Drowning in disinformation
Millions of people around the world woke up to see this image from the Iranian news agency on the front page of the morning newspaper.
Although the image is now known to be fake, or to be strictly accurate, manipulated, the damage done by the exposure may be worse than the damage done by the original fakery.
The facts of the situation are now clear: Only three of the missiles were launched successfully, as another photograph taken earlier demonstrated. What appears to be the launch second missile from the right is actually a combination of the vapor trail from the other two rockets.
The fakers were caught, so what is the problem? Well the problem is that although the fakers were caught this time, we don't know how many times a fake photograph has been used without detection. During the 2004 US Presidential campaign, a photograph purporting to show John Kerry speaking with Jane Fonda was circulated. As with the Iranian forgery, far more people saw the original photograph than the subsequent rebuttal.
But the problem is not just that the fakers may achieve their objective, its that genuine evidence may be dismissed as fake. One does not need to be unduly Machiavellian to see how creating distrust in photographic evidence might suit a government whose grasp on power depends on control of information.
So what is the solution? Cryptography of course.
Adobe themselves have been concerned about the need to authenticate digital documents for many years. Adobe Acrobat has a built in document authentication feature that uses secure digital signatures.
The Adobe system is great, the only problem is that it only authenticates the document after editing. This is exactly what we want in the case of a contract, but not if the question is the authenticity of a photograph. What we need is a publicly verifiable means of authenticating the original photograph when it is taken by the camera.
While it is highly unlikely that the images taken by the original photographer will be the ones that end up on the Web site, the ability to authenticate the input to a process is essential if there is going to be a possibility of authenticating the process as a whole. For image authentication to be effective it must be integrated into the news-room workflow so that an editor knows which images are coming in from a stringer unmodified and which may have been altered and the reader knows which images came from the paper or wire service unmodified. Alteration may be necessary in some cases, a photograph taken in the field may be too light, too dark or have the wrong color balance because of the lighting used. But when an altered photograph is uploaded there should also be a source image available for verification.
As it happens, Nikon do implement a system of this type in their D3 and D300 cameras. Unfortunately, the details of the authentication scheme are not public and image verification requires an additional software package that requires use of a hardware key.
