Florida Congresswoman Katherine Harris, who was running for a U.S. Senate seat the following year, accused some newspapers of doctoring photos to distort her makeup as a way to poke fun at her. Harris became famous when she oversaw the Florida recount in the 2000 presidential election that gave George W. Bush a 537-vote victory in the state. “I’m actually very sensitive about those things, and it’s personally painful,” she said. “But they’re outrageously false. … Whenever they made fun of my makeup, it was because the newspapers colorized my photograph.” Harris and her staff did not, however, cite a specific example of an altered photo. The photo of Harris, shown here, is not known to have been doctored.

A magistrate in Sydney, Australia threw out a speeding case after the police said it had no evidence that an image from an automatic speed camera had not been doctored. This case revolved around the integrity of MD5, a digital signature algorithm, intended to prove that pictures have not been doctored after their recording. It is believed that this ruling may allow any driver caught by a speed camera to mount the same defense.

Pakistani actress Veena Malik sued the India edition of men’s magazine FHM for $2 million in damages, claiming that they “morphed” her cover photo to make her appear to be posing nude. Kabeer Sharma, the editor of FHM India responded that “We have not photoshopped or faked the cover. This is what she looks like.” He suggested that she denied agreeing to the photos only because of the public backlash the cover generated.

A dispute arose between two competing mountaineering teams in India who each claimed that the other team failed to summit Everest as claimed. Both groups submitted photos to support their claims, but a spokesman for the Everest Summit Association Sherpas claimed that the photos from one of the groups, Sagarmatha Giryarohan Sanstha, had been “photoshopped.” According to one of the sherpas, only one of the leaders of the Sanstha team made it to the summit, not all three leaders as claimed. The government initiated an investigation into the incident to determine the truth.