Tools of the Trade

[nonhocapito]

The intention of this post is to compile a list of all the tools that a researcher can use off the internet or through other software, to pursue a clue and investigate or accumulate and share evidence.

Eventually I plan to compile a single, comprehensive list, but in the meantime I think this should be collective work since we all have our favorite tools: websites where we verify sources, software we use etc. I'm especially thinking about 9/11 research, since it is the field where these tools undergo the most pressure.

The criteria regarding search engines should favor websites that make it easier for another user to jump directly to the results of the research, rather than having one to re-make the search from scratch.

This list will be golden for every researcher on this or other forums: so it's the time to be generous and let the cluesforum shine

I'll start listing some of the websites I know of. I am sure I am forgetting crucial ones. Feel free to point out websites that offer better services. The order for now is random, aside of these temporary categories.

+ + + + search engines

Find A Grave / http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi
Search cemetery records to verify the actual death of people
Quality of the results: pretty interesting
Direct link to search result: yes

Legacy.com / http://www.legacy.com
Container for memorials and obituaries
Quality of the results: pure disinfo
Direct link to search result: yes

Ancestry SSDI / http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=3693
Search SSDI to verify the death of U.S. citizens
Quality of the results: good enough
Direct link to search results: no

Genealogy SSDI / http://www.genealogybank.com/gbnk/ssdi/
Search SSDI to verify the death of U.S. citizens
Quality of the results: dubious
Direct link to search results: yes

Google Images / http://www.google.com/imghp?sbi=1
Reverse search using images
Quality of the results: better than tineye
Direct link to search results: yes

Tineye.com / http://tineye.com
Find other websites carrying the same picture
Quality of the results: so-so
Direct link to search result: yes (it expires).

+ + + + robots and scripts

Jeffrey's Exif viewer / http://regex.info/exif
Verify exif metadata in pictures.
Quality of the results: good
Direct link to script results: yes

Image Forensics : Error Level Analysis / http://errorlevelanalysis.com
Check if an image was altered with photoshop
Quality of the results: puzzling
Direct link to script results: yes

TimeAndDate / http://timeanddate.com/
Verify dates on any kind of calendar
Quality of the results: does what it says
Direct link to script results: yes

Hacker Factor - gender guesser / http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php
Verify the gender of the writer from a sample text
Quality of the results: N/A
Direct link to script results: N/A

+ + + + sharing of material

Photobucket / http://photobucket.com
Share your images
Quality of the service: splendid, until you reach your bandwidth limit
Direct link to images: duh

GifSoup / http://gifsoup.com
Create and share animated gifs from youtube videos
Quality of the service: seems good, I never used it
Direct link to images: duh

Scribd / http://www.scribd.com/
Share documents online
Quality of the service: good enough
Direct link to files: duh

+ + + + tutorials and howtos

Hacker Factor - Body by victoria / http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index. ... toria.html
How to spot photoshop manipulations
Quality of the tutorials: pretty good

...

[hoi.polloi]

A spreadsheet program! Like Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets helped us immensely when re-compiling multiple streams of propaganda data back into a single "source mold". By placing every "memorial photo" of a vicsim next to one another on a chart of all vicsims from a particular area, it became easier to see how uncanny some pictures were as "the only two pictures" of that alleged victim in the world.

As more nuanced photos get added to the compilation, it also becomes easier to compare the earlier photos of that vicsim and see how they were later incorporated into more complex images as technology (or propaganda budgets?) improved.

It's also good for organizing data when researching all the victims of any given fake terrorist attack.

[brianv]

Have a look at Portrait Professional if you get a chance!

http://www.portraitprofessional.com/download/ A fake email addy will do!

[brianv]

Any objections if I test some images for forgery and post them here?



CopyMove detection on a random, un-fuzzy, fairly good quality airplane image. There are 250 or so copymove/clone operations being reported on this alleged photograph. The PR/Advertising Firm responsible for the image are fakers [goes without saying] or the forensics software is no good [a possibility].

[Equinox]

Hello Equinox


I have no idea how to capture a frame and post it here or create arrows to show exactly what I mean, if any of you can tell me how to do this it would be greatly appreciated and would help me in the future to show things better, maybe someone can tell me how in a private message so as not to stear away from these post's?

Here I will explain it easy for you how to do it because after all, You are "only Human" Oh I made funny!

All though there are many awesome ways of doing this I am not necessary saying my tools or my style is the best way of doing it. But I have trialed an eroded a few ways of doing it and I think It would be good to share with you and others one way of doing it.


Rookies turned PRO---- Fakery research tools and Methods # 101
Here in this short course you can learn and in turn proactively set about searching fakery by yourself….
The course will cover a few basic parameters.
• Screen Grabbing
• Video downloading
• Arrows, Drawing, Highlighting, Resizing, cropping, photo shopping,
• Active Motion GIF Making
• Uploading.
• Actively Placing relevant material into the forum

Yes, I did spend a tiny bit of money registering the following tools. And I’m sure as my fellow researchers here can also point out as link free tools of the trade. I myself am giving examples of the following to use. As I found them to be very No-nonsense, quick n easy and very simplistic to use.


• Screen Capture--- So you see a part of a you-tube video, part of an article/post in the forum. Or basically anything you see visually on your computer screen that you would like grab a shot of so you can get a better look at and upload for yourself. I recommend this amazing tool called Snag-it. Capture anything on your computer screen with the ultimate screen capture tool. The latest version of Snag it makes it easy to create eye-catching images and videos for quick communication.
• Take a photo of your computer screen, including long WebPages.
• Create quick demo videos to share with anyone.
• Enhance images with stamps, text, and effects.
• Organize your captures with easy auto-storing and tagging features.
• Share your creations to presentations, social media sites, and more.
Just hit the capture button and “target” with precision what ever you want!


Download a free 30 day trial version of “snag-it” here. … http://www.techsmith.com/snagit-gslp.ht ... pAod_SDj-Q


Video downloading--- This tool here is like the coolest tool on the entire internet. I am very sure you need to use firefox for this as it is an Add-on feature for it.
Video Download Helper 4.9.8---
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... oadhelper/

Download Helper is a tool for web content extraction. Its purpose is to capture video and image files from many sites.
Just surf the Web as you are used to, when Download Helper detects it can do something for you, the icon gets animated and a menu allows you to download files by simply clicking an item
For instance, if you go to a You Tube page, you'll be able to download the video directly on your file system. It also works with My Space, Google videos, Daily Motion, Porkolt, film, Dream Host and others.

I recommend as you are about commence the download hit (by right clicking on the file name) “convert to WMV” (Windows Media player) as it the files seem to work best played in the WMV format. After that you have access too all the videos you want and need.

• Arrows, Drawing, Highlighting, Resizing, cropping, photo shopping, ---- All of these tools are savable in tools such as Photoshop and Gimp. I am going to recommend the snag it tool. ( the one I previously mentioned) It is really user friendly. A function of the snag it tool is Snag it Editor where after doing your screen grabs it opens up in snag it editor. These tools are located in “draw” and “image” subheading sections of the editor and it is just a matter of playing around till you find the right way of using the arrows, highlights, drawing, writing, and cropping methods. Again I do stress that these tools are available on many other photo manipulation software such as Photo-shop. I just recommend snag- it because it is verrryyy easy and used friendly. After you have finished with the relevant photo you can use the editor to save your photo to your documents.

Active Motion GIF Making--- I use this tool… Video-AVI to GIF Converter source … @ http://download.cnet.com/Video-AVI-to-G ... 79741.html (free trial just includes the logo on the Gif which kind of sucks) I eventually registered mine n now the logo is gone. To that end, Video-AVI to GIF/JPEG Converter turns small clips of video into animated GIFs or JPEG image files for posting online or using in documents.
The uncomplicated interface prompts the user to choose which portion of the movie to capture and how many frames per second to save. You can then remove individual frames or crop them once they've been saved. (WMV files work great)

• Uploading- Now once you are ready all you need is a reliable site to upload your pics/motion gifs to … There are millions out there I myself recommend "Photo-bucket"... After creating an account you can upload your picks/gifs there for free! (I payed a tiny bit too upgrade to the “PRO”) which means I have unlimited uploading power (which helps me because I have lots of motion gifs online)

You can have a look @ my photo bucket account here--- http://s1131.photobucket.com/albums/m551/equinox911/

• Actively placing relevant material into the forum--- That’s easy…. If your using a photo uploading account you can look at the image info links (on the right) there is different ones like a “direct link” and what not. The one to use on a forum is the one with the [img]http.goshImcool.Jpg[img] >>> [imp] box @ the start and beginning of the links. If you see an image that you like in the net and wish to post it in the forum just right click on the Image>> view image info>> copy url>> paste link into forum post >> Highlight image >> click the [img] box in the post tools section. It should then look like [img]http.goshImcool.Jpg[img] and shall then make the photo appear in the post once you submit the post into the thread.

Hope it helps…
Additional Information….

9/11 TV archive-- http://www.archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive (download the vids using the download helper tool)


9/11 Conspiracy TV--- http://www.911conspiracy.tv/
By the way this is not an endorsement of the above site. As 9/11 Conspiracy TV is quite bluntly is setup as a challenge to this actual fakery research... It has placed it up as it has a lot of links too access downloadable 9/11 footage. Which can’t be denied actually helps a lot any fakery researcher. As sourcing the footage and info on it can be a very hard challenge sometimes.

Again the above methods are just my way of doing it There are many different tools and styles. Just an example...

[Human]

Equinox

Thank you very much for the tool tips and info on how to use them, I will download them and learn how to use them in order to submit more here, very appreciated.

Human

[fbenario]

Here I will explain it easy for you how to do it because after all, You are "only Human" Oh I made funny!

Yes, you did make a funny, Equinox, I burst out laughing. The Song "Human" by The Human League is one of their dullest, and least worthy of being remembered. Conversely, their song The Lebanon is possibly the only synth-pop hit with politically relevant lyrics, and very much worth being remembered.


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEsRYkRpySY

And Joanne Catherall and Susanne Sulley are sooooo sexy up on stage. If you agree, and want more of them, take a look at Keep feeling Fascination. Susanne, the blond has aged incredibly well.


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIgVSbk9ETY

EDIT: Equinox, many thanks for your instructions on all those tools. I'm saving them.

EDIT NO. 2:

Admins, please pin a copy Equinox's post at the top of the Tools Of The Trade thread, so it always appears at the top of that thread. Each member needs easy continuing access to this user-manual for photo-analysis. Thank you very much!

[Equinox]

Equinox

Thank you very much for the tool tips and info on how to use them, I will download them and learn how to use them in order to submit more here, very appreciated.

Human

EDIT: Equinox, many thanks for your instructions on all those tools. I'm saving them.

EDIT NO. 2:

Admins, please pin a copy Equinox's post at the top of the Tools Of The Trade thread, so it always appears at the top of that thread. Each member needs easy continuing access to this user-manual for photo-analysis. Thank you very much!

Not a problem at all. If you have any more queries on it at all, feel free to ask. And remember if you are using windows I ALWAYS recomend having whatever you are using converted to to WMV file. (windows media player) as I find works really well. Fred I have placed it in the tools of the trade thread here--- http://www.cluesforum.info/viewtopic.ph ... 5#p2366117

[sentientlinergy]

A software called lucis pro is also usefull revealing very small diferences in contrast, I use it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9C4L5I9tWg

[fbenario]

Makes permanent things that have always been impermanent, such as conversations, comments, potential lies.

Keeping Close Track of Chats, Word for Word

People store their emails, photos and documents online to keep them from being lost or accidentally deleted. But what about the records we never save to begin with, like phone conversations and text messages? These hold a lot of useful data and can sometimes be the only point of reference for important conversations.

Calltrunk is a service that records, stores and transcribes phone calls while Uppidy does much the same thing with text messages. WSJ's Katherine Boehret says they're both great ideas but says there might be privacy concerns.

I've been testing Calltrunk, a service that records, stores and transcribes calls initiated by its app or website; a manual feature on iPhones and Skype also enables recording incoming calls.

[brianv]

Just to add this...

http://fotoforensics.com/

http://fotoforensics.com/tutorial.php

[reichstag fireman]

Discrete Wavelet Transforms

Neal Krawetz describes in his excellent 2008 paper "A Picture's Worth: Digital Image Analysis and Forensics" the use of the Wavelet Transformation to detect image manipulation.

Krawetz briefly explains the science behind it: a suspect image is re-encoded using wavelets to approximate the image (aka the signal). The re-encode is repeated, but in each re-encode, an increasing percentage of available wavelets is used. A gallery of re-encodes of the original image is created, with each re-encode containing a different count of wavelets. Increasing the count of wavelets increases the sharpness and colour accuracy in the re-encoded image.

This forensic technique exploits a property of the wavelet transform: as the wavelet count increases, the components of a composite image tend to sharpen at different rates. This is the key to detecting photo fraud using the DWT.

The DWT can sometimes detect image fraud where an analysis of the error layer has failed to uncover anomalies. What Krawetz doesn't describe is the ease with which an amateur can implement the wavelet transform technique for image forensics.

The original JPEG (1992) image standard utilises a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to shift the energy from the spatial domain to the frequency domain for compression. However, the little-used JPEG2000 (jp2) standard uses a Discrete Wavelet Transform instead. Tools for processing jp2 images can be used for this wavelet-based forensic technique.

The image rendering engines in most web browsers and many graphic tools cannot natively handle jp2 images, but the Open Source ImageMagick software suite has a range of tools and library support for jp2. The ImageMagick website documents wavelet-based encoding using the JPEG2000 image standard: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/jp2.php

Below is an example of an image composition of a vicsim.

ELA@0.70 highlights the image manipulation and this is confirmed by the DWT forensic technique.


Error Level Analysis (ELA)

Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) Analysis

Notice how the neck remains fuzzy yet the necklace soon comes into focus as the utilisation of available wavelets is increased. This is compelling evidence of image manipulation.

[brianv]

Discrete Wavelet Transforms

Neil Krawetz describes in his excellent 2008 paper "A Picture's Worth: Digital Image Analysis and Forensics" the use of the Wavelet Transformation to detect image manipulation.

Krawetz briefly explains the science behind it: a suspect image is re-encoded using wavelets to approximate the image (aka the signal). The re-encode is repeated, but in each re-encode, an increasing percentage of available wavelets is used. A gallery of re-encodes of the original image is created, with each re-encode containing a different count of wavelets. Increasing the count of wavelets increases the sharpness and colour accuracy in the re-encoded image.

This forensic technique exploits a property of the wavelet transform: as the wavelet count increases, the components of a composite image tend to sharpen at different rates. This is the key to detecting photo fraud using the DWT.

The DWT can sometimes detect image fraud where an analysis of the error layer has failed to uncover anomalies. What Krawetz doesn't describe is the ease with which an amateur can implement the wavelet transform technique for image forensics.

The standard JPEG (1992) image standard utilises a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to shift the energy from the spatial domain to the frequency domain for compression. However, the little-used JPEG2000 (jp2) standard uses a Discrete Wavelet Transform instead. Tools for processing the jp2 standard can be used for this wavelet-based forensic technique.

The image rendering engines in most web browsers and many graphic tools cannot natively handle jp2 images, but the Open Source ImageMagick software suite has a range of tools and library support for jp2. The ImageMagick website documents wavelet-based encoding using the JPEG2000 image standard: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/jp2.php

Below is an example of an image composition of a vicsim.

ELA@0.70 highlights the image manipulation and this is confirmed by the DWT forensic technique.


Error Level Analysis (ELA)

Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) Analysis

Notice how the neck remains fuzzy yet the necklace soon comes into focus as the utilisation of available wavelets is increased. This is compelling evidence of image manipulation.

Ooh, must have a look at this next time I fire up me linux box! Cheers.

[sentientlinergy]

This is a collection of cropped 911 planes

This is the same image processed with lucis pro (settings Big=11)


This is a another composition of cropped planes from the day

This is the last image processed with lucis pro (settings Big=11)


And another collection of cropped planes from the photos I could find from 911

... processed with lucis pro (settings Big=11)


With the software you can test diferent levels of contrast ajustment, and look for yourself.
I am using the 5.0.3 version, the 6.0 is even better.

[Maat]

I recently discovered the GIFsoup.com site is useless, it only ever worked once for me and has remained inaccessible & unusable ever since — apparently been the same for everyone else off & on for 2 years now (I just put a claim into PayPal to recover what I paid a month ago for a 6 month "premium membership").

Anyway, I found a very user-friendly free download for converting videos to gifs:

http://www.video-gif-converter.com/



It works perfectly and even easier if you trim a video, or create a clip, in Windows Movie Maker first. e.g.