“Hany Farid, a Dartmouth professor and an expert on digital photography, has published a number of journal articles and a recent Scientific American article on digital photographic fraud. He seemed to be a good person to start with. If a photograph has been tampered with, he’s the person to analyze how the tampering has been done. I wanted to discuss with him the issue of the Iranian photograph starting with the issue of why we trust photographs in the first place.”

The presumption behind a photograph is: “Someone saw this.” It is supposedly presenting something that someone saw and wished for someone else to see.

When we are been tricked, we are angered because we have been the victims of fraud… In essence, we have been lied to.

The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph. Photoshop is not the culprit. It is the intention to deceive.

I remember Collin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 arguing in front of the entire World that the Iraqis were doing something wrong, knew they were doing something wrong, and were trying to cover their tracks.

Later, it was revealed that the captions were wrong. There was no evidence of chemical weapons and no evidence of concealment nor weapon of mass destruction.

He used photography as a weapon, the only WMD as of today in Iraq!

[Via]