
Spotting Photo Fakery via Dino A. Brugioni, CIA, 1969 - danso
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1156875-spotting-photo-fakery-via-dino-a-brugioni-1969.html
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danso
This is mentioned in the OP's summary description, but just worth re-
mentioning that this document comes from the CIA's professional journal,
"Studies in Intelligence", a publication created to "support the development
of intelligence as a professional discipline"

It was published in 1955 until 1992 (or at least, declassified), and 1400+
documents in this collection are available at the Archives.gov website. You'll
even find some early NSA documents in it.

Description of the series:
[http://research.archives.gov/description/6922330](http://research.archives.gov/description/6922330)

Edit: for some reason, I'm unable to perform searches within the
aforementioned publication on Archives.gov...it gives me a "Search time
exceeded" error...I don't know if that means the query timed out, or my
browser/IP has spent the daily quota of archive browsing, or if archive.gov is
feeling the HN effect...in any case, the articles I skimmed through are pretty
fascinating and well-written. A few that might be interesting to HNers:

\- Observations on the Double Agent:
[http://research.archives.gov/description/7283476](http://research.archives.gov/description/7283476)

\- What it's like to be a CIA trainee:
[http://research.archives.gov/description/7284002](http://research.archives.gov/description/7284002)

\- Notes on how to estimate things:
[http://research.archives.gov/description/7283640](http://research.archives.gov/description/7283640)

\- Deducing the Soviet's atomic energy capability from a photo
[http://research.archives.gov/description/7283639](http://research.archives.gov/description/7283639)

\- Using Bayes Theorem for intelligence work
[http://research.archives.gov/description/7283645](http://research.archives.gov/description/7283645)

------
dimitar
False captioning seems to be too easy to trace today with google image search
and the general availability of photo materials in the Internet.

For example in the current conflict in Ukraine, Russian media has employed a
lot of fakery, but the overwhelming majority of the times they were caught,
they used false captioning.

Today it seems that no one will believe a clumsy photoshot jobs, however false
captioning is potent as ever.

For examples see these sources:

[http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/03/05/ukraines-
activists-...](http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/03/05/ukraines-activists-
debunk-russian-myths-on-crimea/)

[http://www.stopfake.org/en/](http://www.stopfake.org/en/)

~~~
jqm
From the article..

"Communists do not follow the rules when it comes to captions"

(For some reason this line in the article almost doubled me over with
laughter. I guess it's hard to remember how bad the red scare actually was,
but the repeat blanket statements about "communists" just struck me as funny.)

~~~
reality_czech
1969 was not anywhere near the "red scare" which was in the early 1950s.
Anyone living in 1969 would have been well aware of the Cuban Missile Crisis
of 1962, in which a nuclear war almost broke out, and the USSR's brutal
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the pro-democracy protests there.
Pretty much the opposite of "funy."

Anyone reading this document would have known full well that "communists" in
this context meant government officials of the USSR, North Korea, or China.
All of those regimes had (and two still do) highly censored presses that were
indeed not "careful with captions" \-- or the lives of people who dared to
expose the truth about the government in general.

~~~
jqm
Please settle down my friend.

I'm not suggesting the Russians didn't abuse the Czechs.

It's just the blanket statements and rhetoric (yes, it is rhetoric) used in
the article strike me as funny

~~~
reality_czech
Do you also read the Diary of Anne Frank and then post "LOL this girl really
thought the nazis were after her haha" to Facebook? Because that is how you
are coming across here.

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SEJeff
TL;DNR: it's a shop! You can tell by the pixels.

In all seriousness, it makes a ton of sense for the spooks be able to both
spot and create good fake pictures. I'm sure it is a valuable trick of the
trade in an industry where intrigue and blackmail are the norm rather than the
exception.

