Is being used by the Palis against the Israelis.
On June 7, during a training exercise in the Baltics, four U.S. Army Stryker vehicles driving along a road between Kaunas and Prienai, Lithuania, collided when the lead vehicle braked too hard for a obstacle on the roadway. Not long after the incident, a blog post made to look like a popular Lithuanian news outlet claimed the Americans had killed a local child in the collision.
A doctored image was posted showing unconcerned soldiers near a crushed bicycle and child’s corpse.
“This is a very typical example of the hostile information, and proves we are already being watched,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Raimundas Karoblis said of the fabricated event during a June 8 meeting with NATO officials. “We have no doubt that this was a deliberate and coordinated attempt aiming to raise general society’s condemnation to our allies, as well as discredit the exercises and our joint efforts on defense strengthening.”
In this case, the phony image and news article were quickly refuted, but what happens when it’s not so easy to tell truth from fiction?
The ability to distort reality is expected to reach new heights with the development of so-called “deep fake” technology: manufactured audio recordings and video footage that could fool even digital forensic experts.
“I would say 99 percent of the American population doesn’t know what it is, even though for years they’ve been watching deep fakes in science fiction movies and the like, in which special effects are as realistic as they’ve ever been,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Thursday before a technology panel at the Heritage Foundation. “But never before have we seen that capability become so available right off the shelf.”
The emerging technology could be used to generate Kompromat — short for compromising material in Russian — that portrays an individual in deeply embarrassing situations, making them ripe for blackmail by a foreign intelligence service. Or, just as likely, deep fake technology could be used to generate falsified recordings from meetings that actually did take place, but where the content discussed is manipulated.
Perhaps the only audio from a closed-door meeting could be doctored to make a senior U.S. official appear as though they told their hypothetical Russian counterpart “don’t worry about the Baltics, we won’t lift a finger to defend them,” said Bobby Chesney, an associate dean at the University of Texas School of Law who studies the impact of this emerging capability.
The geopolitical fallout from such a declaration would be hard to overcome.
National-level intelligence agencies and even insurgencies already fabricate crimes by other countries’ military forces, Chesney said. Deep fakes could add to these existing disinformation campaigns.
“Often it’s a claim about killing civilians or harm to civilian populations,” he said. “And yeah, you can have actors play the role and impersonate, but how much the better if you can use the technology of deep fakes to make more credible instances of supposed atrocities?”
via Weasel Zippers
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