Moderated Obama birth certificate CT / SSN CT / Birther discussion

[JayUtah]

The Obama PDF -- one PDF layer, nine sub-layers created in another program to make up that one layer. Obviously.

Changing horses.

The program those nine objects were created in is Apple's Quartz 2D PDF optimizer. Lots of Birther handwaving notwithstanding, there is no evidence of any other program being used.

 

[Hans]

The Obama PDF -- one PDF layer, nine sub-layers created in another program to make up that one layer. Obviously.

 

[JayUtah]

Then replicate it. Exactly.

Sorry, your made-up Birther rules don't apply to me. Or to the courts. Or to the Constitution. Nor does a prosecutor get to set rules for exculpatory evidence. That would be changing the burden of proof. We discussed this. Or rather, I discussed it and you ignored it.

The expectation that any optimized PDF should be deterministically reproducible in fine is based on a naive understanding of the combinatorial complexity of the problem. None of your Birthers will discuss the combinatorics, and you won't answer questions about it. You just wave your hands wildly at some small number of feeble attempts -- by the prosecutor! -- and declare that there can be no exculpatory demonstration.

I and several others did some straw experiments with optimizers and reported the results here. You refused to address them or incorporate them into your naive understanding of the problem.

You're simply circling back around to debunked claims at this point, so no further attention for you.

For heaven's sake, the Birther pseudo-experts didn't even know what PDF optimization was until their learned critics told them. Then suddenly within a very short period of time, those phony and cowardly Birther experts suddenly became authorities in how PDF optimizers behave. Do you really think we can't tell frantic goalpost-shifting when we see it?

 

[JayUtah]

They are jpegs of what is claimed to be originals...

Claimed by whom? We have nothing but your unsatisfactory word that those images are supposed be identical.

Just try to replicate that, Mr. Expert, and report back.

There is no requirement to reproduce anything. You have the requirement to prove that the actual credentials used to certify Obama's eligibility were forged as you claim, not that some other documents or copies from unverified sources may be innacurate, forged, or badly copied. Your demands at this point have nothing remotely to do with eligibility. You're simply trying to shift the burden of proof in any way possible, and make your critics look foolish.

There is no point reporting back to you because you refuse to consider reports that contradict your belief.

You stated for example that the configuration of objects in the PDF was undoubtedly the result of conscious artistic creation and couldn't possibly be the result of algorithmic optimization. I performed my own experiments and, applying my considerable expertise on the subject of computer graphics and imaging, described in great detail why the objects we have in the PDF arose the way they did.

Naturally you let that pass in silence, because such learned treatment of your claims handily defuses your table-pounding. You demand this and demand that, but you forget that you have the burden of proof. This is not an exculpatory case. This is you and your feeble pseudo-experts on the hook to show you know what you're talking about. And so far you can't meet even the smallest challenge without devolving into one-word panic responses.

 

[gnome]

And the PDF stuff has been comppeltly debunked too

RP like the rest of the birthers has no evidence

It's shilling. It sounds complicated, and so by appealing to ignorance, people can say they're not convinced. "All I know is lots of people are saying there's something funny about his birth certificate"

 

[Alferd_Packer]

None of your Birthers will discuss the combinatorics, and you won't answer questions about it.

Just seeing the word, "combinatorics" causes birther heads to explode

 

[abaddon]

Robert, did you read the 696 page PDF LRM I provided you?

Did you understand it?

Where are the layers?

 

[JayUtah]

Just seeing the word, "combinatorics" causes birther heads to explode

Of course, because it's real mathematics and real computer science, not the "I write books on Photoshop" sort of pseudo-science, or the press-conference method of investigation, that you see from Birthers. Real science is laborious, tedious, and uses big words. It isn't based on headlines or sound bites.

I investigated the effects of just one variable in the solution and found great variability in the result. Further, PDF optimization is based on geometrical pattern recognition, which is by itself complex in the combinatorial sense and heavily biased by input conditions (e.g., such as the document skew on the scanner bed). PDF optimization is not combinatorially stable. Hence our bumpkin sheriff has no business saying whether, if it were a real document, it should be bitwise reproducible as such.

"Exact reproduction" is Birther bluster. They're licking their wounds after proudly and announcing to the world that a scanned PDF should contain only one pixel map. So to compensate, they pretend to require heavy demonstrations from their critics. Nothing more elaborate, however, than shifting the burden of proof.

 

[abaddon]

The Obama PDF -- one PDF layer, nine sub-layers created in another program to make up that one layer. Obviously.

As interpreted by Illustrator. Why do you persist in misapprehending this? It is not a difficult concept, after all.

Then replicate it. Exactly.

No problem. But that will require you to put a contract in place. I have no urge to jump through those hoops myself, but if you are willing to put your money where your mouth is, then, sure, I will go buy the Mac used, the scanner used, the software used, and so forth. Cash in advance, and you will be in a customer queue.

The burden of proof resides with you. Nevertheless, I am happy to offer my professional services, for an appropriate fee. I can tell you won't like the result though.

Conclude that both are obvious fakes.

Hawaii faked it then the whitehouse faked it. Why?

They are jpegs of what is claimed to be originals -- the AP an alleged certified copy of the original, the WH PDF an alleged scan of the original. One backgournd blue, the other a checkered tiled green. Just try to replicate that, Mr. Expert, and report back.

They are jpegs. For all anyone knows, you cooked them up at home, and YOU are the faker.

 

[JayUtah]

As interpreted by Illustrator. Why do you persist in misapprehending this? It is not a difficult concept, after all.

It is if you write off all of computer science as "technobabble." Important differences that don't seem so important from the layman's perspective (e.g., trying to cram a .25 cal. cartridge into a .22 cal. chamber; it's close enough, right?) suddenly become crucial when you're doing a real investigation.

Hawaii faked it then the whitehouse faked it. Why?

Because the Birthers changed horses. They came up with an elaborate fantasy scenario for how the PDF came to have more than the one object they expected, and that involved artists working for the Obama administration forging two identical documents -- the printed version circulated at the press conference, and the PDF posted online by the White House.

(The Birthers originally though they'd need only one accusation of forgery for both, wrongly believing that the circulated version was just a printout of the PDF. But then they discovered that the circulated paper copy was of a higher resolution and fidelity than then PDF, so hence the pointless two separate forgeries.)

But after Hawaii certified both versions as authentic, then the Birthers had to implicate Hawaiian officials in their accusation. Because all of a sudden authority for the claim shifted from the White House to the state of Hawaii, so their scenario fell apart. It made more sense when the accusation was that the White House forged up the documents and Hawaii wouldn't get involved.

It's standard conspiracy rhetoric: when someone pokes a big hole in your speculation, just spackle over it with more speculation.

 

[Hans]

Maybe Robert is Obama- just trying to make his critics look horribly inept.....

Robert are you Barack? 'fess up now

 

[abaddon]

It is if you write off all of computer science as "technobabble." Important differences that don't seem so important from the layman's perspective (e.g., trying to cram a .25 cal. cartridge into a .22 cal. chamber; it's close enough, right?) suddenly become crucial when you're doing a real investigation.



Because the Birthers changed horses. They came up with an elaborate fantasy scenario for how the PDF came to have more than the one object they expected, and that involved artists working for the Obama administration forging two identical documents -- the printed version circulated at the press conference, and the PDF posted online by the White House.

(The Birthers originally though they'd need only one accusation of forgery for both, wrongly believing that the circulated version was just a printout of the PDF. But then they discovered that the circulated paper copy was of a higher resolution and fidelity than then PDF, so hence the pointless two separate forgeries.)

But after Hawaii certified both versions as authentic, then the Birthers had to implicate Hawaiian officials in their accusation. Because all of a sudden authority for the claim shifted from the White House to the state of Hawaii, so their scenario fell apart. It made more sense when the accusation was that the White House forged up the documents and Hawaii wouldn't get involved.

It's standard conspiracy rhetoric: when someone pokes a big hole in your speculation, just spackle over it with more speculation.

I know, just wondered if Robert was willing to dig himself deeper.

BTW spackle is merkin for Polyfilla for any Europhobes.

 

[Robrob]

Maybe Robert is Obama- just trying to make his critics look horribly inept.....

Robert are you Barack? 'fess up now

Obvious disinfo agent.

Using CT "logic."

 

[Robert Prey]

Just to be clear: is that WH pdf really supposed to be a scan of the original? Or rather of a copy made on safety paper? Because, you know, there is a little difference...
And the WH pdf suggests to me it is a copy on safety paper. While that other copy was made on normal paper.
Mind supplying where either thing suggests it is a fake?

If it was a scan on safety paper then it is not an accurate representation of the original which must include the original background overlaid on safety paper. But that is not the case. It's fake. And if one aspect of the document is fake, then it is reasonable to assume other aspects are faked as well.

 

[Robert Prey]

This claim always made me laugh, because when you actually look at the objects in question and try to interpret them as productive Photoshop layers, you can't help thinking what sort of incompetent moron of an artist would try to use Photoshop that way. Or even how anyone could, without going nuts.

No, the "layers" don't make any sense as a composed document in Photoshop. But the Birther claim is that the PDF exists as several different objects because the hypothetical artist composed the Ps layers that way and then consciously set up the PDF exporter to preserve those layers as separate objects. (Flattening is the default in most Ps versions.) Supposedly only the Birther pseudo-experts were smart enough to be able to see this allegedly bogus representation for what it was.



Or exactly what you'd expect, as we shall see.

It's time we examined these nine objects and try to determine what they are and why they're there.

"One layer entirely the background" is a total lie. The object in question is the green safety paper, and the ruling on the form, and the signatures, and random letters from the typewritten text -- such as the "R" in "BARACK" but not any of the other letters. In other words, a bunch of apparently unrelated elements.

An artist is going to create a layer for the crosshatched safety paper, a separate layer for the line art, and then another layer or layers for the signatures. He's also going to add an adjustment layer with a gradient mask to create the part of the image where the book gutter margin is darker.

Further, the contents of other objects have been "knocked out" of this background object so they are visible as little white outlines. This is necessary for how the PDF rendering engine works, but it is completely unwarranted in Ps. The Ps artist knows that higher layers will simply obscure the background according to the blend-mode settings.

The next object is most of the text and some of the deep black graphic elements like arrows for the signature boxes. Keep in mind that a fair amount of other text appears in the "background-only" object. These elements are jagged and stark because the object is a bit mask. It can represent only the presence or absence of the graphics-state. During the importation, Ai assumes it will be black and converts it as such.

Why logically-related text in two different objects? Makes no sense in Ps, but it makes absolutely perfect sense in PDF optimization. PDF optimizers perform a high-pass filtration of the original image to detect where edges might occur, and where stark transitions from one color to another might be replaced by transitions that lie on pixel boundaries. This allows a portion of the graphic to replaced by a bitmap, which takes up much less space.

However, in the original image the "R" in BARACK was too fuzzy to trigger the high-pass filter. As such it got left as part of the "deep" pixel map so that the fuzzy edge could be accurately rendered using greater image depth. The deep image requires lots of bits per pixel so that it can accurately reproduce true graphical elements as well as "black" elements that nevertheless require some gray scale on their edges to aid interpretation. For example, long thin lines that don't precisely align to the raster, if rendered in 1-bit bitmask-type graphics, are unacceptably jaggy.

It is trivially easy to find and create examples of overly jagged items in optimized PDFs. In the magazine page I scanned and optimized, one photo was of the Ps Brushes palette. The optimizer extracted the hard-edged brushes and replaced them with a bit mask, while leaving the soft-edged brushes alone!

Throughout the document we see that the criteria for keeping an object on the deep background rather than the shallow text object is the requirement that the object in the original image have some grayscale properties, not its logical function in the purported Ps forgery.

Optimizer: 1
Artist: 0

The next two objects are the registrar's signature and the date under the seal, respectively. Again, these are bitmaps. But why weren't they included with the other line-art and text objects? Because they're geographically far removed from the rest of it.

In Ps the layers are the same dimension and depth. Hence you don't gain anything in terms of convenience or space by having separate layers for content that is geographically separate but logically and graphically related.

But in PDFs, image objects are no bigger than they need to be to express the element in question. Hence you gain considerable space savings by taking an image composed of geographically clustered elements, and breaking each element up into its own image. You don't have to store the empty space that way.

Optimizer: 2
Artist: 0

The next three objects are two date stamps and the first three letters of the word "None" -- i.e., omitting the "e" which is contained on the principal text and graphics layer.

The astute viewer will notice that while these too are 1-bit images, they are not full black. They are, in fact, a dark gray. The bitmap-conversion algorithm says, "Can this region be represented by a single color?" In most cases that color is black. Here the color is dark gray because while the edge-detection algorithm found an edge, and while the color-depth simplifier found a single color, it was not the same color that had been used in the other single-bit image. Hence it can't be included with it, because the graphics-state color is different for that bit mask than for the other bitmap objects. Before rendering these bitmasks, the graphics state must be changed to the new color, so they have to be separate rasters.

And again because all the bitmask objects of this color are far separated, they are separate image objects, not all on the same layer.

In Ps a layer can contain any color compatible with the overall image's color model. There is no justification (and considerable disadvantage) to putting different colored objects necessarily on a different layer. But this is exactly how the optimizer renders single-color image elements using the minimum data storage.

Optimizer: 3
Artist: 0

The last two objects are alterations to the paper, one the imprint of the registrar's stamp and the other a set of discolorations at the top edge of he paper.

To understand why these are there, you need to understand the difference between component images and indexed images. Component images store each pixel as a tuple of the numbers that express the components of the pixel's desired color in the color model -- HSL, CYMK, RBG, YUV, etc. You may be familiar with component expressions of color such as #0080ff, which represents RGB values for a color as six hexadecimal digits, two digits for each component. 00 means fully off, 0xff (255 in decimal) means full intensity, with lesser intensities represented by the intervening numbers.

In an indexed image, you predetermine a palette of colors you're going to use, and assign each a sequential number. The value stored for each pixel is the number, the index into that predetermined color table, which is a much smaller number than representing the pixel component values directly. The drawback is that your image must be composed only of the colors you've selected.

Converting a component image to an indexed image requires color-space quantization, that is, reducing the number of colors needed to visually represent an image. In virtually every case, you have to approximate the color in the source image using the closest entry in the color table. The "error" between that entry color and the actual color is accumulated and considered when deciding the colors of neighboring pixels. Since pixels are very small, the overall impression will be of roughly the correct colors. Artifacts of such a quantization and error-diffusion process appear all over the background object in the Obama PDF.

Of course we can simply look in the raw PDF data structures to see that the image has been quantized and indexed. But we can confirm that this process has taken place by magnifying the image. The green safety pattern contains "speckles" of error-diffused pixels in the white spaces. The pattern has been approximated in the PDF by using the minimal number of green colors.

8-bit quantization produces very compact image storage and allows up to 256 colors. You can choose what those colors are, but once chosen you are limited to them. How to choose? Well, by histographic analysis of the source image. This is a sophisticated statistical process, but the result is to determine the set of 256 colors that will best represent all the colors in the image, using appropriate error diffusion.

Here a clever thing has happened. The optimizer has realized that if it eliminates certain regions of the background image that contain outlying pixel data, it can recover the colors it would need to represent them and add them to the greens and grays it needs to represent the bulk of the background and fuzzy line art. And since those outlyers are generally single-color aberrations, they fall under the auspices of changing the graphic state and applying a bit mask.

So here the quantization problem has been simplified by removing slightly outlying data and making it its own simplified object. No reason to do that in Ps since minor color and pattern variations -- especially to an established pattern, can happily live in a single Ps layer.

Optimizer: 4
Artist: 0

So the notion that an optimizer "wouldn't produce" this pattern of objects is simply as naive as it can be. This is exactly the kind of way an optimizer would carve up a raw scan. The notion that these are the accidentally revealed layers of some Ps artist tasked with creating the forgery makes no sense whatsoever.

I actually agree with some of what you have posted, but you must discuss one layer at a time.

 

[JayUtah]

If it was a scan on safety paper then it is not an accurate representation of the original which must include the original background overlaid on safety paper.

No. It is an accurate representation because the designated registrar says it is, under penalty of perjury. End of story. Learn how certification works.

 

[Border Reiver]

If it was a scan on safety paper then it is not an accurate representation of the original which must include the original background overlaid on safety paper. But that is not the case. It's fake. And if one aspect of the document is fake, then it is reasonable to assume other aspects are faked as well.

Who cares if the scans are exactly as is, touched up for clarity or whatever you assert must have been done?

The State of Hawaii has certified that the information displayed therein is accurate. The story ends.

 

[JayUtah]

I actually agree with some of what you have posted, but you must discuss one layer at a time.

No, I don't have to jump through your silly meaningless hoops.

 

[Robert Prey]

He posted two jpegs of unknown provenance. They are not pdf files. I could fake one up in pink. In fact, here you go.

Exactly. Faked. Just like O's COLB.

 

[JayUtah]

Exactly. Faked. Just like O's COLB.

No, his point was that you present no evidence that these randomly-obtained images are what you say they are, or that they should be expected to be identical. You have no point unless you can prove provenance. You refuse to, and instead want to play silly word games. Therefore we drop this point.