Media would rather get Arpaio than vet Obama

When Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the lead investigator of his Cold Case Posse, Michael Zullo, presented evidence they say proves that President Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate is a forgery, they were attacked by reporters who appeared to be more interested in the investigators than the results of their investigation. One thing that was not discussed was their evidence, which ranges from digital forensics to old-school detective work.

The investigation’s technical analysis relied on the work of Mara Zebest, an author and tech editor, who was enlisted by the Cold Case Posse to look at the documents. She concluded in a report that: “Obama’s PDF file can no longer be referred to as a ‘document,’ since that term implies it existed and started in paper form. Obama’s PDF must be referred to as a ‘digital file’ because that is all it has ever been. …”

Ms. Zebest says Obama’s long-form birth certificate is not even a good forgery. “Poor is an understatement. It’s horrific,” she said. “When it was released, I still expected a file that would be difficult to determine as fraudulent, but when I opened it up, within seconds it was clear it was an obvious fake.” In order to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, she says she called a friend who was also familiar with computer programming. He downloaded it from the White House website and had the same reaction. “Oh my God, somebody has been very sloppy here,” he said, according to Zebest.

For Ms. Zebest, the foremost sign that the document has been tampered with is the existence of layers. “Layers are a very damning part of why this is a forgery,” she said. Layers appear when a document is opened in a graphics program, like Adobe Illustrator. These layers contain elements from the document, but not the whole document. One layer may contain the background color. Another layer may contain only black text. The information that appears on each layer depends on how the document was originally created.

For those more familiar with a non-digital era, think of layers as transparencies used with a slide projector. Multiple transparencies may make up a single image. In this case, the transparencies are stacked one on top of the other to create a composite of Mr. Obama’s long-form birth certificate.

Ms. Zebest says there should be no layers in Mr. Obama’s birth certificate. “If you take a birth certificate and scan it into a computer, you’re going to end up with a flat document. You’re not going to have anything with layers. The fact that it has multiple layers in itself means manipulation,” she said.

Obama’s long-form birth certificate contains nine layers. Those who defend the document’s legitimacy say automated computer software could have created the layers. They have suggested two types of processes specifically: Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, and optimization.

The argument for Optical Character Recognition is easily debunked, Ms. Zebest says. OCR scans a document for text and converts it so that it can be selected, edited, copied or pasted. Put another way, OCR software takes text that the computer only recognizes as an image and processes it so that the computer understands it to be text. According to Ms. Zebest, the trouble with the theory that Mr. Obama’s document went through the OCR process is that the words are still “treated as an image in the picture. If OCR were applied, you’d be able to search for a word and it would be recognized within the document, but that doesn’t happen.”

The second argument against forgery put forward by those who dismiss claims the document was manipulated is optimization. The purpose of optimization is to reduce a document’s file size. This makes the file easier to use. Think faster downloads on the web. The way optimization compresses a file is by segmenting the document into separate layers in order to compress it more thoroughly.

Garrett Papit, a computer professional who works for a Fortune 500 company and holds a degree in Computer Information Systems from DeVry University and an MBA from Keller Graduate School of Management, looked at the optimization argument. He approached Mr. Arpaio’s team with his findings. What he found was that optimization doesn’t explain the pattern of layers found in Mr. Obama’s long-form birth certificate.

An automated process of optimization will always create only one single transparent text layer, Papit says. That text layer is always 1-bit monochrome. But Obama’s birth certificate has many 1-bit layers. “It violates the basic characteristics of an optimized file,” Papit said. “What I found through months of testing is that in every case there’s only one single 1-bit layer. I’m 100 percent sure the file had to be manipulated in some way other than optimization.”

Another “big red flag” for Papit is the type of information contained on these layers. “The state registrar’s stamp and the date stamp are two of the individual layers,” Mr. Papit said. “The fact that such important pieces of information were on separate 1-bit text layers is highly suspicious.”

Ms. Zebest agrees that the layers appear to have a human intelligence behind them. No computer software would be able to separate out the registrar’s stamp and the date stamp by itself, she says. Someone, not something, placed those stamps on separate layers.

The reason stamps would appear on separate layers makes sense only if the birth certificate was manipulated, Ms. Zebest says. By having those stamps on separate layers, “they could position them anyway they want. Both stamps are nearly perfectly horizontal to the bottom edge of the page. If those were real stamps, the odds of their being nearly perfectly horizontal are pretty remote.” She says the simplest explanation is “the forger” likely thought they looked good lined up.

“If the registrar’s stamp and the date stamp are not legitimate, which certify that document, the entire document is not legitimate,” Ms. Zebest said.

Another issue that caught the attention of both Ms. Zebest and Mr. Papit was that the document’s metadata showed it had passed through a program called Mac Preview. This is a PDF generation tool commonly found on Macintosh computers. It’s not unusual that a scanned version of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate should pass through Mac Preview. Mac Preview, however, erases the digital tracks of a file, making it impossible to trace its history.

While Mac Preview erases digital tracks, it doesn’t erase layers. What’s more, Preview doesn’t create layers. “The layers in Obama’s birth certificate must have been created in some other application first,” Mr. Papit says. He also notes that an optimization routine that creates layers automatically generates a PDF file. There’s no logical reason to open up MAC Preview and resave a PDF file again as a PDF file. The only logical reason is to do it is “if you are looking to hide metadata,” he said.

There are many other digital anomalies in Obama’s birth certificate that are impossible to explain if the document were legitimate, Ms. Zebest says. Why the forger did such a poor job hiding his work is another question. That the document was put through Mac Preview indicates an effort was made to hide the evidence, she notes.

One of Ms. Zebest’s theories, which she admits she cannot prove, is that the person who created the file had to come from “within the inside circle. Not somebody they could go outside to who knows a lot about graphics programs.” Whoever created the document lacked real understanding of the program, but knew enough to create a plausible-looking birth certificate, she says. What they didn’t realize “is that they were leaving digital tracks all over the place.”

The Cold Case Posse says there are other anomalies, unrelated to digital forensics, that show Mr. Obama’s long-form birth certificate has been manipulated. The Posse also insists there is good reason to believe that Mr. Obama’s Selective Service card is fraudulent. The media have so far not looked closely at any of this evidence. The White House has remained silent.

But the Cold Case Posse is not deterred. “Our investigation is not over by any length and we continue to pursue it,” Mr. Zullo said. During the second press conference, Sheriff Arpaio called for Congress to take up the matter. “We know a fraud has taken place here. But we’re going to need federal congressional subpoena power to get any documents and to interview certain people,” Mr. Zullo said.

So far, there has been no one in Congress willing to take up Mr. Arpaio’s request. What is clear is that the “birther” controversy has not truly died and without more investigation, the truth may never be known.

Read more: http://times247.com/articles/32forging-ahead-on-the-birther-controversy-part-two4#ixzz23emjUf00