Digital Forensics

Fas­ci­nat­ing descrip­tion by com­puter sci­en­tist Hany Farid who works with var­i­ous law-enforcement agen­cies to uncover doc­tored images. Mod­ern soft­ware has made pho­to­graph manip­u­la­tion eas­ier to carry out, but also eas­ier to detect.

I expect that as the field pro­gresses over the next five to 10 years, the appli­ca­tion of image foren­sics will become as rou­tine as the appli­ca­tion of phys­i­cal foren­sic analy­sis. It is my hope that this new tech­nol­ogy, along with sen­si­ble poli­cies and laws, will help us deal with the chal­lenges of this excit­ing yet some­times baf­fling dig­i­tal age.