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On Fri, 11 Jul 2008, Michael Cammer wrote:

> Search the CONFOCAL archive at
> http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal
>
>> Not sure if one can view this Washington Post web page without
>> creating a free user account, but give it a shot (pardon the pun).
>>
>> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/10/AR2008071002709.html
>
> So now the Iranians know that the West has sophisticated image decoding
> technologies.  This was just a first test of many.

Hah.  Well no, it wasn't "sophisticated image decoding technologies."
It was Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, who does it mostly by
inspection.  See:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/30602_Reality_vs._Photoshop

See also:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/30606_New_York_Times_Belatedly_Credits_LGF


Further, it's not the first test of many.  It's one of a gazillion that's come out of the region.  For one list from 2006, see:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22391_Fauxtography_Updates&only

This has become sort of a hobby for folk who hold AFP, Reuters, NYT, et al in contempt because they are so willing to play useful idiots for these guys -- when 13-year-olds are capable of seeing some of the errors, but Reuters can't.


The most amusing was when the AP published a story of a US soldier being held hostage (see:
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=1333909 
-- the original AP story is no longer easily available ).

It turned out to be an action figure:

http://www.freethought-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1703

It's gotten so bad that "Reutered" is now part of the Urban Dictionary:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Reutered


When I worked for the military, this kind of thing was a repeated problem.  Al Quaeda and its affiliates regularly provided falsified imagery as propaganda.  More irritatingly, they kept providing videos of *real* beheadings claiming they were killing American captives -- but they were actually beheadings of Russian captives from Chechnya.

There are, in fact, some new methods in development for this kind of stuff, but they are mostly of ancillary value.  The work by Harin Farid at Dartmouth is particularly intriguing.  See:

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/publications/


>
> Somebody should do analysis like this on the pictures Colin Powell showed
> the UN arguing that Iraq had WMD.


Actually, though I don't know why you want to play these political games in a scientific forum, our data were pretty good.  The claim that we knowingly projected wrong data is simply untrue, however personally satisfying you find it to inject your perspective into this forum.

I was involved in planning for biological/chemical fatalities in the invasion of Iraq.  We were scared to death -- and planning for up to 30,000 biological/chemical casualties.  The biggest fear we had involved smallpox, anthrax and persistent chem weapons.  Smallpox remains viable for as much as 13 years in cadavers, for instance, and we simply could not return contaminated bodies back to the US until they had been decontaminated.  That is a nontrivial thing to do when there are thousands of casualties. This wasn't a trivial political game, no matter how much you try to reduce it to that.  I won't bore you with what we planned, but dealing with a few tens of thousands of infectious bodies is a nontrivial task. You can't burn the bodies, for instance, without aersolizing the agents. You can't fly the bodies back in cargo holds because the change in pressure may cause outgassing and contamination of the airplane.

The bottom line, however, is if you look at the interrogation records of Saddam after his capture made by George Piro, Saddam knowingly mislead the US into thinking there were WMDs because he fundamentally didn't think that Bush would invade.

Oh, I know, it doesn't serve your taste to differentiate between being fooled by another intelligence agency and "lying," but in most of the rest of the world, folk can comprehend it.

>
> Furthermore, perhaps the gov't should release all the raw data so that we
> may have the opportunity to reanalyze them using our favorite tools.
>
> Why stop at imaging in scientific research?


In fact, that's done all the time.


billo
http://www.billoblog.com/billoblog