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Tuesday, August 12, 2008

"All you need to do is change the caption."

And, of course, believe the people telling you the tale.

We're all so dumb.

Errol Morris on "Photography as a Weapon" - Boing Boing:
"Documentary film maker Errol Morris has a fascinating piece in the New York Times about 'Photography as a Weapon.' In it, he interviews Hany Farid, a Dartmouth professor and expert on digital photographic fraud.
Errol Morris: [D]octored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.


The photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 provide several examples. Photographs that were used to justify a war. And yet, the actual photographs are low-res, muddy aerial surveillance photographs of buildings and vehicles on the ground in Iraq. I’m not an aerial intelligence expert. I could be looking at anything. It is the labels, the captions, and the surrounding text that turn the images from one thing into another."

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