Science in the service of truth.

I wrote recently of the need to Be sceptical in the face of a dishonest press corps with questionable ethics, illustrating the piece with the crudely altered pictures taken by a schmuck with a political agenda working for Reuters.

Well, someone has decided to apply science to the process of uncovering digital fakes, and more can be found in this excellent web site. That someone is a member of the Dartmouth faculty (though I recognize that’s no guarantee of integrity) named Hany Farid and he is to be commended for his work. It’s instructive to realize that the many illustrations on his site of tampered ‘news’ pictures are from across the political spectrum and academia. No party or ideology, it seems, is above blame ot guilt. Anyway, Dr. Farid sounds like the real thing – check out his research papers to get an idea of how he goes about the discovery process. Here’s someone applying a forensic approach to photographic crime, which seems entirely appropriate.

Some digital camera makers are now beginning to offer ‘original digital signatures’ as part of the information stored with digital images. Sounds like these should become required equipment for the staffs of major magazines.

True, cheating is as old as the world – Farid’s examples amusingly include Lincoln’s head on another politician’s body (as if Lincoln needed any help!) – but it’s nice to read that someone is trying to institutionalize the process of discovery using mathematical techniques. Nor does he restrict his work to still pictures, for he addresses video fakes (no, not newscasters, but that’s pretty close – that’s a subset that should see elimination of humans, replaced with inexpensive cyborgs, with no loss to viewers and considerable financial savings to the networks) in one of his papers.