The PDF is composed of multiple images. That’s correct. Using a photo editor or PDF viewer of your choice, you can extract this image data, view it, hide it, etc. But these layers, as they’re being called, aren’t layers in the traditional photo-editing sense of the word. They are, quite literally, pieces of image data that have been positioned in a PDF container. They appear as text but also contain glyphs, dots, lines, boxes, squiggles, and random garbage. They’re not combined or merged in any way. Quite simply, they look like they were created programmatically, not by a human.
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.
UPDATE: I’ve confirmed that scanning an image, converting it to a PDF, optimizing that PDF, and then opening it up in Illustrator, does in fact create layers similar to what is seen in the birth certificate PDF. You can try it yourself at home.
I browsed over to NRO thinking I'd get a sample of high-level conservative thought on a number of important issues. Instead, I find that the birthers on this comment thread have morphed into...afterbirthers. Moreover, you've wasted no time in throwing NRO under the conspiracy bus too.
The conservative movement is doomed.
Dateline 2060: Parents who wish to ensure that their children can be validated for presidential election are required to have the POTUS chip subcutaneously implanted at birth, containing bloodtype, image of footprint, genome, and parents' genealogy.
The Hawaiian official already said it's stored in a book in the same place it's been for 10 years. So he's lying too?
YES!! HE"S LYING!! If you draw a circle around Hawaii and then draw a line to Washington, DC, and then another line to the Kremlin, and then draw a circle around Meccah, it spells O-B-A-M-A!!!
Expert: No Doubt Obamas BC is Legit http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/04/29/expert-says-obamas-birth-certificate-legit/
Keep in mind both O'Reilly and Shepard Smith have ALWAYS maintained that Obama was born in Hawaii.If FOX says it, then the Birthers will believe it? Nope.
Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the former director of Hawaii's Department of Health, said in a rare telephone interview with NBC.
Fukimo said she has personally inspected it — twice. The first time was in late October 2008, during the closing days of the presidential campaign.
She found the original birth record, properly numbered, half typed and half handwritten, and signed by the doctor who delivered Obama, located in the files. She then put out a public statement asserting to the document's validity. She later put out another public statement in July 2009 — after reviewing the original birth record a second time.