Recently President Obama has been getting an earful from a certain conspiracy group known as the "Birthers". The ultimate goal of the group is to discredit Obama via accusing him of being born in Kenya, instead of Hawaii. Recently, Obama became so annoyed at these accusations that he released his birth certificate. The Birthers did not give up.
Multiple videos on Youtube show someone moving and hiding the layers found on the photocopy of his birth certificate. The claim is that things means the document was tampered with. Is this legitimate?
Nope.
Here is why:
It's called OCR (optical character recognition). Acrobat and many scanners do this by default. It detects letters and words on the page and allows you to add selectable text to the document without having to type it in manually.
Notice how when you hide a layer, it's white behind it? If it was truly forged, you wouldn't see any of the background missing. It's white because it doesn't know what's behind the text BECAUSE THE TEXT WAS THERE WHEN IT WAS SCANNED.
Other accusations:
- "It's fake because the ink is smudged"
- "It's fake because it states that his father's race is African, but it should say Bro"
- "African isn't a race"
- "Some people are really good at Photoshop"
- "There is no way that paper was available in the 1960s"
This is ridiculous.
[/rant]
