By now I am sure you all have heard of the horrific crime that happened in a little town called Duncan, Oklahoma. If not, here is a quick catch up from CNN

A random act of violence has left a promising 23-year-old college baseball player dead, a family devastated and two countries half a world apart rattled. Christopher Lane, who was from Australia, was gunned down in Duncan, Oklahoma, while he was out jogging last week. The motive? Three teens who had nothing better to do, according to police

. Click here to read the rest of part one of this important post

The Suspects!

Now before I go further, I want to show a picture of these three teens. That picture was posted on Allen West’s Facebook page, yesterday at 4:03 pm est. In the picture, he links the Murdoch Owned NY Post. . That was at 9:43am yesterday. Now if you clicked my link, you may have noticed that I’m using the way back machine, which archives web pages. Why is that? Because if you go to the actual link now, here is the picture of the suspects. Notice something? One of the suspects magically got new hair and underwent the Michael Jackson skin whitening procedure.

Where did the wrong picture come from?

Now I have been trying to find the origin of the original picture. As near as I can tell it was ABC affiliate KSWO, Channel 7, which is the local station in Duncan. I say that because the original NYPost picture gives attribute to Channel 7. Glenn Beck’s The Blaze even credits them with it, plus gives a link. Again, this is the wayback machine because the right is frantically trying to delete this. Now here is where it gets confusing. The link from TheBlaze is here, but there is no picture or no mention of it. To complicate matters, KSWO isn’t in the wayback machine, either because it’s not popular enough or KSWO blocks them. Sadly there isn’t an alternative to that. Now back to The Blaze. They also give credit to The Herald, a newspaper located in Australia. Their article also doesn’t have this picture. Well they also don’t work. It’s not that they are disabled, but rather it redirects you out of the WayBack machine to instructions on enabling cookies. So we are left wondering where this false picture actually came from. Two sites say Channel 7 and one says The Herald. I did find another site and now I am going to pull out some tech stuff on you. Here’s a screenshot from the site TheConservativeTreeHouse: Ok they are saying The Herald. Not just that, they are saying that The Herald is the only site reporting it. Well that should be easy enough to figure out. When was the post published? Ahhh – a day before, on the 29th! But I’m anal and will like a time. So here’s the first comment: Great I got a time. But wait – we have timezones. Well that’s easy to figure out. Here’s the feed address for those comments. Look at the PubDate for that comment:
Wed, 21 Aug 2013 23:47:17 +0000 Now my blog is in eastern time, which is 4 hours behind GMT. So subtract 4 hours from that time and we get 7:47 pm edt! Looks like their blog is in the same time. So that means the Herald put out that picture, right? Well not really. Look back at my original screen capture of that image. It was considered an “Update” and we weren’t given a time of the update. But don’t threat. I do this stuff for a living and have yet another trick. Now hold on, this gets techy. Head on over to that post again and scroll down to the picture this is all about. Now if you’re using Chrome, hit F12 on your keyboard and you’ll get developer tools. On top is a tab for network. Go ahead and click on that (trust me, you won’t break anything!). Next go ahead and click on that image. Now you should have the picture in your browser and a line in developer tools with the file name. Go ahead and click that name. Whoa – see all that data that just showed up? Well that is the header data sent between your browser and the web server. Every web file you download has that. Now look down at the Response Header, which is the information sent back from the server. There’s an item labeled Last-Modified: Last-Modified:Tue, 20 Aug 2013 18:39:03 GMT. Now let’s do our quick timezone adjustment and subtract 4 hours and we get to 14:39, or 2:39 pm yesterday. Hmmmm that just so happens to be about 6 hours AFTER the NYPost had that picture up and attributed it to ABC 7. So with all this information the safest assumption is that ABC 7 was the publisher of the original picture. Hopefully someone asks them about it, as it would be nice to track down the original source.

When did the official picture appear?

The release time of the original picture is much harder to figure out, especially with how many have been out there. The biggest site i can find, publishing it the earliest is The Chicago Tribune. Sadly there is no date and the page is not in the wayback. The earliest time I could find in their comments is 6:28pm edt. Comments aren’t a sure fire way, but they do get us close. I also checked Duncan’s local news. They have this post Checking their feed I find this timestamp: 2013-08-20T17:33:02-05:00 Now that -05:00 means it’s 5 hours behind GMT and I want 4 hours, so I simply just add an hour to it and I get 6:33pm edt yesterday. So let’s say that the actual picture emerged around 6:30 last night. It wasn’t long after that picture appeared yesterday that the right jumped on it, The earliest copy I could find online was at 9:08 am yesterday, on the NYPost’s site. The Channel 7 site that the right is claiming as the source had the linked post up at 8:37am yesterday, but there is no picture there. Oh well, I’ll go ahead and take their word for it. So we had a period of ten hours where the fake picture was floating around.

Why are these times so important, Jamie?

Excellent question. Where I’m going next is where this gets good. Sadly though this post is entirely too long, so I’m going to split it over to another one. I will have that up tonight, so please check back!