Why did Obama release electronic birth certificate?

Posted: June 07, 2011
8:31 pm Eastern
By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2011 WND
wnd.com

NEW YORK – The White House's release of an electronic copy of Obama's long-form birth certificate instead of a certified paper copy raises questions in a 22-page criminal complaint with the FBI filed by an international expert in scanners and document-imaging software.

Doug Vogt's complaint charges that individuals within the Hawaii Department of Health, Obama political operatives and an unidentified graphic artist worked in a multi-state conspiracy to create a fraudulent long-form birth certificate for Barack Obama.

Vogt's complaint asserts: "I have irrefutably proven that the Certificate of Live Birth that President Obama presented to the world on April 27, 2011 is a fraudulently created document put together using the Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator programs."

He claims the long-form birth certificate the White House released April 27 as an electronic document in PDF format was forged from a composite of legitimate birth certificates obtained from the Hawaii DOH archives and manipulated to replace the original information with a fraudulent Obama birth record.

The birth certificate the White House released consists of an electronic file that when opened as a PDF file in Adobe Illustrator reveals nine different layers that corresponded to different sections of the form, including the signatures.

"I also opened up the White House PDF file in WordPad so I could see the codes and headers in the file. There I discovered the evidence for the nine layers embedded in the code," Vogt writes. "The big surprise I discovered was that the file was finished or created on April 27, 2011, and the copy I had downloaded from the White House web site was modified on April 28, 2011, at 9:58 a.m., the day after the news conference."

Vogt sees a discrepancy between the electronic PDF file released on the White House website and the White House-released correspondence with the Hawaii Department of Health, including a letter from DOH Director Loretta J. Fuddy, that clearly states she released in Hawaii to White House outside counsel Perkins Coie two certified copies of Obama's original Certificate of Live Birth.

"The whole White House story that the President had his Seattle-based lawyer fly to Hawaii and pick up a signed and stamped paper Certificate of Live Birth and fly directly to Washington, D.C., is obviously not the document the public has been shown," Vogt concludes.

"In other words the whole story is not true," he said. "The Press Secretary proudly stated that he personally put up the PDF on the White House web site and that's probably all they got, was the PDF by e-mail."

Vogt also questions why the Obama birth certificate was shown by the White House as a positive document, black printing on a white background (covered by green hash-marked official Hawaii DOH document paper), while the Nordyke twins' birth certificates from the same era were obviously archived as microfilm, with photostatic copies clearly showing the white printing on black background characteristic of positive copies made from records preserved on microfilm.

To make the point, Vogt displayed a TIFF image of the Obama birth certificate issued by the White House and the photo static copy issued to the Nordyke twins by the Hawaii DOH in 1966:

The White House has not explained how the copy of the Obama birth certificate released to the press in the White House press room was produced without the green hash-mark background that supposedly represented the document as officially issued by the Hawaii DOH.

The figure below shows the photocopy the White House released to the press at the same time the electronic birth certificate was posted on the White House website:

The Hawaii DOH has refused to show the original document in its vault to the public, to compare with the White House-released versions. The agency also has not explained the apparent discrepancy of retaining Obama's 1961 long-form birth certificate as a paper document, while the Nordyke twins' birth certificates issued within days of Obama's are maintained as microfilm records, not paper documents.

Multiple layers

Vogt notes that the multiple layers in the PDF file released by the White House have been widely demonstrated by various experts in numerous videos posted on Internet sites.

He provides a rebuttal to Jean-Claude Tremblay, a Canadian graphic artist who argued on the Fox News Channel on April 29 that the layers were a natural result of the Hawaii DOH scanning the original document while leaving OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software operative within the scanner.

Tremblay told Fox News that scanner OCR software tries to translate characters or words in a photograph into text, producing multiple layers in the resulting PDF file.

Tremblay further maintained that in the scanning process, layers were created when the OCR software was unable to separate text fully from background, resulting in the creation of a separate layer within the document.

Vogt charges that Tremblay "knows nothing about OCR engines and how they work and their file structure."

Vogt notes the Obama PDF birth certificate file was supposed to have come directly from the Hawaii DOH office.

He maintains that the Hawaii DOH would have absolutely no reason to use OCR features when making the scan, and if the Hawaii DOH were asked to give the White House a PDF image, "it would be from their existing TIFF image stored in their document imaging program on the server."

"My qualifications on OCR programs are considerable," Vogt asserts.

He provides the following technical explanation:

"Our own document imaging program, TheRepository, has an OCR option from Expervision that is called TypeReader. We integrated TypeReader into our program but to do this we had to sign a non-disclosure statement with them and then we got their Took Kit and API. When an OCR program saves a file as a searchable PDF, the file contains three main files within it. The first file is an image file, usually a compressed Group4 TIFF. The second file is a ASCII text file and the last file is a matrix file that contains the X and Y coordinates of all the words in the document. The Starting point for the image file and the matrix file is usually the upper left hand corner of the image measured in pixels. The text file and matrix files would never be seen as separate layers and there is certainly no nine layers. The three files would be in a PDF 'wrapper' and that's all. All OCR programs work on the same principle."

Put simply, Vogt explains, OCR technology is typically used to read into a word processing program text from a typed or printed document that is translated into electronic format by a scanner.

If the Hawaii DOH produced the PDF file for the White House, a flat TIFF image would have been sufficient, as the Hawaii DOH had no reason to think the White House or U.S. citizens would manipulate the document in a word processer, either before or after the document had been released.

Instead, Vogt asserts, the White House released, perhaps by mistake, a nine-layer Adobe Illustrator file that had been used to forge the document.

As of this writing, the Obama birth certificate placed on the White House website can still be viewed and downloaded.

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