Today AmericaBlog reported that BP released bogus photos of their supposed HIVE Houston gulf oil disaster command center.
Here’s just one example of the mistakes in their fake:
After BP got busted for one of the most embarrassing Photoshop botches of all time, BP posted what they claimed to be original, undoctored image. The difference, they asserted, was that they had only faked two screens that were blank in the original image.
Knowing a little bit about forensic image analysis, I was surprised that no one had bothered to conduct an error level analysis of BPs photos. Basically, an error level analysis can help reveal what areas of a jpg image has been altered and resaved. The process isn’t foolproof: reds and edges can sometimes create a “false positive”, causing an image to appear altered when it’s not.
Because I was pretty sure that BP was lying again, I decided to run the supposedly original image through the online error level analyzer. Unsurprisingly, the results suggest that BP is, in fact, still lying, and that this isn’t really a photo of their command center: it’s make believe.
The images below offer the evidence for this. First, here is the so-called “original” image I used for analysis. I had to save it at a lower resolution so that the file size was small enough for the analyzer. This downsampling does not alter the image enough to have a significant impact on the analysis:
And here, is the error level analysis of the same image:
The darkest areas represent older pixels that have been resaved most often. The brightest areas in the image have been saved more recently, and most likely suggest they were pasted into the image later. As you can see, there’s an awful lot of cut-and-paste going on in those monitors, suggesting that the original images you see of the Deepwater Horizon are bogus, and are added later.
So it turns out that BP’s most recent claim, that this is an actual photos of the HIVE Houston Command Center, is most likely another of BP’s many lies in this disaster.
I’d like to close with a few thoughts:
- If you’re surprised that BP keeps lying, you’re ignorant. This isn’t surprising to me, in fact I expected to find this.
- Where are the real journalists? I’m some guy in my mom’s basement, remember?! Why are real journalists not doing their jobs?!
- I’d like to point out that if terrorists did this to America, we’d be under martial law right now. The Deep Horizon Disaster is an attack on America, plain and simple.
Follow John Holland on Twitter
Boycott (Lying) BP Facebook Page