Henk van Ess teaches workshops in online investigative techniques; he
worked with colleagues and a team of students from Axel Springer
Academie to analyze a viral news video that purported to show a
discarded missile launcher that had been discovered near Cairo’s
international airport in 2011, but only published last month.
Van Ess presents a case that the video is a fake, produced in 2017 and
then back-dated to make it look like it was recorded in 2011. To date
the video, his team tried a variety of clever techniques, from dating
the models of cars found in the video to a phone and battery pack
visible in the hand of a police officer. Ultimately, he gets his
evidence by stitching together frames from the video to make a panorama
from which he is able to isolate some distinctive buildings, which he
believes he’s located on historical satellite images; by analyzing a
time-series of satellite images of those buildings, he’s able to date
the video to no earlier than late 2016.
On the way, van Ess shows how he can use public sources and advanced
Google and Facebook techniques to identify the purported source of the
video, tracking him to his seeming home and uncovering biographical
facts about him even though he has closed down his Facebook account.
Regardless of whether you care about this missile launcher, it’s a
fascinating look at the difficulties of tradecraft when it comes to
hoaxing the news, and presents a counterpoint to the “in the future, all
fakery will be seamless” narrative that 2016’s many partisan news
hoaxes spawned.
