Like a number of others, I could not care less about the scandal itself. If you want your leaders to be perfect, you are going to have to do without leaders.
This is a response to labradog's diary: How about some explanation from tech expert Weiner apologists?. What I'm going to propose is a rather simple policy that anyone can implement - for themselves or as a site-wide rule - to avoid this sort of embarrassment in the future.
In the digital age, there is no real excuse for not verifying your work.
The simplest method by which to do this is, to follow the claimed series of events, and check your investigative process each step of the way.
But all digital forensics does is catch people who are sloppy. That's it.
It is not a magic bullet. At the end of the day, the best evidence throughout this entire scenario was Anthony Weiner's own words.
But digital forensics is still a useful tool. When done properly, it is an example of what separates journalism from, well, what happened here. Even if most news organizations don't do journalism these days. We can do better.
FleetAdmiralJ did an excellent takedown of the errorlevelanalysis data in his diary here, and we need more of that.
The same sort of thing can be applied to the difference in EXIF data. When you send a large image through yfrog, does it crop and resize it? If so, does this also edit the EXIF data?
Even then, it doesn't say much - EXIF data gets stripped, added to, and altered by all sorts of programs that exercise their personal philosophy about what to do with it. As was pointed out, the original image itself was flipped upside down - meaning that it had been edited by a program before it saw the light of the Internet, which would have removed any sort of camera fingerprint the photo had in the image itself, in addition to possibly swapping out EXIF data.
Don't get me started on the data stamps. That was ridiculous. Weiner's camera probably took the image in 1280x1024 resolution or possibly larger, and he then made two smaller versions from the original source file, after flipping it upside down. There are cases where that will tell you something, but this wasn't one of them.
So what of Yfrog's security issue with its e-mails?
Just because it exists does not mean it was taken advantage of. Pointing out a security vulnerability is good - it can demonstrate flaws in the system - but it's a bad idea to assume that it, and it alone, was the vector.
In general, it's important to take an even, diplomatic response to these sort of things when investigating them. There were valid points turned up here by some of the people defending Weiner - but in the end, the evidence that was gathered was not explicitly exonerating.
The point is, digital evidence is rarely conclusive.
Nor was it particularly incriminating - Weiner could possibly have gotten away with claiming innocence. Especially if he avoided putting so many holes in his own story. At least until yfrog got a subpoena asking exactly how that image got onto their servers.
The Lessons You Should Take From This
1) Always double-check your work. Put a known good sample through the same procedure, and then evaluate the claimed forgery, as FleetAdmiralJ did with the errorlevelanalysis data.
2) Limit your conclusions to what the available evidence actually proves. It was possible to upload images to other people's yfrog accounts. This tells you that it was in fact possible. This does not mean that that was in fact what happened.
3) Verify the words of the sources where possible, and call them out even when they are on your side. The more we avoid wagon-circling, the faster we get this crap over with. In the long run, this is an investment in our future integrity, even if it costs a bit initially. The only technical perspective I have to offer, here, is that Weiner had to know about his yfrog, as he had to specifically give it access. His ability to delete those images himself means it's highly unlikely that someone actually tricked him into setting it up or something - or otherwise, he would have had to figure out how to get the yfrog account down and would have discussed the measures he had to take in order to do that. And then yfrog would have had his account data subpoenaed.
4) Those of you who did get 'punked' have only yourselves to blame, and not Weiner. By this I don't mean calling out Weiner for his stupidity is bad, per se. But Weiner did not call on you to defend him - you went down that rabbit hole yourself. If you want, eventually to be considered to have journalistic-level integrity, you need to do journalistic-level analysis. Blaming Weiner for this just gives you an excuse to get caught with your pants down again, the next time this happens. The proper thing to do, instead, is stop getting caught with your pants down.
5) That means report facts, not opinions or ideology. Jon Stewart did a comparatively excellent job regarding this, all things considered. Who knows, maybe Weiner stuck something in his pants.
6) Get over it. Not just about being wrong, owning up to it and moving on. I mean the business of this affair, as well. As long as Weiner did not abuse his authority, I don't really consider it my business as a voter. I hope the people he offers to represent think the same way.
Your sex drive has rather little bearing on your competence in governance.
Thank you.