Adobe deed het

Je kon er op wachten. Zodra Obama zijn uitgebreide geboorteakte had vrijgegeven, om aan te tonen dat hij toch echt op Hawaii geboren is, riepen complottertjes natuurlijk weer dat het fake was. De grootste vriendin van Geert Wilders, Pamela 'The only good muslim is a dead muslim' Geller, was een van de huilende wolven in het bos.

Of zoals New Press het treffend formuleerde: 'The true "birthers" are Obamaphobes and conspiracy enthusiasts for whom all proof is false, and the sensible conservatives who tell them to drop it are part of the plot they believe is afoot out there to foist an illegitimate president on us. Like the belief that UFOs are real and evolution is false, the birther cult is rooted in bullet-proof ignorance: Evidence that debunks their conviction is just part of the coverup or the hoax, and serves only to strengthen their conviction.'

Prison Planet kwam als eerste met het verhaal dat wanneer je het document inleest in Adobe Illustrator je diverse lagen krijgt te zien, wat erop zou kunnen wijzen dat ermee gerommeld is. Maar het eerste waaraan Barracuda dacht - en waarom kunnen complotters dat niet? - was dat het gewoon iets met de scanner te maken zou kunnen hebben die het document heeft gedigitaliseerd. Dat dacht ook National Review: 'What’s plausible is that somewhere along the way — from the scanning device to the PDF-creation software, both of which can perform OCR (optical character recognition) — these partial/pseudo-text images were created and saved. What’s not plausible is that the government spent all this time manufacturing Obama’s birth certificate only to commit the laughably rookie mistake of exporting the layers from Photoshop, or whatever photo editing software they are meant to have used. It’s likely that whoever scanned the birth certificate in Hawaii forgot to turn off the OCR setting on the scanner. Let’s leave it at that.'

PJ Tatler legt het de complottertjes nog eens even haarfijn uit: 'If you scan a doc with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) turned on, Adobe Acrobat is capable of taking a scanned doc and breaking it out into layers automatically. That’s what seems to have happened here. There are still one or two funky anomalies, like the text in box 17a getting split into two separate layers and the date in 20 getting its own, but OCR is an imperfect beast and stuff like that happens. The larger question seems to be settled on how the cert got broken out into layers: Adobe did it.'