, 11 tweets, 4 min read Read on Twitter
So, exciting! The President of These United States tweeted out an image that appears to be a crappy smart-phone photograph of a classified intelligence briefing. But how can we be sure? With Tungstène!(1/11)
(2/11)What is Tungstène? It's a photo analysis software package developed by the brilliant Roger Cozien, good friend of @CNS_Updates. He was kind enough to share his knowledge with us just this week. Here's an interview with him: bit.ly/2LlIdAS
(3/11)Tungstène analyzes images with algorithms that tease out details that might not be apparent to the naked eye, and outputs a filtered image. This filter, called Mercury, runs a Principal Component Analysis:
(4/11)What the heck is Principal Component Analysis? It's, uh, complicated and mathy. Basically, it breaks the image down into bits, sorts them into bits that statistically "belong" and those that don't.
(5/11)The first picture shows the bits that "belong," which we take to be the underlying image, the one that was presumably shown to a bored and fussy President. The second picture is the bits that don't belong--artifacts of the smart phone photo snapped by said POTUS.
(6/11)This filter shows true spectral color, what the image would look like if everything had uniform lighting. What this is showing is that the whole thing is the same color! It's not picking up the picture of the launch pad, but a picture of the surface of that picture!
(7/11)The exception to the uniform color is that bit in the upper left hand corner, where some unknown hero obscured the classification marking. Again, on the photo Trump took, not on the underlying image.
(8/11)Now, we can't tell what classification marking was obscured, but I'm willing to entertain guesses. I'm gonna go with S//SCI//NOFORN.
(9/11)One more filter, in GIF form! This shows the layers of the image, again using principal component analysis. See how it starts with the blurry, blocky artifacts of Trump's smart-phone photo, then hones in on the details of the image?
(10/11)So the mathematical artifacts of the image seem to corroborate the reporting. Our adult-onset-ADD president snapped a photo during a classified briefing, then Just Tweeted It Out. For reasons?
(11/11)In conclusion,
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