Sure, Ted, but I am a bit surprised that some people cannot see how conclusive this is. (Unless, of course, they say that everyone is lying and there is some sort of conspiracy involved. I have thought that over, and dismiss that possibility.) Then again, perhaps it is only my decades of experience as an editor, in which I have to process and understand a huge volume of text every day, that helps me.

In any case, I will have to go from memory, since, as is often the case, I am quite busy right now (processing and understanding a huge amount of text!). Here is the situation as I understand it off the top of my head:

Apparently in response to accusations that Senator Obama was refusing to release his birth certificate to prove he is eligible to become President, a website called the Daily Kos posted a scan of a document titled Certificate of Live Birth that it said came from the Obama campaign. (Such a document is not an actual birth certificate according to some posters, but that is a side issue.) The certificate number was blacked out, and there appeared to be no embossed seal. (Later it seems someone was able to tease out an image of a seal, but—if I understand correctly—it only occurred on a second copy of the document posted, and some say that has suspicious features also.)

It wasn’t long before people started saying the document was fake, and someone whose screen name was Techdude, who said he was a long-time forensic document investigator, decided to examine the scan. I think it was at this point that I noticed these developments and started to follow them.

On the blog Atlas Shrugs, Techdude eventually posted his analysis and concluded the document was a crude forgery. He compared the decorative border with those of known authentic documents from Hawaii in the year before and after, and found significant differences, as well as other evidence of tampering in the form of stray marks, irregularities, font differences, and an unusual halo around the text printed on the document. There was also some metadata (hidden information in the digital file) that proved photoshopping had taken place.

Of course, pro-Obama people responded strongly, with arguments of their own, but a lot of technical jargon and complexities were thrown around on both sides, so for myself I simply decided that although Techdude sounded more convincing, and I thought he was right, I could not be absolutely certain.

Then, again on Atlas Shrugs, Techdude posted to the effect that he had uncovered an actual name under the existing text by matching a certain type and pattern of stray marks with letters of the alphabet in the same font. These marks were apparently very disjoint, but they appeared around the visible text that was Obama-specific, and there was enough to pinpoint some of the seemingly erased letters and narrow down the possibilities for others. This, combined with the fact that in readable text, certain combinations of letters are less likely or impossible, enabled Techdude to reconstruct the presumably hidden text.

It spelled out the name of one of Obama’s relatives.

Techdude did not release the name, out of consideration for the person or persons responsible so that they would have a chance to come forward without damage to their reputation or legal consequences. But he also issued a challenge to readers to follow his own process and see if they could make out the name themselves. He even offered a prize in the form of a free trip to Las Vegas to the first person who succeeded.

At least three people, most of them non-experts in graphics or forensics, independently came up with the same name. Techdude awarded the person the prize.