Pseudorandom Thoughts

Link Gateway Pundit: New York Times Busted in Hezbollah Photo Fraud! -- this time, staged photos. Presumably the time, date, location is real, only the subject matter is staged. This is the kind of thing that would be difficult to prevent, were it more sophisticated and used different actors throughout. In this case, however, presumably face recognition could be applied, as well as some basic olde-style symbolic AI inferencing.
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Link Drinking From Home: Extreme Makeover - Beirut Edition. Is it two photos of the same woman at the same event? Or is she a professional mourner? A technical means of providing supporting authentication for the photographic evidence would be a GPS-enabled camera where the coordinates / time are included in the photographic data being digitally signed.

Of course, unless this kind of technology is available in consumer market models, the cost is likely to be prohibitive. Luckily, including GPS data in cameras might actually be coming, since it helps consumers geolocate their vacation photos etc.

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Link The Jawa Report: Another Fake Reuters Photo from Lebanon -- another photo credited to Adnan Hajj that's obviously been manipulated.
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Link lgf: Reuters Doctoring Photos from Beirut? is quite interesting and brings to mind ideas from over a decade ago of embedding secure, tamper-resistant hardware into digital cameras to digitally sign photos. Without something like that to provide a chain of evidence (when the chain of custody is weak), our faith in photographic evidence should necessarily diminish as photo manipulation gets easier and easier. Of course, photos may need post processing in order to enhance color balance, etc etc, and that's why authenticating that an original raw photo came from a particular camera is only a link in the chain of evidence. After all, shots (like the one with the dead body) can easily be staged. (NB: I have no idea if it was, and if it were, to what degree.)
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