh" on "2008:06:12 08:42:36". Assuming the EXIF data was added after the document was scanned (assuming it is real) and the document modified only by placing a black-out section over the Certificate Number or if it was converted and saved for web use this would not be too unusual. The Daily KOS released the story on “2008:06:12 08:44:37” which would be 2 minutes after the graphic's EXIF stamp was created. Before I became a forensic geek I worked for [a herein nameless publicly traded company] that designed counterfeit detection hardware and software for the banking and retail industry. The company was very high profile and we received training from [a certain herein nameless department of the Federal government that knows a thing or two about counterfeiting] - but I do not claim to be an all around expert in Questioned Documents but after several years of working with them I do know what to look for to spot an obvious fake. That being said...I too was able to see "something" that looked like a seal - however even using highly specialized software (specifically designed for law enforcement and forensic examiner use for cleaning up digital images and video) I was unable to recover anything more than what others have previously released using a basic find edges and modification of the contrast. Even when the background security paper pattern was removed there was not enough of a "seal" to view anything usable or verifiable which is a bit odd but still might be possible if the seal had been completely flattened out in the mail, etc. There is also a fold which runs vertically across the top of the certificate which is close to the same location on the Decosta certificate. At this point I was beginning to believe the certificate was real until I resized and overlaid the Decosta certificate on top of the KOS version. All things being equal there was a 3.82% difference in the size of the KOS version vs the Decosta certificate - but again depending on the optical distortion from the scanner this too was explainable. But upon manually stretching them to match edge to edge I caught a glimpse of what I and apparently everyone else had simply not noticed. The security borders do not match. Literally. They are not even close to identical. For instance "Decosta" contains five 10 pixel wide "diamonds" per vertical row while the "KOS Obama" contains 2 to 2 1/4 36 pixel wide diamonds per vertical row. These differences can clearly be observed even with the naked eye although you may need to enlarge the graphics on your screen. Taking the measurements further - Decosta's "Certification of Live Birth" heading is centered between security diamond pattern and is 762 pixels wide @ 0% angle while Obama's "Certification of Live Birth" heading is not centered evenly between security diamond pattern and is 794 pixels wide @ 0% angle. Decosta's "Any Alterations" footer is centered evenly between security diamond pattern and is 1244 pixels wide @ 0% angle while Obama's "Any Alterations" footer is not centered evenly between security diamond pattern and is 1294 pixels wide @ 0% angle. I kept the comparative screen shots in case anyone wants them. I am unable to explain the differences between the security diamond sizes and counts and the un-centered portions (meaning the diamond pattern ends on an odd pattern instead of even where it meets the edges of the header and footer boxes). Looking closer at the KOS certificate (magnified to 400%) clearly shows inconsistencies in the security border such as cut and paste marks and overlaying of the side borders where they meet the top and bottom. This effect is not observed in the Decosta certificate at any magnification. Another point of interest, removing the background security pattern did not remove the background area from underneath the security border on the KOS certificate. The color and hue values of the background pattern located and viewable through the security border are also not a match to

color and hue values of the background pattern located and viewable through the security border are also not a match to the rest of the certificate background. I can not explain these discrepancies. I then noticed there were some indications that the background pattern had been duplicated and placed in various locations to clean up the document. Now at some point I just started to laugh and went out for a smoke and gave up looking for more. I am convinced that the certificate is a fake (and not really a very good one) and I went into this with a completely open mind (something the Obamanationalists seem to have lost). I also have to say that everyone who has been looking into this federal crime (and it is a federal crime even if the certificates were never meant to be used for identification) have done a stupendous job and I wish they all worked for my lab. Talk about a winning team. UPDATE: KOS released another birth certificate? How funny that cigar man calls me "this Geller character" :) You know Stogie ...... he helped me design my new banner. Stogie, you funny Techdude sent me the screenshots: Analysis

Analysis 2:

Analysis 3

Techdude said, "Sorry about the image quality but damn it Jim I am a geek not a graphics junkie! (sorry...trekkie moment) I believe they should get the point across. The "cut & paste" artifacts are rather obvious in the "analysis3.jpg" as are the overlapping joints and gaps in the security borders". *** Copyright © 2005-2008 Pamela Geller | All Rights Reserved *** (credit and link back to Atlas) Posted by Pamela Geller on Friday, July 04, 2008 at 11:15 PM in Obama's Birth Certificate Forgery, WHITE HOUSE: THE RACE TO NOVEMBER | Permalink TrackBack TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/343429/30895956 Listed below are links to weblogs that reference EXCLUSIVE: Atlas Tech Expert Declares Obama Birth Certificate Forgery: » Blogger admits Hawaii birth certificate forgery, s from Don Singleton Why doesn't the Obama campaign just release the real certificate? Is it because it would show Obama is not eligible to be president? [Read More] Tracked on Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 03:06 PM » The Continuing Saga of Obamas Forged Certificate Of Live Birth [Updated] from Ironic Surrealism II We are still waiting. As I posted in a previous Obama BC post: Polarik over at Townhall.com has examined the supposed proof of

We are still waiting. As I posted in a previous Obama BC post: Polarik over at Townhall.com has examined the supposed proof of birth, with the discerning eyes of one who has 20 years of working with computers, printers, and typewriters under hi... [Read More] Tracked on Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 11:22 PM » Obama Birth Certificate Not Forged - All Claims Otherwise Are Fantasy from The Strata-Sphere I am really, really disappointed in how fevered the rightward swamps have become. After the purity wars and intolerance from the far right to differences of opinion from members of what was a governing conservative coalition, I did not think it could g... [Read More] Tracked on Wednesday, July 09, 2008 at 02:20 PM » Pamela Geller At Atlas Shrugs Claims Obama Birth Certificate A Forgery from Advice Goddess Blog What do you think? Here's an excerpt from Atlas reader techdude's analysis... [Read More] Tracked on Sunday, July 20, 2008 at 01:45 PM

Comments Yes, but was it a fake tatoo? Posted by: elvis | Friday, July 04, 2008 at 11:37 PM >UPDATE: KOS released another birth certificate? How funny that cigar man calls me "this Geller character" :) You >know Stogie ...... he helped me design my new banner. >Stogie, you funny BUSTED! :) Posted by: Stogie | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 01:39 AM Ms. Geller, the true and authentic birth certificate is at the following link: http://saberpoint.blogspot.com/2008/07/obamas-birth-certificate-forgery-after.html Posted by: Stogie | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 01:42 AM hmmmm, he finds gaps in the security borders... Posted by: kobi | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 02:37 AM Maybe it's just me.But I find that comment highly disrespectable: 'that geller character' What kind of crap is that? Posted by: RISE_UP | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 06:39 AM Nicely done, Techdude! One of my commenters noted that the border was suspect, but your analysis is the first detailed breakdown I've seen. I had written a few days ago, having found what I thought to be the seal and a signature block, that the issue might be resolved: http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/06/obamas-birth-certificate-issue-resolved.html But, as you have ably pointed out, it indeed may not be. I would caution all who jump on the Obama-Birth Certificate bandwagon that may still turn out to be a trap or dead-end. Obama's campaign produces a real BC and blames the scan on yet another "staffer" who gets thrown under the bus. Let's not forget to keep attacking the policy differences, Obama's amazing contortions (some would call lies), and business-card sized resume! Best, Doug Posted by: directorblue | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 08:45 AM I did the same analysis and found the same things - came to completely opposite conclusion. For one thing, you are comparing two different certificate patterns. The seal and signature block area are there, as you and I and others have detected. And the date the certificate was produced (Jun 2007) as well. Clearly the person who stamped and signed the back did not use the same pressure as the date stamp, but they are all there. What you need is another original certificate of the same format, as this guy does with the same uneven corners. At least someone confirmed my find that the Opendna documents are modifications to the Obama certificate because of two tell tale laser printer dots (see here). Sadly, this only proves Opendna printed out the document and rescanned it at a higher resolution so that photoshop could do its work better. It does not prove the certificate is a fake. If you want to prove it is a fake ask the state of Hawaii! Ask Obama to show the certificate he has to Hawaii! This is so much wasted energy - and it makes the conservatives look foolish.

has to Hawaii! This is so much wasted energy - and it makes the conservatives look foolish. You better have more than this to make a claim of forgery. Regards, AJStrata. Posted by: AJStrata | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 10:29 AM >Maybe it's just me.But I find that comment highly disrespectable: 'that geller character' What kind of crap is >that? It's called a JOKE Kobi, as in S-A-T-I-R-E. Look it up. (It helps if you look at my satirical graphic of the birth certificate too). Pam is a character, too, albeit a colorful, funny, and sexy one. And one of my favorite characters on the net. Stogie Posted by: Stogie | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 11:04 AM someone is misreading the commments. all i said was re 'gaps in the security borders' alluding to obama's idiocy re security, see, it's from birth. uh, that's a joke. but, not really! when and how is this birth certificate issue going to be properly and legally resolved? can't it be taken to court? Posted by: kobi | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 11:22 AM To me the first question is, where did the Senator's mother live when he was born? If in Hawaii, then he would be a native citizen of the U.S. All the biographical information seems to indicate that Senator Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was in Hawaii attending the U. of Hawaii when she met his father, Obama, Sr. The second question is, if the birth certificate online is a fake, which it appears to be, why go to that trouble? The suspicion that naturally arises is that there is something the Obama campaign doesn't want the public to know, or why not end this problem right now by simply producing an authentic birth certificate. Something definitely seems out of place. Posted by: Sonny | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 12:53 PM AJ, we've been asking. Repeatedly. Lambert even submitted a request under the Freedom of Information. All these damn questions. Of course folks are guessing. It's like we're blind and they've moved the furniture. The documents were forged. WHY? Why not release the original? WHY? Why distract us from more important scandals? WHY FORGERIES? Posted by: Pamela Geller | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 03:43 PM Just a (not so) quick early evening response to directorblue who said “For one thing, you are comparing two different certificate patterns.”... Well of course, that was the point of my analysis which seems to have been lost on a few individuals. Both certificates are printed with the OHSM 1.1 (Rev. 11/01) LASER identifier with the revision dates being identical [11/01]. If there was a new or modified certificate security pattern introduced there would also be a different revision date indicating that it had been revised after November 2001. Some people are apparently under the mistaken impression that the security border printing will just change once and a while or perhaps some folks may just never really understand the issue. As consistency and precision are the keys to spotting forgeries it is extraordinarily unlikely – perhaps even to the point of impossibility - that the revision numbers would be the same while containing different “certificate patterns”. As anyone who has worked at a bar can even tell you there are official guide books handed out by liquor control officials that list what is and what is not found on official state issued documents – and high security documents do not vary from week to week or printer to printer. Israel Insider has already posted on his/her blog that a Hawaiian official had already been contacted about the document and that particular Hawaiian official could not very them as authentic based on the image. I simply wanted to figure out for myself (and to humor my friend) if there was truly anything suspect. At first blush I did not believe there was. Let’s quickly review how a paper certificate may come into existence. A Certificate of Live Birth, just like any other high security paper document, is almost always first printed on blank specialized paper stock using an offset press to create the base images. The raw paper stock itself may even contain UV reactive micro fibers or security threads. This printing process would generally include the use of special color shifting inks and micro engraved or repeating security patterns such as the ones visible on the Decosta certificate. That process is, of course, not done at the Registrar’s office but at a professional printing house. The ancillary information, such as the child’s name and date of birth, would be later printed onto the pre-printed security stock, which was received months or years earlier from the print house and kept in secure storage until needed, at the time it is requested at the Registrar’s office. This is typically done by running the pre-printed security stock through a laser or thermal wax printer and perhaps even the occasional typewriter. Take for example commercially available yet low security blank check stock which is run through a home laser printer using an accounting application which fills in the blanks. The micro security border and color shifting background were already pre-printed by the

application which fills in the blanks. The micro security border and color shifting background were already pre-printed by the manufacturer and the user is only using their laser printer to add the ancillary information. Now let’s get a bit silly for a moment shall we? Let’s all pretend the certificates were changed by proxy and no one bothered to modify the revision number. Stranger things have happened in government. But our dream world comes crashing down once we actually look at the structure of the images themselves and perform an error level analysis on the underlying graphics. In the interest of fairness, and well before I even bothered to post my original comment, I also took into account that the security border may have been printed on a laser printer…perhaps even one running out of toner…and only the background security pattern existed beforehand. But then I performed an error level analysis on the KOS Obama and Decosta certificate images. [For an easy to understand paper written for general non-geek audiences on error level analysis see http://www.htcia.org.hk/artman/uploads/2_3_digital_imaging_forensic__v4_.pdf ] Doing the error level analysis using several known error rates revealed some immediate disparities in the KOS image such as the border floating as a “layer” on top of the background. Further the border appears to consist of several distinct parts and individual sections which were pasted together. [To make your lives easier here is a link to a WIRED article which explains a bit in relation to what I am referring to http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/researchers-ana.html ] The compression and error ratio of the security border simply does not match the rest of the certificate. The same can be seen with the text. However the same analysis of the Decosta image using the same exact methodology instead verified the compression and error levels are consistent with equal distribution throughout the document. [Screen captures are also available – but the output created by the analysis are 17MB each…not really made for posting put if Pamela wants them she is always welcome to them :) ] The bottom line is that if the document was simply scanned into a computer and was not created on, or substantially modified by, a computer there would not be as many variations in the compression and error rates as can be seen in the KOS certificate. Taking the error level analysis into account along with my other findings (such as the obvious cut and paste marks, the glaring errors in the size and count of the security diamonds, and the lack of consistent header and footer start and end point) is how I arrived at my conclusion. None of this can simply be explained away or ignored by people claiming that this is a different un-recorded revision since no one has been able to produce another real certificate that matches the security engravings of the KOS version but there have been numerous reports and sightings of real certificates matching Decosta’s. I believe the Israel Insider blog has links to a few of them. Occam's razor then forces this issue to a point – the simplest answer generally being the correct one – if there are multiple documents that appear to contain similar security engravings of the Decosta version but no others that resemble the KOS image - the KOS document is a forgery. As others have already repeatedly asked – why would Obama’s webmaster post a fake (or even a suspected one) on the “fight the smears” website? – I have no clue and do not really have an issue with it – they may not even know it is a fake. That was not a goal nor included as an aspect in the analysis of the graphics presented. But as I said before, it is with a high degree of scientific certainty that I must conclude that the KOS Obama image is a pretty bad counterfeit. Just to touch on the remaining issues raised with the “Opendna versions”. While I am bit busy with a few cases this week and next (the rent is not going to pay itself) and I do not have time to look into their details – others may want to use a hex editor or an application such as JPEGsnoop to create a timeline of the EXIF data and time stamps for all of the known versions, including the KOS version, to create a basic event line to see if the chicken or the egg came first. Deeper analysis by comparing segmented digital signatures (such as partial MD5s) may also reveal statistically identical areas rather than just relying on the naked eye. Just my 2 cents. And on a final quick thought (as I really must get back to the lab) the specifications for the layout and the details of the security features of a real Hawaiian Certificate of Live Birth may be obtainable with a sunshine law or FOI request. Can this entire issue be a simple "bad scan" of a real document - not likely. But as others have said it is better to look into other more important issues (but it would be nice to have him present a real document to settle the nagging resident alien question since even I have to come up with an original certified birth certificate just to renew my own driver's license next month - why should he be so special? I wonder when his license expires.) And Stogie...I thought your comments were hysterical. :P Posted by: techdude | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 08:59 PM Ooops...it was AJStrata who made the "different certificate patterns" comment not directorblue. Doh! Sorry for the typo...I was going to start the post thanking directorblue for the compliments when the keyboard gremlins must have got me :( Posted by: techdude | Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 09:05 PM Bloggers ask “If you want to prove it is a fake ask the state of Hawaii!” Many have, Hawaii will not disclose any information. Even if there is a faded stamp on the back, any expert as Jim McKinnon claims to be would'nt have been so stupid to forget that feature. Where was Obama born? There are websites that say Obama was born at both the ‘Kapiolani Medical Center’ and ‘Queen's Medical Center” he couldn’t have been born at both.

KAPIOLANI MEDICAL CENTER: The English version of Wikipedia says Obama was born August 4, 1961 at the Kapiolani Medical Center. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama Ancestry of Barack Obama Says Obama was born August 4, 1961 at the Kapiolani Medical Center. www.wargs.com/political/obama.html The Spirit of Barack Obama Says Obama was born August 4, 1961 at the Kapiolani Medical Center. http://www.barack-obama.tv/barack-obama-articles-audio-video/articles-about-barack-obama/wikipedia-barack-obama QUEEN'S MEDICAL CENTER: The Italian version of Wikipedia says Obama was born (4 agosto 1961) at the Queen's Medical Center: “Barack Obama nacque al Queen's Medical Center di Honolulu” http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama Ancestry of Barack Obama, About.com says, Barack Hussein OBAMA was born on 4 August 1961 at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii http://genealogy.about.com/od/aframertrees/p/barack_obama.htm This site Familypedia: The Genealogy wikia, gives a detailed listing of Obama’s geneology all the way to his great-grandfather x10. They say he was born at Queen's Medical Center http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/Barack_Obama_(1961) So was he born at ‘Kapiolani Medical Center’ or ‘Queen's Medical Center’? There is the possibility that he was born on a military base, since his mother Ann Dunham’s father signed up for World War II after Pearl Harbor, and her mother went to work on a bomber assembly line, and after the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill. Maybe their daughter had her child on the military base, which is not considered US soil and therefore to be a “Natural Born Citizen” both Barack’s parents would have had to be US citizens, which they were not, and if only one was, Ann would have had to be a US citizen for at least 10 years with 5 of those years being after age 16, since she was only 18 she did not qualify her son. There is a rumor circulating in journalistic circles that Barack Obama was born in Nairobi Kenya when his mother and father were in Kenya on a visit and that his parents returned with the infant who was then registered in Hawaii. Apparently, examination of the hospitals' records in Hawaii have shown no birthing records for Ann Dunham Obama even though there is a registry of the birth in the public records office a week after his date of birth it does not show his place of birth. Perhaps she visited her friend in Mercer Island as a stop over from Kenya on route to Hawaii to register her son. In Hawaii one could apply for a "Late" Certificate of Birth. The Certificate of Hawaiian Birth program was established in 1911, during the territorial era, to register a person born in Hawaii who was one year old or older and whose birth had not been previously registered in Hawaii. The Certificate of Hawaiian Birth Program was terminated in 1972, during the statehood era. "Who is Eligible to “Apply for Late Registration? As provided by law (HRS §§338-15, 338-29.5), the following persons may apply for late registration: Any person born in Hawaii who is one year old or older and whose birth has not been previously registered in Hawaii, or that person's parent, guardian, next of kin, or older person acting for that person and having knowledge of the facts of birth may request the registration of a late certificate of birth.” What I find curious is under the law you can apply for one of these years after the birth as long as someone has knowledge of the facts of birth. After reading this I am wondering if Obama was really born in Hawaii if all that was needed was his mother’s say so. He could have easily been born in Kenya, brought back to the US and applied for a LATE Certificate. http://hawaii.gov/health/vital-records/vital-records/latereg.html You do not have to be a Natural Born Citizen to receive a passport or a driver’s license; you can be a naturalized citizen and just because Obama filed with the Federal Election Commission does not mean he showed his Birth Certificate. The FEC does not require candidates to file birth certificates in order to run for office. http://www.contrariancommentary.com/ Posted by: | Sunday, July 13, 2008 at 10:48 AM Techdude,

Your entire analysis rests on YOUR assumption the version control number covers the background elements and is not simply limited to the document contents (fields) and layout. Clearly it does not cover the background since the document was updated - and I have proof. http://strata-sphere.com/blog/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=5652 Sorry, but checkmate. Don't waste your time and credibility unless you have a way to prove this is not simply a new security-enhanced background in answer to the Real ID Act of 2005. Otherwise your house of cards has collapsed. Posted by: AJStrata | Sunday, July 13, 2008 at 12:30 PM BTW, The Real ID Act is why HI will not answer questions about this. Check the link, it has sources folks can research. It was news to me. Cheers, AJStrata Posted by: AJStrata | Sunday, July 13, 2008 at 12:31 PM OK, One more comment. Techdude, you are aware of how new graphics programs use layering to shim a background pattern under a background layout, and then overlay the data fields and contents on top. And under these new graphics programs can ingest images and scans at any of these layers. I am not saying what happened here, but if you are trying to create hard evidence you need to prove there is NOT an obvious and alternative answer to the evidence. It is not evidence to say this could be a forgery or could just be the production of a valid document. You must show how, under any assumption, there is no way this could be a valid document. So far you have not done this. You have been showing possible, but highly implausible, reasons this might be a forgery. Until you exclude all reasonable scenarios that would support this being valid, you have not shown even within reasonable doubt that this is a forgery. So far all I have seen is possible, but highly improbable! Posted by: AJStrata | Sunday, July 13, 2008 at 12:38 PM AJStrata, what you fail to understand, time and time again, is exactly what I've said. So, for your benefit, I'll say it again. Your hypothesis is that the so-called "Kos image" is a true and faithful copy of an original, PAPER DOCUMENT. No way, Jose. Which brings me to my first hypothesis, My first hypothesis says, with 100$ certainty, that the Kos image is NOT a true copy of a laser-printed paper document. In fact, the Kos image is a copy of a copy. For starters, a direct copy would not have a black bar obscuring the Certificate Number. May I direct your attention to the caveat: ANY ALTERATIONS INVALIDATE THIS CERTIFICATE. Obscuring the Certificate Number would count as an alteration. The EXif information in the Kos image indicates that we are looking at a COPY of a scanned image that was altered by Photoshop. The inconvenient truth is that we were NEVER shown the original scanned image. Oh, BTW, the uncropped dimensions of the original scan were 2546 x 2388, and not 2427 x 2369. Since the Kos image is NOT the originally scanned image, we can truthfully say that we have NEVER seen the actual copy of his COLB. If a person wanted to post the originally scanned image, except for the Certificate Number, it would have been child's play to place a small rectangle of paper over the number, and hold it in place with a smidgen of removable Scotch tape. In this way, a true copy of the original paper document could have been made, but it wasn't. Gotcha! I could stop right here because you, AJ, have staked your reputation on the Kos image being a true scan of the original document, and I just knocked that curve ball right out of the park. Since you, AJ, have not seen the original scanned image, you cannot know, with any degree of certainty, that ONLY the Cert. No. was blacked out. PLUS, AJ, you cannot claim to know what was the SIZE of the original scanned image. It could have been larger than the size of the Kos image, and you would never know it. Gotcha again, Strata! But, let me continue.

My hypothesis is the exact opposite: that the pixel patterns on the Kos image are anything but the result of a scanned laser-printed paper document. You also claim the following: "Inspection of the files shows consistent anti-aliasing across all letters and images (e.g., the state seal in the middle). Consistent antialiasing across the document tells me this was induced when the document was originally printed - not from later manipulation. Polarik mistakes this anti-aliasing feature with forgery, which is completely ridiculous" I know what anti-aliasing is, and I did not equate it with forgery, nor does it have any bearing on what I said about the textual pixel patterns found in the Kos image. Now, when you claim that everything we see in the Kos image is a direct result of the anti-aliasing fonts used to print the original, then that claim is ridiculous because I have four different COLBs that I know are genuine copies (one of which is Pat DeCosta's) and none of them show any of the patterns that you claim are due to anti-aliasing. They are not there, nor were they ever there. The text in DeCosta's COLB is exactly what the text should look like when laser-printed onto a patterned, green sheet of paper, and it bears no ill effects from anti-aliased laser text. I also have in my possession, a direct image of a recently-printed COLB, circa June 30, 2008, and it looks nothing like the Kos image, especially in the borders. The borders on the Kos document look blurry and smeared, by comparison. If the Kos image is so high in quality, then why are there no black pixels in the criss-cross lines of the border? I can clearly see black, criss-cross lines in the other COLB borders (except for Smith's which has matching dark green pixels) but, there isn't a single, black pixel present in the criss-cross lines on the Kos image. In fact, there are several missing lines, or parts thereof, in the border that should have been printed. The text in the Kos image is black and clearly legible. The seal in the Kos image is black and clearly legible. The rectangle is black and clearly legible. The title and caveat text boxes are black and clearly legible. Yet, the borders in the Kos image are blurry and contain nothing that a color wheel would call, black. There are only faint, dark shades of gray. And, you're trying to tell us that this is the "new" border used on COLBs? My second hypothesis, in support of my first hypothesis, says that the patterns I found around and between specific groups of letters in the Kos image are not due to laser printing, not due to anti-aliasing fonts, not due to resizing JPGs, and not due to changing a JPGs compression factor. In short, they are not the result of anything that you, AJ, said they were. I've scanned thousands of multi-colored documents and patterned paper that were printed by a laser, reducing their image size and file size by 30 percent or more, and none of them had pixel patterns around the text that resembled those I found on the Kos image. If you think that you could recreate the Kos image simply by scanning a paper COLB, then I'll bet you that you cannot do it. Posted by: Polarik | Monday, July 14, 2008 at 11:09 PM Technically, the possibility of this is being true is less than .05%. Posted by: Tech Expert | Friday, August 22, 2008 at 06:42 PM