#fotoforensics

Pixels lie. The job is to make them confess. IMINT forensics is the part of imagery intelligence that doesn't care what the picture shows — it cares what the file betrays. Every edit leaves a fingerprint somewhere: in the compression grid, in the sensor noise, in a shadow that points the wrong way. A working analyst …

In December 2012 a journalist published one photo of John McAfee, on the run from Belize police. One photo. Inside the JPEG sat an unstripped GPS tag from an iPhone 4S — 15°39'29.4"N, 88°59'31.8"W — a poolside in Parque Nacional Río Dulce, Guatemala. McAfee tried to claim the data was faked. Two days later he co…