Russian blogger 'ntv' uncovered a number of obvious logical errors, exposing the incompetence of the amateur sleuths who accused the Russian Ministry of Defense of falsifying the imagery, based on irrelevant and insufficient evidence.
For example, in their eagerness to find a 'smoking gun', the investigators jumped at the revelation that the photos were digitally modified using Adobe Photoshop CS5 software.
The blogger however explains that the use of Adobe Photoshop CS5 software is the standard method for changing the size of the pictures and the ministry obviously used it for this very purpose and not, in fact, to modify the actual imagery.
The blogger went even further and uploaded a random photo from the Bellingcat website onto the website used by the group for analysis, only to find out that it had also been artfully edited in Adobe Photoshop.
The blogger also debunks the Error Level Analysis (ELA) of the imagery that Bellingcat claimed was so significant.
ELA identifies areas within an image that are set to different compression levels. With JPEG images, the entire picture should be at roughly the same level. If a section of the image is at a significantly different error level, then it likely indicates a digital modification.
The investigators claim they revealed five areas with significantly different error levels which clearly indicated a digital modification. The blogger however proves that this type of analysis is also insufficient by analyzing knowingly unedited photos yet finding the exact same result.
The blogger goes further and rips into Bellingcat's argument based on the chronology of the photos, and in so doing finds it harder and harder to hide his disbelief at the crude level of incompetence contained in the Bellingcat report.
And now it is worth mentioning looking at Bellingcat itself in a little more detail.
Bellingcat was started on 15th July 2014, funded by a Kickstarter campaign, just 2 days before the MH17 tragedy by British journalist and blogger Eliot Higgins, also known as Brown Moses.
In the blogger community he is well-known “for having, through incompetence or design, passed on, passed off, incorrect MH17 information”, according to The Truth Speaker website.
The blogger, the website claims, “has a long track record for selling his 'citizen journalist reports' to anyone willing to pay.”
Back in 2013, before the war in Donbass, Eliot was covering the war in Syria, despite either speaking the language, or ever having been there, as is the case with Ukraine/Donbass.
The website notes that he covered Syria, and covers Donbass as a ‘citizen blogger’, analyzing video evidence, despite admitting to having no expertise in the sphere: "before the Arab spring I knew no more about weapons than the average Xbox owner. I had no knowledge beyond what I’d learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo," Higgins apparently claimed.
