Apparently, this did not sit well with the techies at Coptix. They got their hands on an image of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove in Porker's Bar-B-Que in Chattanooga, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

Karl's porking up at Porker's. Click picture for a larger image.

Then, the boys at Coptix fired up Photoshop, updating the image to show Mr. Rove holding a report with Coptix' name on the front, as shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B

Mr. Rove is apparently holding a Coptix report. Click picture for a larger image.

And then, Mr. Cross and the Coptix team sat back and waited for the blogosphere to blow a gasket. Which, in short order, it did.

Traffic all across the Internet jumped to judgement, claiming that because Mr. Rove had a document in his hands from an Internet company, he was "privatizing" his White House email in an effort to hide it from public view.

Shortly after this story exploded, Josiah Roe, Executive Vice President of Coptix Inc. published an explanation in the Chattanooga Times Free Press:

Our experiment demonstrated that, as with all great marketing, Web marketing can be used by a few people to shape the way that millions think. Of course, we ran our test on April Fool's weekend, when bloggers, like all journalists, should have their skepticism synapses at their sharpest. Today, two very busy days later, we are reminded that the Internet is a tool to be mastered rather than feared, and that the right word whispered in the right ear can still carry around the world.

Examining the hacked images
You can see the changes between the two images more clearly in Figure C.

FIGURE C

There be Sleestaks here. Click picture for a larger image.

Not only was the Coptix report placed under Mr. Rove's arm, but the television image was changed as well. Instead of the woman in the original picture, our intrepid team of photo retouchers inserted a picture of Sleestaks.

If you're not familiar with Sleestaks, perhaps you're just not geeky enough. For those of you who aren't intimately familiar with 1970's cult scifi, the Sleestaks are large, green reptilian/insectoid hybrid creatures that were featured in the 1974 series Land of the Lost. Apparently, the Coptix kids had a lot of time on their hands.

While the Sleestak image clearly was a gag, the report under Mr. Rove's arm was obviously meant to send a message. Although placement of the report in the image is pretty well done (thanks to Photoshop), there's one "gotcha" visible from the enlarged image shown in Figure D.

FIGURE D

There's no shadow on the report. Click picture for a larger image.

As you can see, on the left side, under Mr. Rove's sleeve, there's a shadow. On the retouched side, where the report was placed, even though there's a gap between the sleeve and the report, there's no shadow.

It was a nice job, nonetheless.

I'd ordinarily like to end an article like this with a deep, insightful conclusion, and, in fact, I do go into the dangers of mob journalism over in our special report in DominoPower and OutlookPower.

Here, though, rather than looking deeply into issues of journalistic integrity, I'm simply going to recommend that if you retouch images, you keep track of your shadows.

For more than 20 years, David Gewirtz, the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? and The Flexible Enterprise, has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com.