A reverse image search of at least one “scandalous” photograph appearing on two websites – and on a Facebook page belonging to Graham Davis, a former communications advisor to the FijiFirst government – showed copies of it circulating on adult websites dating back to 2014.
Open source intelligence specialist Eric Nelson, a graduate of the DFRLab Digital Sherlocks program who owns Minnesota-based Slickrockweb Inc, said the explicit photograph was so heavily reused by porn sites it would be almost impossible to find where it was originally sourced from.
The websites and Mr Davis claim the seminude photograph is of Cabinet Minister Lynda Tabuya and allude to it being linked to a sex scandal in August last year.
Mr Nelson first used the TinEye, the original reverse image search engine, which uses image recognition with a growing index of billions of images.
TinEye is also used to find out where an image came from, how it is being used, or if modified versions of the image exist. The search results he forwarded to The Fiji Times on Wednesday said over 64.9 billion images were searched and multiple matches were found.
Because of their explicit content, they cannot be reproduced by this newspaper. After the same images were uploaded again on the websites yesterday, claiming they were legit and not AI generated, Mr Nelson conducted another reverse image search on Yandex which confirmed the TinEye findings.
He said the two search engines were very reliable. “TinEye is the gold standard because they attempt to timestamp images, you will see it in the results,” he said.
“Never seen anyone show it was wrong on a reverse image search.
“If it can’t find a strong match it will just say no results.”
Earlier this week The Fiji Times had reached out to overseas journalists who specialised in investigating organised crime, and they put reporters in touch with Mr Nelson.
In his initial assessment, Mr Nelson said another seminude image purported to be that of the minister had the “torso and the head appearing to be off” but the quality was too poor to be analysed properly.
“For whatever reason, the sizing and resolution of that screenshot (the chat containing the seminude picture) is much worse than the other screenshots, the screenshots are of different quality.
“Given how poor the resolution is of these screenshots, it would be very easy to fabricate any of those text bubbles.
“I could do it easily. “Also relevant, you could easily create an AI generated image with her face and then downsample it so you wouldn’t be able to analyse it for artifacts. That is a not uncommon technique.
“If it is a fake, it is not an amateur fake.”
He said because of the poor resolution, a proper analysis of the screenshot could not be done and suggested The Fiji Times request a copy of the original from the owner of one of the websites.
The Fiji Times emailed a contact listed on the website saying a forensic analyst had doubts the images were real but was withholding judgment until he saw the real original.
The response received from the email address was: “Tell the forensic expert to take a running jump. It’s all real and I don’t need to be proven right or wrong.”
