PDF Layers in Obama's birth certificate

Original Link to National Review

We have received several e-mails today calling into question the validity of the PDF that the White House released, namely that there are embedded layers in the document. There are now several other people on the case. We looked into it and dismissed it.

The PDF is composed of multiple images. That’s correct. Using a photo editor or PDF viewer of your choice, you can extract this image data, view it, hide it, etc. But these layers, as they’re being called, aren’t layers in the traditional photo-editing sense of the word. They are, quite literally, pieces of image data that have been positioned in a PDF container. They appear as text but also contain glyphs, dots, lines, boxes, squiggles, and random garbage. They’re not combined or merged in any way. Quite simply, they look like they were created programmatically, not by a human.

The National Review is definitely a right-leaning publication, started by William F. Buckley, Jr. I have expressed pro-birther views in the past. But I've come to the conclusion that this smoking gun isn't.

Many people argue that Obama's BC isn't a left vs. right issue. In fact, even Fox News has jumped behind Obama on his extraordinary efforts to withhold this document. Regardless, whether any media source claims to be left or right, they are all statist, thus closer to each other than they would have us believe. Obama is just as much a puppet as Bush and Clinton.

With that being said, I'm not a birther as I don't really question whether Obama was born in the US. However, I do question how and why he jumped through hoops to keep his BC hidden. Now, all of the sudden it appears and we are some how supposed to be okay with that?

Not only is it lacking a seal, which is what the DMV requires before geting something as relatively mundane as a DL, but it has other inconsistencies too. The layers for one and other issues such as the race being labled as "African", instead of what would presumably be listed as "negro" in 1961. It is awfully PC.

So all in all, just because a media source is either left or right, certainly doesn't mean that we can trust what they say. Other right leaning media outlets wanted us to believe that it is perfectly fine for a President to jump through hoops to keep his BC hidden.

Myself and others, believe this whole left-right facade of American politics to be a smoke-screen anyway.


--airspoon

reply to post by schuyler


Did anyone read the comments to the original link? This one is interesting...

catera

04/28/11 15:23

The curious thing, you can open this document in Adobe Bridge and see the dates and times this
document was opened, changed, etc etc.
October 2010?
Why would it have been opened, changed and resaved in October 2010.
I mean, there could be an explanation...anyone are to take a stab?

UPDATE: I’ve confirmed that scanning an image, converting it to a PDF, optimizing that PDF, and then opening it up in Illustrator, does in fact create layers similar to what is seen in the birth certificate PDF. You can try it yourself at home.

UPDATE II: For those of you who still aren’t convinced, here’s a one-page PDF that I just scanned and optimized, so you can see for yourself that an optimized PDF shows up in Illustrator as layers. (I didn’t spend hours getting the settings right.)