Form follows function: Applying photographic content analysis to forensic firearm identification

Drawing forensic conclusions from an image or a video is known as “photographic content analysis.” It involves the analysis of an image, as well as objects, actions, and events depicted in images or video. In recent years, photographic depictions of objects suspected as illegal firearms have substantially increased, appearing on CCTV surveillance footage, captured by mobile phones and shared on social media. However, the law in Israel states that a person can be charged with illegally possessing a firearm only if it can be proven that the object is capable of shooting with lethal bullet energy. This becomes more challenging in cases where the firearm was not physically seized, and the evidence exclusively consists of images and video. In this study, photographic content analysis was applied to images and video where objects suspected as commercial or improvised firearms had been depicted. An image and event sequence reconstruction video databases of both firearms and replicas were created in order to better define firearm-specific functional morphological features. We demonstrate that it is possible to classify an object as a firearm by analyzing the functional, and not only the esthetic, morphology in images and video. It is also shown that event sequence reconstruction in video may be used to infer that an object suspected as a firearm has the capacity to shoot by confirming the occurrence of a shooting act or shooting process. Thus, photographic content analysis may be used to forensically establish that an object depicted in an image or a video is a firearm by ruling out other known scenarios, and without physically seizing it.     

Speechlessness: In Search of Language to Resist the Israeli “Thing Without a Name”

This paper criticizes the words used to critique Israeli repression of Palestinians as ineffective for political struggle and not critical enough. It argues that there is no single word able to comprehend the phenomenon of constant dispossession, violent repression, and righteous blaming of Palestinian resistance as terror. Unable to suggest one comprehensive concept that can at once describe, analyze, and criticize the phenomenon, scholars use inappropriate existing terms—like occupation, Apartheid, colonialism, and Zionism—or invent new words like ethnocracy, politiciside, Bantustine, spaciocide, sociocide, or symbolic genocide. All the concepts are discussed in the paper; it is argued that they are partially correct, but not totally comprehensive. The paper aims to uncover the sophisticated regime that can co-opt every critical word, and present always Israel as a democratic and enlightened regime, a victim of Palestinian violence. It claims that the incapacity to create a critical language is one of the obstacles to develop effective resistance to the regime.