The great birth certificate "mystery": A challenge

No-one has refuted my smack-down of Techdude, an alleged "expert" in computer graphics who claims to have found the name of Barack Obama's sister hidden "between the pixels" on the much-debated certificate of birth. So I have decided to issue a put-up-or-shut-up challenge that should settle the matter once and for all.

To explain what this controversy is all about, let me take you back to the year 61 A.D. At that time, someone hammered bronze letters onto the east pediment of the Parthenon. The letters spelled "NERO IS LIKE TOTALLY THE COOLEST EMPEROR EVAH," or words to that effect. (I have translated the Latin rather loosely.) Seven years later, the unpopular Nero got "axed" to leave by his own guards, and those bronze letters were pried off of Athena's home.

But the holes remained.

They puzzled scholars for many years, until finally someone doped out what the inscription must have been. Only certain letters could match that particular pattern of holes.

In essence, Techdude claims to have done the same thing with the Obama "certificate of live birth," or COLB. (Here.)

The COLB consists (mostly) of black lettering on a pale green/white herringbone pattern. The pattern was on the "blank" paper to begin with. That patterned "blank" was shoved into a printer somewhere in the Aloha State, and the data was printed in black ink.

Are we clear on how the thing was originally made? Good.

Now, Techdude says that the alleged Obama COLB is actually a forgery. He says that the forger began with a COLB belonging to Maya Sotero, Barack Obama's half-sister.

The forger (we are led to believe) used a computer graphics program such as Photoshop to lift up a bit of the pale green/white herringbone pattern. This bit was taken from a part of the document that had no writing on it. The pattern was positioned over a piece of text that the forger wanted to cover up. The patterned overlay hovered over the text on a separate layer (which is one of the cool things you can do in Photoshop). The forger set this layer to "lighten," thereby erasing everything darker on the layer beneath -- such as that dark ink.

The result? After the layers were flattened together, the alleged forger had a nice blank patterned page, onto which he could place new writing.

Techdude claims that when the original writing was erased in this fashion, a few pixels remained. He says that one can recapture the hidden writing by studying those pixels. That's how he knows that the COLB was originally Maya's.

Sort of like studying those holes in the Parthenon. Ya dig?

Here's the rub: Everyone agrees that the holes in the east pediment are actually there. You can even find pictures of 'em on the web. But no-one has demonstrated that those "stray" pixels actually exist in the COLB.

So I decided to reverse engineer the thing. What I wanted to find out was this: If one were to follow in the footsteps of Techdude's imagined forger -- if one were to erase writing on the COLB using the method he suggests -- will ghostly hints of the original lettering be left behind? Will there be any stray pixels? Will (so to speak) any unsightly holes mar the east pediment?

Here's how I decided to answer that question.

First, I lifted out a chunk of the background pattern (using Photoshop, natch). That chunk is the greenish rectangle you see above. (Throughout this essay, click on the images to get enlarged, clearer versions.)

Next, I put that strip of light green herringbone right over the name "BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA II." Yow! Look what happened!



You should be able to see the ghostly white outline around Barack's name. It's pretty damned obvious.

Is Techdude vindicated? No. If Maya's name had been that obvious, everyone would have noticed it right away.

So what went wrong? Why does that white outline exist?

When the COLB was posted to Daily Kos, it underwent heavy jpg compression. Why? Because it is a large image. Without compression, it would take forever to load up on your 'puter. Most images you see on the web are heavily compressed.

Compression introduces strange artifacts, especially in areas of high contrast, like black letters on a light background. Stray white and dark pixels will surround such letters. When I set the top-most pattern layer to "lighten," those white pixels beneath it were unaffected.

If the overlay were set to "normal" -- which is how I would have dunnit, frankly -- all of those stray pixels would be eradicated. So why wouldn't the forger do it my way, the safer way? Ya got me!

Now, when the proposed forger went to work, he presumably used Maya's actual COLB. Those black letters would have NO stray pixels. The result? This:



I saved this demonstration image at a high-quality setting, which means that the file is rather large. It's still a jpg, but it's a good jpg. There should be few weird artifacts around "BARACK," which I typed in using a 9 pt Arial font.

That's what you see in the field marked with a pink 1.

In field 2, you see "BARACK" covered by that same strip of overlaid pattern. Even though that pattern is on a layer set to "lighten" -- guess what? Every single pixel of the underlying "BARACK" is gone.

And I very much doubt that Techdude's much-vaunted forensic expertise will ever tease even one of those pixels back into visibility.

All of which brings us to the Great Techdude Challenge.

I have used what I understand to be the same techniques employed by the imagined forger. I have replicated what seems to be Techdude's notion of how the job was done.

I have typed a Shakespearean quote onto a blank area of the COLB, just above the place where you can read the words "CHILD'S NAME." I used 9 pt black Arial letters.

Then I covered up that quote, using the same techniques ascribed by Techdude to that supposed forger.

If Techdude's forensic methods actually work, then he should be able to tell us all what that quote is. Maybe you can uncover the quote in the image below. (Click to enlarge.) Play with the contrast slider! Change the hues! Use every filter you can think of! Brush up your Shakespeare -- start quoting him now!


The quote is quite obscure, so don't bother trying to guess it.

This test is perfectly fair. I have hidden this text using the same method allegedly used to hide Maya's name.

If the Dude now wants to argue that a different method was used, let him describe that method -- and let him tell us why a forger would prefer that method. I will prepare a similar test using any method he proposes.

C'mon, Techdude.

If you could find Maya's name in the COLB, you also should be able to divulge the secret Shakespearean text. The exact same methods should work in this case -- if they work at all, which I don't think they do.

In this instance, there are no holes in the east pediment of the Parthenon.

Why do I continue to challenge the Dude's work? Because Larry Johnson continues to promote it, online and on the radio. The PUMA movement is still a fairly delicate thing, and impressionable folks can be easily misled by this pseudo-scientific bullshit.

Frankly -- and at the risk of sounding paranoid -- I am starting to wonder whether Techdude is operating in good faith.

Oh -- and if folks out there want to question my good faith: Fine. Anyone else can put together an exactly similar experiment for the Dude. I have no problem with that, as long as the same rules are followed, and everyone is on the up-and-up. (If, as I suspect, Techdude is a bit of a con artist, then I naturally worry about the use of confederates.)