About Bellingcat’s claim: “Russian sat pics fake”June 1, 2015
Preliminary review about Bellingcat’s newest report ‘Forensic Analysis of Satellite Images Released by the Russian Ministry of Defense’. (Link to Bellingcat)
Author: This review is written By Charles Wood B.Sc MIEEE MACS.
Mr Wood is an experienced forensic expert with one specialisation being
forensic analysis of digital images and metadata. Mr Wood has over 20 years years experience in digital media and 10 years experience in digital media forensics for criminal and civil cases. Additional experience includes formerly working in applied physics (meteorology, climate research, toxic gas research, and oceanography) and also 5 years parttime service in the infantry.
Executive Summary
This report is on the quality and validity of the Bellingcat report. This report makes no assertion that the images were or were not faked; it simply points out the almost completely fallacious basis for the Bellingcat report and its conclusions.
The Bellingcat report is hopelessly flawed from the very start. It relies on unsophisticated use of a (free) online ‘image checker’ to detect ‘evidence’ of forgery and relies on Google dates for imagery dates. Neither reliance is at all justifiable and any conclusions made from them cannot be used by any serious party.
They also rely on EXIF data as evidence of manipulation without addressing the very simple point that images have to be prepared for publication and so will naturally be processed by photoshop or equivalent to trim and enhance and annotate.
Image Error Analysis Failure
The error analysis program they use is incapable of detecting forgeries in any but the most obvious cases. They rely on vague patterns well below noise level that are expected in any image with a small object on a relatively plain field.
Their first error is resorting to (free) fotoforensics.com to do the analysis rather than a tunable command line tool that can perform more intelligent analysis.
They then submit the images to fotoforensics without knowing what algorithms are being used and what the precise meaning of the error image is.
[…]
In conclusion I reiterate the main issues
– Bellingcat ‘investigators’ are unqualified
– Their use of Error Level Analysis is incompetent
– Their reliance on dubious imagery dating is incompetent
– They have no idea about publication processes for digital
documents
– They make totally unjustified guesses at ‘probabilities’ and
present them as fact
– Their conclusions are unsound.
> http://7mei.nl/2015/06/01/about-bellingcats-claim-russian-sat-pics-fake/
Hier noch eine Einschätzung eines russischen Experten (Google Translate benutzen)
> http://ntv.livejournal.com/398128.html