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Comment by mfoy_ | Hacker News Reader

That screenshot was so outstandingly bad I almost want to believe that someone elaborately staged the screenshot to make a Secure Channel exec look incompetent... but Occam's Razor prevails.

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It seemed like a good way to frame her but incompetence is a more likely reason.

Let's not even get into how she tweeted a picture of the text of another tweet, which is a rather roundabout way of just retweeting something.

It's usually done to preserve a tweet that could end up getting deleted.

Which is meaningless due to how easily screenshots could be doctored. It's no better than "this is what they said".

http://i.imgur.com/jcnkw71.png

Having multiple screenshots from multiple sources increases the likelihood of legitimacy - but doesn't guarantee it. 20 people can easily get together and doctor the same statement.

It's no more reliable than "this is what they said," but it adds a step to the fabrication: I could just type random quotes and attribute them to a Twitter account, sure, but it would take effort to fake a screenshot.

For anyone who's passingly familiar with HTML and the web developer tools built into modern browsers, it's barely more effort than "this is what they said". In most cases it's literally right-click, Inspect Element, double-click the html node and replace it with the contents of your choosing.

For reference, if you want to archive something in such a way to preserve its legitimacy, use a site like http://archive.is- it's an automated third party process with the original URL attached. There is no doctoring happening there.

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