Did British hacks fabricate "empty camp" story?

Did British newspapers fabricate a story about the Occupy London protest camp being left unoccupied at night? The answer is "yes", when seen through the lens of a specific model of re-rented thermal imaging camera.

Earlier this week, U.K. tabloids such as The Times and The Daily Mail suggested that London's Occupy LSX protest was left largely empty at night, and used pictures taken by thermal imaging cameras as evidence. With only one or two 'hot' tents glowing in a field of darkness, it looked like the campsite was a fraud.

A visit to the camp already proved it plenty full, but after renting the same model of camera and shooting the above video, however, activists also proved that tents remain "cold" to the cameras even when occupied. This insulating effect is the purpose of tents, whose heat-reflectivity is marketed by the companies that make them.

Moreover, the footage shows that activity in and around camp is still apparent at night, despite the insulating effect of the material. Presumably, those taking the original thermal images could observe the camp and assess the occupation level with their own eyes, too.

Only in carefully-selected thermal stills would the protest camp appear empty, leaving the impression the reporters must have known the story spun from the thermal images wasn't true.

Previously: Debunking the OccupyLondon "empty tents" story

⟿ Follow Rob Beschizza on Twitter.

MORE: cantellbythepixels • occupy

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formosaman

So Arnie should have hidden inside a tent!
http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza

DUTCH: You’re one ugly motherfucker!
DAILY EXPRESS PHOTOGRAPHER: *roars*
bardfinn

News Corp fabricating outright lies to pander to their bigot demographic? It’s a /scandal/!
That_Anonymous_Coward

So rather than exposing the corruption and inequality that is leading to people taking to the streets world wide, they try to make the protest seem fake… like their “news”…
Nick Wood

And in other news, St Paul’s seeks injunction to remove the protesters, while Footsie chiefs’ pay rises by 49%. Luckily we’re all in this together and there is no alternative…etc. etc…
http://twitter.com/RichStwit richard sulley

Unfortunately this new footage does not disprove the original claim, the tent material is opaque to infra red light so if you go inside you will be ‘invisible’ however an occupied tent will after a period develop a ‘glow’ as the tent material heats up. The protestors debunking video really needs to look at tents that have been/are occupied for a period. not just pop in and out of one.

I think this is an example of fighting misinformed science with further misinformed science.
- sagodjur
  
  “however an occupied tent will after a period develop a ‘glow’ as the tent material heats up.”
  
  [citation needed]
  - Guest
    
    Take a hot sandwich, put it in an oversized cold paper bag. 10 minutes on, check the external temp of the bag with your hand.
    
    that is your citation, einstien.
    - sagodjur
      
      Richard Sulley was specifically referring to the material that these particular tents were made out of, not just any material. He was claiming that this particular material will eventually show a heat signature when humans have been in it for a while when viewed through this particular infrared camera. I’m saying that we don’t know that necessarily. This material may not show the heat signature on the device if the material is too well insulating for human warmth or the camera is not sensitive enough to detect it. The heat signature of the one tent in the photo might have been a space heater or something else that generates more heat than human bodies would over a period of time. I’m saying more experimentation/confirmation is necessary before we conclude that the protesters are conducting bad science here in their debunking of the “journalists’” reports.
    - erissian
      
      Leave that paper bag on the ground outside on a windy 40 degree night and see how long it takes before you realize you don’t have a hot sandwich anymore, Boltzmann.
- Steve Jacobson
  
  @ richard
  
  The tent material is not opaque to infrared, specifically mid-IR (8-14 microns). Mid-IR does not work that way (like visible light). If the individuals inside the tent were inside insulating sleeping bags (like most people inside tents) then the molecular vibration (mid-IR) from the humans would never transfer from their bodies to the tent surface.
  
  Clear glass will pass all visible light to the human eye but will only display its own molecular vibration when viewed through mid-IR optics (blocking all “light” behind it).
  
  If you ever find yourself on the battlefield trying to hide from an Apache helicopter, dig a hole in the ground, cover the hole with a piece of glass and sprinkle dirt over the glass. Your mid-IR signature will be identical to the earth around you (assuming you did not heat the glass) and the helo won’t be able to see you. Best part is, you can still see the Apache. Now, if they switch to near-IR optics, that’s a different story (different wavelength, different rules)
  - http://twitter.com/RichStwit richard sulley
    
    good advice, I shall remember that in case i ever find myself in that particular scenario.
    - Steve Jacobson
      
      Haha! Hopefully you don’t!
    - That_Anonymous_Coward
      
      Might I suggest staying away from #OWS events then…
      If Oakland had a budget…
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_MLAKC2J76NFB64XLSLUKEHF4J4 Daniel
  
  It doesn’t disprove the original claim, but it certainly makes it less probable. It’s not like the journalists doing the original story took a really rigorous, scientific approach with the thermal imaging either.
  
  Of course, that hardly matters for folks like you grasping for reasons to slag the protesters.
http://twitter.com/TruculentSheep Truculent Sheep

Some interesting facts:

- The Telegraph did its own ‘thermograph’ tests, which were debunked above. It is also owned by the billionaire Barclay twins, who live on the tax haven Channel Island of Sark.

- The Daily Express, with its ‘throw this rabble out’ campaign, is owned by Richard ‘Dirty Des’ Desmond, who registers his companies on the nearby Channel Island of Jersey, another tax haven.

- The Daily Mail, which has been raining hellfire down on the protestors, is owned by the current Viscount Rothermere, who pays no tax in the UK as he is officially ‘domiciled’ in France, even though he spends most of his time in Britain.

- Paul ‘Guido Fawkes’ Staines, who denounced the protests as ‘a sham’, registers his blog under a false name and address on the Carribean island of Nevis, which is – you guessed it – another tax haven.

- The Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch/News International… I’ve said enough.

Anyway, draw your own conclusions.
- espritdecorpse
  
  Barclay brothers not even ‘normal’ enough to live on Sark (600 pissheads clinging to a rock) – they have their own private island (and it’s not as if it is an archipelago of vacant rocks round there). They bought a small island called Brecqhou and built a weird Gothic castle (incoming workers are bound by NDAs) – it’s truly Bond villain-esque! In spite of all this creepy solitude they are still registered as living in Monaco!
  - http://twitter.com/TruculentSheep Truculent Sheep
    
    The Barclays are registered as Sark residents, so that’s where they’re ‘taxed’ (or not as the case may be). Brecqhou is part of Sark, but the Barclays also own many of the businesses on the island, which they used to collectively punish the inhabitants when they didn’t vote for Barclay supporters in the island’s first ever elections. I think calling the Sark natives ’600 pissheads clinging to a rock’ a little unkind incidentally. Not to mention wrong.
    - espritdecorpse
      
      Sorry, was a fool to believe Wikipedia about their residential/taxation status (though that’s not to say they aren’t skilled ‘avoiders’)! Does any of their wealth actually filter into the Sark economy or is it just remnants of the ‘lark’?
      I must apologise about the ‘pissheads’ comment; in reality, that is how I heard Alderney described and just nicked it to attract attention to the weird world of the minor Channel Islands. I love Sark so much and think it is one of the most extraordinary places on earth. I would move there in a heartbeat if I could (even though I cherish the anonymity provided by living in a city). Helped by the fact I am a huge fan of Mervyn Peake. Went there one time and found the beaufiful cottage in which he used to live and met an (extraordinarily) old woman, his former neighbour who remembered him well. Very trippy – felt like I’d travelled in time.
shannigans

The tent with six people in it would have begun to glow by the time everyone got out if that were the case. It didn’t. Material science, how does it work?
http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza

No, it’s not “misinformed science.” It’s easily-understood evidence that still images taken from thermal imaging cameras doesn’t mean that tents are empty.

A variety of corroborating evidence shows that the camp was occupied when the newspapers said it was not. Anyone visiting these places at night knows that the claim is simply ridiculous: the mess and the noise and the chaos of it is such that public health is the hot excuse to try and get them dismantled.

The story was simply bullshit, the newswriting equivalent of supermarket counter rags that get a lucky shot of someone famous mid-blink and spin a story about them “hitting bottom” out of the sleepy look.
- http://twitter.com/RichStwit richard sulley
  
  I agree with your conclusion that the original story was bullshit. I don’t think there is dispute there. My assertation is that the debunking film has as much missinformation in it as to render it useless as the case for the defence, or prosecution or whatever side you are on.
  
  The danger is that it simply ends up in a battle of he who speaks last is the winner.
  
  - Telegraph et al. make claim based on dodgy use of thermographic camera.
  - Protesters debunk claim based on similarly dodgy use of thermographic camera.
  - Telegraph will come back with more ‘evidence’
  -etc.
  -etc.
  
  and bringing in the motivation of the newspaper owners al la Truculent Sheep doesn’t add to the debate in my opinion.
http://sarahhayes.is-a-geek.net/ SarahKH

Did they fabricate the story? It goes without saying or at the very least they manipulated the images to show exactly what they wanted them to, either by creative photography or outright Photoshoping. How did they fabricate it? A swift tinker in Photoshop also goes without saying.

The story here is that people are eager to believe anything that appears in a Newspaper or on TV, most of the population may have heard of photo manipulation but have no real idea of what it is capable of doing nor how long removing an IR glow from a tent in a still picture would take a professional (2min tops?).

Even if they do know how long such manipulations would take because it has appeared in a Newspaper or on the 6 o’ clock news it must be legit. These people report the news and don’t lie.

I would also add that this rebuttal of the story is on BoingBoing with a video hosted on YouTube. The story was carried by The Telegraph, guess which one has far more ‘factual weight’ in the general public’s mind?
http://inkthink.org DJBentley

OK, it’s easy to attack the Murdoch owned press but The Times is a quality compact, not a tabloid.
- Warren_Terra
  
  OK, it’s easy to attack the Murdoch owned press but The Times is a quality compact, not a tabloid.
  
  Its stock in trade isn’t sleazy gossip of the sort The News Of The World used to purvey, but it’s still a Murdoch rag, and the rot runs deep.
  
  See for example The Times‘s repeated use of fraud to steal the banking information of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.. Still, that isn’t quite as bad as Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, which not only fraudulently obtained information about Gordon Brown’s son’s Cytic Fibrosis, their editor actually threatened Brown with reprisals for attempting to beat the paper’s prized scoop to the press by revealing to the media information about his own son’s tragic ailment.
http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza

haha “quality compact”

I know it comes from The Independent but it’s such a perfectly self-aware phrase. “WE’RE NOT LIKE THOSE OTHER NEWSPAPERS IN TABLOID FORMAT!”
- http://inkthink.org DJBentley
  
  Tabloid was originally used to describe the size of the newspaper, now it says something about the style of the newspaper. If size matters then we really only have the FT and Daily Telegraph left that are broadsheets and the Telegraph ran this story too.
  - atimoshenko
    
    Well, the FT IS pretty much the only British daily I respect…
drukqs

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
- http://sarahhayes.is-a-geek.net/ SarahKH
  
  Is a good concept but in practice doesn’t work to well.
  
  Then they fight you. Then they change the law. Then they shoot you. Then everyone else forgets about you because Dancing with the Stars is on.
  - drukqs
    
    I’m not sure about the Dancing with the Stars part, but you’re absolutely right about Gandhi getting shot.
Finnagain

I think this story debunks your theory.

“but The Times is a quality compact, not a tabloid. “
Mister44

I see a market for voyeur thermal imaging porn.
shamocracy79

Are there still individuals out there naive enough to believe our main stream press isn’t completely controlled by and heavily biased towards corporate interests?
Jas Strong

If infra-red went through a tent that easily, it wouldn’t be a very good tent, now would it? You’d get cold. Modern tents as used in most European countries are designed to keep you warm and trap air between the inner tent and the outer flysheet, which acts as a barrier to infra-red and convective heat loss.

A tent with a sleeping person inside is pretty well insulated- you’ve got a human, wrapped in clothing, wrapped in a hollowfibre or down sleeping bag, wrapped in the inner tent, wrapped in a trapped layer of air, wrapped in the flysheet. Thermal imaging cameras are not that sensitive- they’re not going to pick up a few tens of watts of thermal leakage spread across tens of square metres of flysheet.And sure, it’ll glow a little after a long time, but it will only be a couple of degrees warmer than the background- because that’s what tents are designed to do, to keep heat in. The one bright tent in the photo is probably either a single-layer, summer-only tent, or a tent that is occupied by someone who’s not in their sleeping bag.
- Guest
  
  Exactly!
  
  This isn’t Star Trek. Heat sensors cannot see –through– insulation.
  - Jas Strong
    
    And remember that sunshine is about 1 kW per square meter- and that only makes most surfaces a few tens of degrees warmer after hours of shining directly on it. A resting human emits about 150 watts of heat. A typical tent has a surface area of about 5 m^2. You can do the math- even if you stay in there indefinitely, without a sleeping bag, and with no inner tent, the change in surface temperature is going to be very small. Most thermal imaging cameras have a resolution of about a tenth of a degree C. You’ll be lucky to get two colour steps between the unoccupied tent and the occupied one.
    - bardfinn
      
      I was going to mention the resolution capabilities, as well as the surface area of the tent is exposed to any wind, which would carry heat away.
lostmonster

I haven’t read the comments yet, but doesn’t it take a while for the infrared of a person to leak through a tent, so as to legitimize both sides’ argument?

Assuming that’s the case, if the newspaper’s hired infrared camera went there, took a quick snapshot, then left, wouldn’t that remove intent? (‘course, the paper could have just known it takes a while, and could have just told the guy with the infrared to take a quick shot)
- Warren_Terra
  
  The argument about people in the tents for an extended period of time is that if the people remain in the tent radiating heat for a very long time, warming the entire chamber, even though the tent is a good insulator the accumulated heat should eventually leak through and the surface of the tent should be warm. If the entire surface of the tent was warm, a snapshot would reveal this. People walking behind tents or briefly inhabiting one would not similarly warm the entire chamber, and would not have the potential to thereby warm the outside surface.
  
  The question is whether this model is correct, or whether the entire inside of the tent could be warm while the outside wasn’t. I suspect that it could, that the insulating properties of the material could maintain a significant temperature differential between inside and outside, with what warming of the outside that did occur as rapidly removed by radiating away and by wind chill. But I’m very much guessing here, not in any way well informed.
  
  Also, there’s the utter gutlessness of the report. The people in #OWS and the London version aren’t savages, and they aren’t wild animals. They love talking to the press; indeed, publicizing their concerns is their entire reason for being there. Dude could have walked through the camp talking to people and assessing whether tents were occupied. Instead he used a shortcut, one that he didn’t understand, and used it incompetently.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    The argument about people in the tents for an extended period of time is that if the people remain in the tent radiating heat for a very long time, warming the entire chamber, even though the tent is a good insulator the accumulated heat should eventually leak through and the surface of the tent should be warm. If the entire surface of the tent was warm, a snapshot would reveal this.
    
    And the media would report that those damn lazy hippies never leave their tents, what the hell kind of a protest is this.
http://twitter.com/Kurren Kurren

Not really a Murdoch fan, myself, and the paper lost most of its value since, but calling The Times a tabloid on same level as the ‘Dirty’ Mail is stretching it a bit too much.
http://twitter.com/TruculentSheep Truculent Sheep

The Barclays own a lot of the tourist-friendly businesses on the island, so their response to their placemen losing the vote was to lay people off and close the businesses down. (The vote, which took place in 2008, was the first ever on the island, which until then was actually run by a feudal government.) They reopened soon after, but it was a shameful episode, and says a lot about the Barclays, a sort of cut-price, Happy Shopper local equivalent of the Kochs.
- espritdecorpse
  
  Interesting that they got that involved. When they first built their fortress of solitude it all seemed fairly quiet (admittedly some time ago), but I guess they were never going to miss an opportunity to mess with things. I do hope cries of ‘clameur, clameur, clameur’ were heard around the island (how I wish the world could adopt that method of protest… think I’ll pop down to St. Pauls later!)?
Pawel Loj

I always thought the ariport xray scanners will have a purpose, now I know!
Jonbly Herbert

Not particularly convinced by this new footage, actually. Big difference between a closed tent that’s enclosed a living body for hours (glowing), and an open tent that someone’s just popped into. The temperature of the latter will still be dominated by the mass of cold air inside.

In other words… this didn’t prove a thing.
Thomas Shaddack

Coming a bit late to the party. The problematics of thermal signatures is a little more complex.

Thermal cameras are showing the amount of long-wave infrared radiation emitted by objects. The “emitted” word is crucial here, as its amount depends not only on the object temperature but also on its emissivity!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissivity

Therefore even a fairly warm object can appear similar to a cold one on the thermal camera’s screen. For example, polished metals have a pretty low emissivity; you can test this at home with an infrared touchless thermometer, comparing objects of the same temperature but with different types of surfaces.

This is the basis of infrared camouflage; camouflaged objects are coated with something that has a very low emissivity and fairly high reflectivity, so they appear like being part of the surroundings instead of being a hot or cold spot against the background. Paints with similar effects are used for lowering energy losses of buildings, both to prevent overheating at summer (saving air conditioning energy) and radiative heat losses in winter (saving heating energy).

An inverse approach is needed for e.g. thermal management of satellites; these are coated with a metalized kapton (or other material) foil, where the transparent polymer has high emissivity (to radiate waste heat from the satellite out to the space – no air means no convective cooling) while letting the infrared light from the sun through, and the metalization serves to reflect the solar infrared radiation away to avoid heating of the sat.