In the US, truth is absolute defense to defamation: if the defendant can show that the alleged statement is true, the defamation case fails right then and there. The difference between public and non-public figures with respect to defamation is that the statement needs to be made with "actual malice" if the figure is public (i.e., knew it was false or recklessly disregarded the falsehood).
Watch the embedded video. Either some random woman with no apparent background in this work made the most convincing deep fake I've ever seen, or that young woman was caught on film smoking something.
If its really fake the folks over at Sassy Justice should hire her, their stuff looks like garbage in comparison.
They might have had more evidence that the story didn't claim, but just saying "Our records show Joe Fakename is the guy in the photo, you must be lying." Doesn't actually disprove the guy's claim that the photo was stolen.
I mean it's pretty classic trick to mix in real stuff with fake stuff. This video was probably really, but one of the videos in question is apparently fake.
I agree 100%. Although this is purely anecdotal, I have a great track record at identifying deepfakes (I've aced every deepfake challenge I've seen so far) and my brain assures me that the video is not faked.
The story here isn't about harassment or the technical chops of some bitter mom. This is the perfect way for the Mockingbird Media to introduce the concept of a "deepfake" to the public. A video, followed by claims it's fake, followed by claims it might not be fake. The end result is confused and more easily-manipulated masses who need to trust authorities to vet all information they receive, an abusive but codependent relationship.
I'd love for this information to be released now, but wouldn't publishing cryptographic hashes of the material now (or a decade ago) prevent it from being dismissed as deepfakery if it's released in the future?
The end result is confused and more easily-manipulated masses who need to trust authorities to vet all information they receive, an abusive but codependent relationship.
On the one hand, yeah, it's definitely more how the press likes a human interest story mixed with whatever is flavor of the month (the techno wow of "deep fakes").
But on the hand, the tone you take in that last sentence is really off-kilter. The press just works in a kind of hysterical fashion, moral panics (even conspiracy theories) aren't conspiracies but natural. Attributing stuff to a malicious effort to make the public more manipulable (as if that was necessary) should be dropped in favor of the natural incompetence of the press in framing issues reasonably.
Edit: "Mocking Bird" above is a phrase referencing CIA manipulation of the media. This is a bit of over the top for just some rather screechy but pretty ordinary story.
> Attributing stuff to a malicious effort to make the public more manipulable (as if that was necessary) should be dropped in favor of the natural incompetence of the press in framing issues reasonably.
Except we've known for a long time that the mainstream press works, very intentionally, to manipulate public opinion.
The press has influence. The press has always had influence. In a society involving mass media, the press can't not-have influence.
We might talk about what form a society would have to have for the press to not have great influence - maybe "very strong education and civil institutions" or "directly democratic workers' councils" but if we're going have a modern capitalist society with multiple poles of elites and atomized consumers, the press, the corporations, the state and highest professional all will have disproportionate influence.
Which is to say, now, all the different press outlets manipulate, sometimes in distinct and opposite ways, sometimes in agreement with each other. And all the various economic and political institutions manipulate.
And the thing with this manipulation is it doesn't require crazy plan like the ggp/op insinuates. They don't need to intentionally create "deep fake" as vague threat, human psychology just naturally drifts that way, including the psychology of the reporters themselves. And manipulation for a specific purpose just requires the poor framing of ideas that can leveraged whenever you need it. So yeah, the press certainly manipulate but it doesn't generally have a "master plan" of manipulation. That wouldn't help (not that it hasn't been tried).
Probably sometimes, intuitively it's pretty damn obvious not all the time, and based on what evidence? What a huge sweeping claim to just drop in one sentence.
The GP's argument doesn't make any sense to me. The reporting was good for a change. It gives named, verifiable sources who are legitimate experts on the subject and several of them, it tells us where to find the video in question [1] and gives us the basis for their opinion (e.g. no visual artifacts in the smoke or when the hand goes in front of the face).
All of this can be confirmed by a responsible news consumer and everything I can find here checks out. So this is legit investigative news and precisely the kind of thing we should encourage more of.
I am aware of Project Mockingbird [2] but I cannot see any relation between it and this report. It makes no sense whatsoever that the CIA would care about some squabble over unknown cheerleaders. It makes no sense to believe that everything is or isn't a deepfake without examining the facts. And this article, unlike so many I have seen, is an example of news done right. Given how disinformation works, this is the opposite of it. This article was written to inform, not to inflame our passions.
In short, it's the polar opposite of what I would expect from disinformation and this is the kind of good reporting that should be rewarded.
I do agree with you. But this specific article seems to actually question the media:
> Even more troublesome, it seems that no media outlets attempted to verify that the vaping footage was actually a deepfake before broadcasting the claim to millions of Americans.
> The possible misstep by the media, and the chance that the criminal justice system could misapply laws against videos mischaracterized as deepfakes, is what worries experts the most.
Whenever I think about politicians lamenting about the deepfakes, I can’t help but wonder if they’re attempting to get ahead of Jeffrey Epstein new. Epstein allegedly ran a blackmail operation by recording people in “compromising” situations on his island and ranch (and probably other places).
Can you please not. It's hard to take someone's argument seriously when this kind of name-calling is intermingled with it. It's similar to someone writing m$ft or unironically referring to Zuckerberg as a robot.
> While prosecutors have not provided specifics, tools designed to make women appear nude in images with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI) do exist.
They may be able to generate a "plausible" nude, suitable for rubbing one out. But it's not a real nude. Moles and scars wont match. The data is just not there, so the manipulator has to make something up. Thus I think the nudes are actually the most promising for conclusively proving or disproving a manipulation.
Hard to disprove without stripping naked for a court witness though, which is a pretty high degree of ‘shitty’ that would be easy to cause. Especially if you used a ton of stolen bikini photos to generate the deep fake. Not a lot of skin that wouldn’t exactly match, and the parts that don’t would definitely not be for public consumption.
You don't need to strip naked, you just need to show one discrepancy. Cut a hole in a pair of cheap jeans where you have a mole that's not in the video.
Hardly - almost none of the video we’re talking about has that type of resolution, it’s easy to ‘paint on’ something like a mole or a birthmark, compression side effects can nuke some pixels, etc.
You’d spend a lot of time and effort explaining one mole difference - and that’s if you legitimately had one. If you didn’t, what else are you going to go on?
“ “Scary though if it isn’t a deepfake,” Shamook added. “This could be the start of people being able to discredit real evidence by simply saying ‘deepfake.'” “
This.
I have been in a jury, and I wouldn’t be surprised if image based evidence won’t always be discounted by defense attorneys. It probably is already starting for the high paid ones (e.g. the notion itself will protect the rich.)
It brings up an interesting future where you can’t trust any witness testimony (because people do misremember) or any video, image, or audio evidence due to this technology.
The only societal workaround will be to implant cryptographic keys inside of bodies and monitor all interactions on some blockchain /s?
I thought that juries are instructed to decided when it's "beyond any reasonable doubt"? So if the defense wants to discredit video evidence they have to make a case that that's a reasonable doubt, probably have experts review the video and provide at least a sketch up of the motive behind spending resources on forging evidence like that. Also I understand that in most cases that go to trial there's more than just video evidence.
IMO it's a step in the right direction. Photos and videos should at minimum be signed/cryptographically verifiable if they are used as key testimony in court. We have had the tools to easily and convincingly fake photos for decades now. I can bet there are people behind bars today because someone got creative with photoshop.
> Photos and videos should at minimum be signed/cryptographically verifiable if they are used as key testimony in court.
This kind of "verification" doesn't work. You're trying to have the device authenticate the image. That implies a root of trust that goes through the device manufacturer, which state actors will immediately compromise, making the signatures untrustworthy regardless. Then people will find vulnerabilities in the devices themselves, or convincing ways to have the device take a picture of a doctored photograph instead of a picture of the world, extending the ability to forge signatures to the general public.
The resources needed to forge a signature aren't going to be much different than the resources needed to create a deepfake to begin with. The creator gets to choose which device to use and can choose based on which device they find a vulnerability in. So it's more likely to be a liability than a benefit because it lends false credence to the authenticity of fakes.
For it to work you would need all devices to be secure against all attackers. It's not realistic.
> The resources needed to forge a signature aren't going to be much different than the resources needed to create a deepfake to begin with.
How? If you have a public/private key pair and then do some kind of multisig process wherein the manufacturer can sign the photo, the OS can sign the photo, and then a user supplied signature could also sign the photo. You're not going to be able to fake 3 cryptographic signatures without 3 private keys. It would be extremely difficult to fake all of that. It would take a concerted, concentrated effort and would be extremely rare in practice. It would certainly improve the situation.
It has to be where the camera is. Otherwise the device holding your private key would need some way to authenticate photos from the device with the camera, which was the original problem.
First off, you'd have to steal the actual device. Then you'd have to break the device encryption itself to then extract a an encrypted version of a private key. (the private key itself can be encrypted with a password not stored on the device) You pair the 3 sigs plus a blockchain to track timestamps and photo hash signatures and maybe pair that with a different blockchain app to report lost or stolen devices...and you've got yourself as secure of a system as you can conceive in the age of deep fakes.
One threat is that a malicious actor uses a compromised device to fake a "legitimate" verified image.
This image can now be injected into the news cycle and be taken seriously.
Keeping a secret on the camera is more or less the "jailbreak problem", aka being able to make a dvd player or console that only does the things that the manufacturer wants.
I will be pretty sad if this problem is actually "solved" effectively because it portends a future where manufacturers can completely curtail user freedom. But...
If the key on the device is compromised by reverse engineering or because the manufacturer is compromised then the whole root of trust is gone.
Attackers can choose the weakest brand of camera.
You now have some doubt about any image that has been "verified" because it could have come from a compromised camera secret.
All the rest of the stuff, the blockchain, etc depends on the root of trust in the camera.
You also now have debates around camera country of origin because there is no near future world where governments can't lean on local manufacturers. Finally, doubt can be thrown on images retro-actively if we later learn that a camera we thought was secure, has vulnerabilities.
This isn't a "freedom" issue. And no, even if the private key on the device is hacked, you wouldn't be able to hack all the cameras (assuming the device manufacturer would embed a different key for each unit ID), you would still have to hack the OS and the User and the Phone's encryption. So the surface area of a hack would be small. You cannot fake all those signatures, you'd have to literally hack all that encryption.
All of this would be optional, of course. People can always edit out metadata. But it would lend credence and authority to a photograph or video. Which would carry more weight in a court of law, for example, where this stuff really matters.
This is an interesting conversation because we both seem convinced we're "obviously right". I am clearly having trouble understanding your point of view. I apologise in advance if I'm mis-understanding your argument. Perhaps "First off, you'd have to steal the actual device" from upthread is the clue.
I think the disconnect might be that you are working from a threat model where someone else is trying to tamper with an image from your camera. I agree you could make that arbitrarily difficult. But I am primarily concerned with the threat where someone is tampering with their own camera to fake evidence. This possibility makes it harder for you to prove that your own image is legitimate.
Your reasoning implies that one or two hacked cameras are not a problem. To my way of thinking, the possibility that "at least 1 hacked camera exists" or "any camera could possibly be hacked" are enough to throw doubt on any "verified" images that someone tries to present in a high stakes context such as national security or the courtroom. We're back to debating provenance.
I don't know. I don't want to live in a world where someone can literally murder someone on camera and get away with it on a technicality. Witness testimony is already used in court and is quite unverifiable and subject to all sorts of psychological phenomenon where people sometimes believe they saw something entirely different than what actually happened. I think cryptographic signatures couldn't guarantee validity 100%, but they could improve the situation in a world of deep fakes on demand.
It would require a larger degree of premeditation and effort to convincingly pull off a deep fake in that world.
It's not a technicality if the video can't be distinguished from perfect nonsense. Just as you don't let someone with a documented history of hallucinations testify on their own.
You'd make the camera reach out to a signing server for the user's signature. You'd even sign the whole photo, not a hash supplied by the camera, to give you (via the server) a chance to verify the image was correct.
Or, you'd adapt a hardware wallet to do the same. Either way, there'd be two devices from two manufacturers, communicating over a transparent protocol.
> The resources needed to forge a signature aren't going to be much different than the resources needed to create a deepfake to begin with
I imagine deepfakes will become way easier in the near future because there are legitimate commercial reasons to make them easy and accessible (for example digital art assets). I don't see the same happening for cracking devices, which is more a standard security cat and mouse game between hackers and device manufacturers.
All you're saying is that creating deepfakes would get easier, not that cracking devices would get harder. And it's already not hard enough to be a significant barrier.
One possibility would be for all recording devices to immediately upload checksums of their recorded footage to multiple trusted online authorities upon recording.
If someone presents altered footage, you can show that the checksum of the original was uploaded earlier.
This of course only covers certain cases. If the deepfake is crafted from scratch or from a camera that doesn't upload its checksums, and the incentive for the creation of the deepfake arises before the supposed time the deepfake takes place, then this method won't be of use.
I don't quite understand how it would be an invasion of privacy. All that's needed is a checksum paired with a timestamp, you don't even need to identify yourself. There is no way anyone could extract any meaningful information out of that without the footage.
And you can just upload it to ten different authorities in ten different jurisdictions, or even a hundred if you're paranoid. States are powerful but they're not _that_ powerful. It's the same principle that makes Tor work.
I agree jamming wireless could be an issue, but only for prosecution. In the case of proving innocence it's a moot point because this checksum system only covers after-the-fact fabrication anyway.
They'd also have logged the IP, which combined with a time will probably significantly narrow down the individual in question if you can also access telco records. Especially if inadvertently more information is also documented (such as a user agent).
> It's the same principle that makes Tor work.
Tor doesn't work for this kind of problem, unless you are significantly more technically savvy (and even then...) then the average smartphone user.
I think you missed the point regarding Tor. I mean that for Tor to be compromised, a state actor would need to compromise on the order of dozens to hundreds of nodes simultaneously. The fact that Tor works shows that they are unable to do this, and so they would also be unable to simultaneously compromise dozens of checksum authorities. Nothing to do with using Tor for uploading checksums, I was just using it as an example.
Chain of custody is standard for evidence already. It might not be 100% infallible, but it certainly works better than nothing.
Yes, if a state actor wants to create evidence to frame you, and they didn't care about cost or returns, they could do so. But they could always do so. The fact is most of us are never going to get framed by a nation state.
The notion that you're either secure against all possible attacks or nothing is absurd.
Chain of custody implies you have some impartial authority who was actually there at the time to authenticate the recording. But then you would already have an impartial eyewitness. That doesn't work the other 99% of the time when the two parties to the case each tell a different story and one of them is offering evidence they have in their possession. The chain of custody then contains someone partial to the case and untrustworthy.
> Yes, if a state actor wants to create evidence to frame you, and they didn't care about cost or returns, they could do so. But they could always do so. The fact is most of us are never going to get framed by a nation state.
This is a major problem for elections. Nation states absolutely will doctor video of adversarial political candidates and for other propaganda purposes.
> The notion that you're either secure against all possible attacks or nothing is absurd.
But that's how signatures work. You're trusting every device in the world to sign the output of its camera. If the attacker can compromise any device, they can produce signed forgeries.
You're describing a situation where the recording ought not to be admissible anyways. If you can't trust where evidence came from, it's not evidence.
Again, nation states have always been able to doctor video of adversarial political candidates. Lookup pictures where the KGB made someone disappear.
Yes, if an attacker can compromise any device they can produce a signed forgery. But that's a really big if. There are a lot of potential attackers who can't compromise any and all devices, and signatures protect against them.
I guess the weakpoint in all of these techniques to prove a photo was taken by a certain device, at a certain time, in a certain place is for someone wearing a very good disguise to publicly commit crimes in your name. Any witnesses or photo evidence is going to point to you. A full movie costume makeup kit probably costs less than what it takes to hack Apple for someone's iPhone private key.
You’ve explained why it wouldn’t work flawlessly, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work better than the current state of affairs. Video evidence is already useful in the legal system despite “video evidence” obviously not being a flawless system. A state actor or even a competent video effects studio with a modest budget could already create a convincing fake video!
There are pretty good ways to detect photo editing, using things like measuring levels of JPEG artifacts across the image. Or if you save pictures raw I’ve never seen anyone try to fake a camera raw file.
I didn’t say it would be hard, just that I haven’t seen one. But they contain a lot of information that can’t be displayed on a computer monitor and so it would be a lot of work to check all of it.
Couldn't you just "rebalance" the JPEG artifacts as a final pass? Or some sort of slight blur that re-jumbles the least significant bits of every pixel?
Yes, this is standard in the forgery business - dust and speckle filter, drop the res, ensure the light is balanced, and maybe blur if you can get away with it.
These general techniques are weak against specific detection models that understand how the original image should’ve been generated. Another example is camera noise modeling since the injected noise won’t be consistent with how a phone camera etc actually behaves, or an ML model for image depth might see that it's at the wrong distance somehow.
Scaling the image down seems like one of the best tricks if you can get away with it. Another cheap one would be shifting the image 4 pixels over to break up the DCT artifact grid.
If I'm an end consumer taking pictures and videos for fun / posterity what's the incentive for me to have them cryptographically signed? Why would I ever need to prove they're real?
Are you saying that by law devices should cryptographically sign pictures?
The other aspect of discounting image evidence in this way would be to produce multiple conflicting versions and then argue a jury can never be sure which is real (where deepfake quality is comparable to the law enforcement original). This would have a hurdle for admission in a criminal case, but I would be able to very easily argue an acquittal if it was presented to the jury.
It's always so odd when people assume that there were no functioning legal systems during the tens of thousands of years of human history before photography was invented
People lived before the Internet existed but it would be a huge setback if we lost it. Similarly, advancements in technology have allowed for our justice systems to be a lot better and it would be a real shame if we lost that because of deepfakes. I'm not saying it will go that far, but it's totally normal to be wary of it.
The question is how effective that justice system was, not whether it existed or not. It's the same with medicine, it existed for quite some time but the effectiveness increased drastically and you wouldn't want to roll back all that progress.
The reality is that for most of those tens of thousands of years justice systems were mostly a sham where the focal point wasn't actually determining innocence but rather the appearance of justice and pleasing (some) people.
The phrasing of this rubs me the wrong way -- I get the feeling that you're more afraid of guilty people being presumed innocent than you are of innocent people being framed by deepfakes.
Our justice system worked for a very long time in an environment where cell phones didn't exist, where cities weren't covered end-to-end in CCTV cameras, and our courts were able to do a decent job of protecting the innocent and putting away the bad guys. Distrust of video evidence only makes us revert back 30 years to when we weren't so monitored. It's something that we can survive. On the other hand, if we don't see an outright rejection of deepfakes in our courts, we're going to see it used as a political weapon. We can survive the former, but not the latter.
Unfortunately, I don't see it working out that way. Once courts and police get their hands on a new technology and it becomes sufficiently ingrained, it doesn't matter how little sense it makes. Drug dogs are bullshit, but they're still everywhere. [1] DNA evidence can be synthesized and planted, but it's the gold standard in terms of courtroom evidence. [2]
Given all of this, I don't have a lot of faith in our justice system getting deepfakes right, and that worries me a lot more than guilty people being presumed innocent.
I don't think the history regarding how courts (and juries) handled eyewitness testimony, is all that different from how they handle DNA evidence. It's regarded as far more reliable than it is.
The track record of the justice system has been extremely mixed for many, and downright awful for minorities. DNA testing has been absolutely crucial in the last 30 - 40 years for undoing some of the damage the justice system caused before DNA testing was adequately available. There is no comfort found in regressing backwards to where forensic science becomes easily dismissible, and we're reliant on who can buy the most prestigious expert witness to testify for them.
> That's not really comforting to the minority people whose lives were ruined by them.
Actually, it probably is somewhat. I hate paying money but that my taxes go to useful things makes it bearable. I hate sucking up to a guy in a uniform but that he also arrests murderers makes it less infuriating.
But moreover, that's not the issue brought up originally, which was net damage to a group. The implication was that the justice system harmed minorities and as a group that's simply not true.
Also, the language used is trying to borrow outrage. Harmed minorities? No, harmed the poor. Many of whom were minorities. But there are rich racial minorities too.
You are trying to dilute the impact the racist history of US has had on minorities via the justice system. Justice and policing policies disproportionately target minorities. Sure the poor are affected by lack of proper representation, but minority populations also happen to be disproportionately affected by poverty. Stop and frisk, racial profiling, less lenient prosecutory discretion, mandatory minimum sentencing, and the War on Drugs all disproportionately impact minority groups compared to Caucasians[1]. If you just think we need to solve the poverty problem, a significant part of that problem is rooted in systemic racism too.
Per the Innocence Project, 70% of the cases they have exonerated have been of a minority group, and often these cases involved underlying racial prejudice to railroad an innocent person into a long-term prison sentence or death.[2]
>As of November 2019, 367 people previously convicted of serious crimes in the United States had been exonerated by DNA testing since 1989, 21 of whom had been sentenced to death.[9] Almost all (99%) of the wrongful convictions were males,[19] with minority groups constituting approximately 70% (61% African American and 8% Latino).
So the largest discrepancy from proportions in the US population is the overwhelming skew in favor of males (99%) - are they “minorities” too?
If the problem is racism, in a country where sexism against women is said to be a major problem, why would there be a 99:1 preponderance of men? Are the racists also biased in favor of women and against men?
Are males a minority group? No, technically not, since sex split is about 50/50. Is the high preponderance of men ending up in prison concerning? Yes. Frankly our high incarceration rates for non-violent crimes is extremely concerning. Does this somehow invalidate the problems brought up around female equality? Absolutely not. I also believe there is probably additional negative bias towards African-American males because of racist tropes.
Also the 99% figure was from the Innocence Project, Google brings up Federal Bureau of Prisons stat suggesting active incarceration is closer to 93% male, 7% female. Still concerning.
> You are trying to dilute the impact the racist history of US has had on minorities via the justice system.
Hasn't anyone told you that you learn more with questions than assertions?
No. I'm saying that the language used is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Regardless of all the stuff you mentioned, which is true, the system is still a benefit.
You should not go out of your way to further weaken trust in the system that has benefitted those minorities you mention more than it has hurt them. Especially as you are presumably not those groups, you should be careful not to wreck what they have. (You may not be aware, but white 'progressives' often speak for people of color. Their messages sound like ones of support initially, but because these people are often merely social signaling the rhetoric can often prove harmful to people who have to live with it.)
> [...] all disproportionately impact minority groups compared to Caucasians
Some minorities, yes. Others, no. Deeply troubling to the white v black narrative is that Nigerian immigrants often do very well in the USA, even when Americans don't know if they're american-descendants-of-slavery or not.
But yes, ADoS do have it rough. If you want to support someone though, vague "minorities" is not how you do it.
> Per the Innocence Project, 70% of the cases
You can't use that stat in that way, presumably they picked the most egregious cases which would be the poorest, etc.
I think you're saying minorities are better off with a justice system than without. Maybe everyone is technically better off with a justice system, than with something like vigilante justice, but the US has always had some level of justice system even during slavery. Was it really to their benefit at that time? Can we say things have improved, yes, very slowly, but systemic racism still exists.
>You can't use that stat in that way, presumably they picked the most egregious cases which would be the poorest, etc.
No, you cannot just ignore ingrained racism within the judicial system from day one as simply being a class issue. You can read more from the National Registry of Exonerations about racial bias in exonerated cases[1].
> Can we say things have improved, yes, very slowly
Nobody was asking. This is you retreating into the Motte after the Bailey was stormed.
> but racism still exist.
Who said otherwise? You sound so white "progressive" American. Consider if other people need you to say what you do, or if it takes the air from the people who would say it when actually needed?
>> You can't use that stat in that way
> No, you cannot just ignore ingrained racism
You're obviously trying to have an emotional moment not a serious conversation.
>Drug dogs are bullshit, but they're still everywhere. [1]
Just because some abuse them and have no proper training doesn't mean they are fake. You clearly have never seen a police dog work. They are able to find dead people, drugs, etc. that is at the bottom of the sea or follow the path the target took while inside a car. What is BS is the "police" and justice system in the US.
This is a misunderstanding of why "drug dogs are bullshit".
Yes, dogs are capable of sniffing out people, animals, and substances. This has been made use of for centuries.
Dogs are also capable of "hitting" on the trunk of a car, just because they guess that their master wants to look inside it. Plenty of evidence that this happens all the time.
Which undermines the right protecting against unreasonable search and seizure. All you have to do is be the wrong color, or driving in a "suspicious" way (which means whatever police want it to mean), and they can bring a K9 by, the dog will dutifully point at the trunk, and the cops get their search.
It's no different from the "I smelled pot" routine: there aren't any penalties to the police for doing an "I smelled pot" search and not finding cannabis, and there are no consequences for a K9 'hitting' on a trunk which turns out to have nothing more interesting than a gym bag.
That is a very convoluted way of stating that police dog handlers in the US are as bad as the rest of the US police. It is not that "drug dogs are BS" but that "US police have a huge problem and it includes their use of drug dogs".
drug dogs usefulness to law enforcement, almost exclusively, are as machines to manufacture probable cause on command. As this is how they’re used, “bullshit” is far too kind a descriptor.
Just because one drug dog might actually work doesn't mean that, on average, they and their handlers are performing to standard sufficient for probable cause.
I'm aware that there are huge problems with police training and integrity in the US but that isn't a problem with drug dogs. That is a problem with the training and integrity of their handlers.
I love dogs, I also used to love weed. I had planned a trip to a far away country for the New year. I left my country of origin on a short flyover to meet with friends and catch main flight to destination. I was absolutly smashed from smoking 2 joints before getting on the plane (outside the main door of the airport). When I arrived I walked through bagage area, with no baggage to collect as it was going straight to the final destination.
I spied a dog, and made a beeline to say hello. I had fun playing with the dog and just as I was walking away I could feel this burning feeling that someone was giving me the evil eye. I turned around and followed the dogs lead to the owner, who was a fair way away, and dressed in a high-vis jacket. I continued on without thinking about it, until i started to think about it. Lets just say the next couple of hours waiting for my friends was not so pleasant. (I wasnt carrying anything, but still).
>It brings up an interesting future where you can’t trust any witness testimony (because people do misremember) or any video, image, or audio evidence due to this technology.
That future sounds a lot like the past where we couldn't trust testimony and audiovisual evidence was practically nonexistent.
There is a recent British Netflix series called "The Capture" that is pertinent to this discussion. A little absurd at times, but for anyone who wants some mental floss around this topic it's a very interesting show.
There already are services who claim to be able to verify the authenticity of images. And so far, I managed to fool all of them with good CGI videos injected through MIPI into an Android system.
I remember that TruePic was especially awful, because their app fell for me just taking a photo of a printed out image. Plus their website overflows with Blockchain and Crypto buzzwords
> There already are services who claim to be able to verify the authenticity of images. And so far, I managed to fool all of them with good CGI videos injected through MIPI into an Android system.
Not to mention adversarial attacks will probably always exist, so there will always be a way to fool these systems.
I remember an episode of the Olde Time Radio show "The Shadow" where Lamont and Margo attend a trial as audience members. This is in the 1930s // 1940s for context.
The prosecution projected a film with audio [cutting edge technology at the time] demonstrating the crimes in question [bribery and related charges].
Lamont ['The Shadow'] was able to hear the audio and read lips at the same time and figure out that what was heard was not was what said. "Believe half of what you see, and nothing you hear" was his takeaway.
As the story goes, that's what happened. The film shown at court was dubbed for audio by a hired guy who did great vocal impersonations. The accused was innocent.
Short story long: deep fakes aren't a new idea. 100 years and counting. Same trick, different tools.
Can someone fill me in here? Would an anonymous video with no chain of custody ever be admissible in court even without deepfakes? After all, there was always CGI.
On cross examination the other side has the right to try to discredit the witness: “Aren’t you really blind, couldn’t this be a deepfake, “ etc. And, they have the right to put on an expert or other witness to testify that it’s fake or the wrong picture or whatever. In the end, it all goes to the jury and they get to make of it what they will.
Weintraub also stated during the press conference that investigators determined that the vaping video had been manipulated after analyzing its “metadata,” a term which refers to embedded information in digital media that can reveal how and when it was last edited.
But after contacting Reiss, the officer who investigated Spone, the Daily Dot learned that police never actually obtained the original vaping video. Instead, like what was seen on NBC News, police only had access to a cellphone recording taken by Spone of the vaping video being played on a separate device. Any metadata analysis would therefore fail to include information on the source video.
In response to questions on how it could have been determined that the vaping footage was manipulated without access to the original video, Reiss argued that he could see with his “naked eye” elements that “don’t make sense.”
-----
So... They can tell by the metadata on a copy of the file plus a naked eye analysis of the video that this is a deep fake? That's much worse evidence for the deep fake case than I assumed there would be.
This does make me wonder though: Should we default to believing video or doubting it? Does the victim here need to prove it is a deep fake or the perpetrator prove it's not?
> In response to questions on how it could have been determined that the vaping footage was manipulated without access to the original video, Reiss argued that he could see with his "naked eye" elements that "don’t make sense."
Never expected to see a version of the "I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time." meme used as legal testimony.
This is no different from whether a letter was or wasn't faked, or an e-mail, or whether a signature was forged or not.
You just get an expert witness (or opposing ones) to testify as to the likelihood of something being forgery or not and why, as well as take things like motivation, means, etc. into account.
There's literally nothing different about deepfakes. We have a well-established court system for handling this.
> In the context of a court's ability to deal with them?
From the legal perspective, I think you're right that "at the end of the day" faked evidence is faked evidence and we do have protocols and processes for that kind of thing. Dismissing faked evidence is not new.
However, earlier you said this:
> There's literally nothing different about deepfakes.
I'd argue requiring AI/ML to create or invalidate deep fakes is _literally_ very different from generating fake emails, fake photos, or fake audio. It's also _literally_ different from things like CGI video. The standard of what counts as evidence is _literally_ changing as deep fakes evolve.
Validating video evidence, in the new era of deep fakes is now very different.
Your clarification about the context of the courts ability to deal with them is an example of how you were being disingenuous, in my opinion. You made a blanket statement about deep fakes are literally the same as other faked evidence and then afterwards put a clarifying condition around the statement to narrow it to the court's ability to deal with faked evidence.
If we're just talking about faked evidence and how to deal with it - I think we agree: Determine if evidence is legitimate however you have to, and then toss it out if it's not legitimate.
But we're talking about deep fakes in this context and your statements dismissed all of the things that make deep fakes different in the context of determining legitimate evidence, or how deep fakes will impact the court system. We are transitioning (over decades, already) from a standard of evidence of "This is video evidence of the truth of what happened" to "Some people think this video is probably not real." That's a big difference.
lol a video being manipulated doesn't mean its a deepfake
but I suppose it will follow the same standard as sexual harassment and rape victims: if they’ve ever altered the truth in the past then their current experience is invalidated for the purpose of using a court to reduce freedom for someone else
so videos will have to be closest to raw sensor data or inadmissable
1. A cheerleader's mom anonymously texted some images and a video of a rival cheerleader to her coach. One of these images was a deepfake—a swimsuit photo off of Facebook edited to make the subject look nude. The other images and the video (of the girls drinking and smoking), were real.
2. The girl and her mom were charged with cyber harassment and harassment. The prosecutors weren't entirely clear on which of the photos + video were real and which were edited—the victim claimed they were all fake—but the whole thing was generally classed as harassment. Later, the police claimed that "metadata analysis" proved the video was fake.
3. ABC (among others, but ABC is mentioned in this article) ran a TV spot about this story, repeating the prosecutor's assertion that the video was manipulated
4. Twitter user @HenryAjder ("Deepfake expert"), among others, pointed out the error
5. The DailyDot published this article
This seems like a bit of a nothingburger? Any reason we're still talking about this? Nobody was "discrediting evidence", the videos & photos were only evidence to one thing—that someone sent them to her coach in order to get her kicked off the team. Whether they were real or not was immaterial to the harassment that occurred.
Nations state > Bigco > Smallco > Neckbeards > Karen
(skipping some steps but you catch the drift).
The metadata stuff the NSA was doing 20yr ago is what advertisers are doing today. SpaceX is doing stuff that was recently only the purview of nation states.
> The statement is similar to claims made by Engelhart to the Daily Dot that Spone allegedly used legitimate video as a basis for the deepfake. Police did not know whether the alleged victim’s face was added to a video of another young female vaping or if a vaping pen and smoke was digitally added to a legitimate video of the alleged victim.
> Weintraub also stated during the press conference that investigators determined that the vaping video had been manipulated after analyzing its “metadata,” a term which refers to embedded information in digital media that can reveal how and when it was last edited.
> But after contacting Reiss, the officer who investigated Spone, the Daily Dot learned that police never actually obtained the original vaping video. Instead, like what was seen on NBC News, police only had access to a cellphone recording taken by Spone of the vaping video being played on a separate device. Any metadata analysis would therefore fail to include information on the source video.
It appears the police are calling the video of the vaping a deepfake
My mistake! I had hedged around that point in my original comment, but I removed it after reading the twitter thread DailyDot where HenryAjder seemed to imply the opposite. I've updated my comment to clarify
I think it's interesting if law enforcement bungles a type of evidence that is almost certainly going to be more of a society-wide problem in the near future
My impression is that law enforcement generally bungles every single type of evidence on a regular basis. Computer evidence is only notable because we're paying more attention to it.
what was a takeaway here regardless of the story being wrong, is that the damage deepfakes will cause might not be what self-proclaimed futurists predicted (e.g. rampant use of the technology as a means to subvert evidence) but the opposite: that people will counter justified allegations of evidence as being deepfakes. So not the technology is doing most of the damage but the hypothetical possibility that allows that these arguments now exist.
Imagine any Karen or Kyle now being presented with video evidence will soon scream "deepfake". And few have seen this coming because we were more absorbed with hypothetical (but less realistic) scenarios.
This is even more fascinating (and was the simpler answer yet most have missed it).
> rampant use of the technology as a means to subvert evidence) but the opposite: that people will counter justified allegations of evidence as being deepfakes.
That's not the opposite, that is subverting evidence.
The facts of the situation are definitely not that exciting but the significance of the story itself is pretty monumental. Just the fact that such ordinary people are caught up in public uncertainty about the authenticity of media depicting very ordinary human stuff, all because of the ubiquity of a bunch of < 10 year old tech... this is the tip of a massive very messy iceberg.
Agreed. If I had the power to make deep fakes as a child I might have landed at least 3 people in prison, and had charges put on multiple people I just didn't like.
> “The videos or the images already existed in some form and then our allegation—this is of course subject to proof at trial, she’s innocent until proven guilty—but our allegation is that Mrs. Spone took existing images from existing social media from these three victims’ existing social media accounts and manipulated them,” Weintraub said.
> The statement is similar to claims made by Engelhart to the Daily Dot that Spone allegedly used legitimate video as a basis for the deepfake. Police did not know whether the alleged victim’s face was added to a video of another young female vaping or if a vaping pen and smoke was digitally added to a legitimate video of the alleged victim.
If you're saying that she started with one video or image that was publicly accessible and modified it, I'd expect them to have the original video or image so they could tell what was added.
I'm just curious how many centuries will have to pass before we outgrow the bullshit society where being exposed smoking, drinking (but not harming anybody while drunk) and posing nude can harm you.
This person allegedly created a deepfake video that simulated a child nude, and sent it to someone else. Why was she not charged with creating and distributing child pornography?
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation
If its really fake the folks over at Sassy Justice should hire her, their stuff looks like garbage in comparison.
https://www.dpreview.com/news/7021408195/hipster-offended-af...
On the one hand, yeah, it's definitely more how the press likes a human interest story mixed with whatever is flavor of the month (the techno wow of "deep fakes").
But on the hand, the tone you take in that last sentence is really off-kilter. The press just works in a kind of hysterical fashion, moral panics (even conspiracy theories) aren't conspiracies but natural. Attributing stuff to a malicious effort to make the public more manipulable (as if that was necessary) should be dropped in favor of the natural incompetence of the press in framing issues reasonably.
Edit: "Mocking Bird" above is a phrase referencing CIA manipulation of the media. This is a bit of over the top for just some rather screechy but pretty ordinary story.
Except we've known for a long time that the mainstream press works, very intentionally, to manipulate public opinion.
We might talk about what form a society would have to have for the press to not have great influence - maybe "very strong education and civil institutions" or "directly democratic workers' councils" but if we're going have a modern capitalist society with multiple poles of elites and atomized consumers, the press, the corporations, the state and highest professional all will have disproportionate influence.
Which is to say, now, all the different press outlets manipulate, sometimes in distinct and opposite ways, sometimes in agreement with each other. And all the various economic and political institutions manipulate.
And the thing with this manipulation is it doesn't require crazy plan like the ggp/op insinuates. They don't need to intentionally create "deep fake" as vague threat, human psychology just naturally drifts that way, including the psychology of the reporters themselves. And manipulation for a specific purpose just requires the poor framing of ideas that can leveraged whenever you need it. So yeah, the press certainly manipulate but it doesn't generally have a "master plan" of manipulation. That wouldn't help (not that it hasn't been tried).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
> So yeah, the press certainly manipulate but it doesn't generally have a "master plan" of manipulation.
Ah, the master plan - code name 'red herring'?
All of this can be confirmed by a responsible news consumer and everything I can find here checks out. So this is legit investigative news and precisely the kind of thing we should encourage more of.
I am aware of Project Mockingbird [2] but I cannot see any relation between it and this report. It makes no sense whatsoever that the CIA would care about some squabble over unknown cheerleaders. It makes no sense to believe that everything is or isn't a deepfake without examining the facts. And this article, unlike so many I have seen, is an example of news done right. Given how disinformation works, this is the opposite of it. This article was written to inform, not to inflame our passions.
In short, it's the polar opposite of what I would expect from disinformation and this is the kind of good reporting that should be rewarded.
[1] It should've actually linked it, IMHO, but I won't complain because it wasn't hard to find this video @0:49 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5I1RfxehT4
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mockingbird
> Even more troublesome, it seems that no media outlets attempted to verify that the vaping footage was actually a deepfake before broadcasting the claim to millions of Americans.
> The possible misstep by the media, and the chance that the criminal justice system could misapply laws against videos mischaracterized as deepfakes, is what worries experts the most.
“That wasn’t me on camera. Must be a deepfake!”
Can you please not. It's hard to take someone's argument seriously when this kind of name-calling is intermingled with it. It's similar to someone writing m$ft or unironically referring to Zuckerberg as a robot.
They may be able to generate a "plausible" nude, suitable for rubbing one out. But it's not a real nude. Moles and scars wont match. The data is just not there, so the manipulator has to make something up. Thus I think the nudes are actually the most promising for conclusively proving or disproving a manipulation.
This happens.
Particularly in rape cases where the woman (or child) describes some particular feature on the alleged rapists genitals.
Michael Jackson had to strip down, as I recall. Obviously not in open court.
You’d spend a lot of time and effort explaining one mole difference - and that’s if you legitimately had one. If you didn’t, what else are you going to go on?
This.
I have been in a jury, and I wouldn’t be surprised if image based evidence won’t always be discounted by defense attorneys. It probably is already starting for the high paid ones (e.g. the notion itself will protect the rich.)
It brings up an interesting future where you can’t trust any witness testimony (because people do misremember) or any video, image, or audio evidence due to this technology.
The only societal workaround will be to implant cryptographic keys inside of bodies and monitor all interactions on some blockchain /s?
I think the danger is in trying to come up with an abstract, general solution for it. I don't think one exists.
I think the only thing we can do is deal with things on a case by case basis in these situations.
This kind of "verification" doesn't work. You're trying to have the device authenticate the image. That implies a root of trust that goes through the device manufacturer, which state actors will immediately compromise, making the signatures untrustworthy regardless. Then people will find vulnerabilities in the devices themselves, or convincing ways to have the device take a picture of a doctored photograph instead of a picture of the world, extending the ability to forge signatures to the general public.
The resources needed to forge a signature aren't going to be much different than the resources needed to create a deepfake to begin with. The creator gets to choose which device to use and can choose based on which device they find a vulnerability in. So it's more likely to be a liability than a benefit because it lends false credence to the authenticity of fakes.
For it to work you would need all devices to be secure against all attackers. It's not realistic.
How? If you have a public/private key pair and then do some kind of multisig process wherein the manufacturer can sign the photo, the OS can sign the photo, and then a user supplied signature could also sign the photo. You're not going to be able to fake 3 cryptographic signatures without 3 private keys. It would be extremely difficult to fake all of that. It would take a concerted, concentrated effort and would be extremely rare in practice. It would certainly improve the situation.
This image can now be injected into the news cycle and be taken seriously.
Keeping a secret on the camera is more or less the "jailbreak problem", aka being able to make a dvd player or console that only does the things that the manufacturer wants.
I will be pretty sad if this problem is actually "solved" effectively because it portends a future where manufacturers can completely curtail user freedom. But...
If the key on the device is compromised by reverse engineering or because the manufacturer is compromised then the whole root of trust is gone.
Attackers can choose the weakest brand of camera.
You now have some doubt about any image that has been "verified" because it could have come from a compromised camera secret.
All the rest of the stuff, the blockchain, etc depends on the root of trust in the camera.
You also now have debates around camera country of origin because there is no near future world where governments can't lean on local manufacturers. Finally, doubt can be thrown on images retro-actively if we later learn that a camera we thought was secure, has vulnerabilities.
All of this would be optional, of course. People can always edit out metadata. But it would lend credence and authority to a photograph or video. Which would carry more weight in a court of law, for example, where this stuff really matters.
I think the disconnect might be that you are working from a threat model where someone else is trying to tamper with an image from your camera. I agree you could make that arbitrarily difficult. But I am primarily concerned with the threat where someone is tampering with their own camera to fake evidence. This possibility makes it harder for you to prove that your own image is legitimate.
Your reasoning implies that one or two hacked cameras are not a problem. To my way of thinking, the possibility that "at least 1 hacked camera exists" or "any camera could possibly be hacked" are enough to throw doubt on any "verified" images that someone tries to present in a high stakes context such as national security or the courtroom. We're back to debating provenance.
It would require a larger degree of premeditation and effort to convincingly pull off a deep fake in that world.
It's not a technicality if the video can't be distinguished from perfect nonsense. Just as you don't let someone with a documented history of hallucinations testify on their own.
Or, you'd adapt a hardware wallet to do the same. Either way, there'd be two devices from two manufacturers, communicating over a transparent protocol.
I imagine deepfakes will become way easier in the near future because there are legitimate commercial reasons to make them easy and accessible (for example digital art assets). I don't see the same happening for cracking devices, which is more a standard security cat and mouse game between hackers and device manufacturers.
If someone presents altered footage, you can show that the checksum of the original was uploaded earlier.
This of course only covers certain cases. If the deepfake is crafted from scratch or from a camera that doesn't upload its checksums, and the incentive for the creation of the deepfake arises before the supposed time the deepfake takes place, then this method won't be of use.
And subject to attack. Don't want to be recorded? Jam wireless so they can't have anyone sign their videos, then claim they're fake.
Also doesn't work for state actors. A country can compromise three separate signing authorities.
And you can just upload it to ten different authorities in ten different jurisdictions, or even a hundred if you're paranoid. States are powerful but they're not _that_ powerful. It's the same principle that makes Tor work.
I agree jamming wireless could be an issue, but only for prosecution. In the case of proving innocence it's a moot point because this checksum system only covers after-the-fact fabrication anyway.
They'd also have logged the IP, which combined with a time will probably significantly narrow down the individual in question if you can also access telco records. Especially if inadvertently more information is also documented (such as a user agent).
> It's the same principle that makes Tor work.
Tor doesn't work for this kind of problem, unless you are significantly more technically savvy (and even then...) then the average smartphone user.
Yes, if a state actor wants to create evidence to frame you, and they didn't care about cost or returns, they could do so. But they could always do so. The fact is most of us are never going to get framed by a nation state.
The notion that you're either secure against all possible attacks or nothing is absurd.
> Yes, if a state actor wants to create evidence to frame you, and they didn't care about cost or returns, they could do so. But they could always do so. The fact is most of us are never going to get framed by a nation state.
This is a major problem for elections. Nation states absolutely will doctor video of adversarial political candidates and for other propaganda purposes.
> The notion that you're either secure against all possible attacks or nothing is absurd.
But that's how signatures work. You're trusting every device in the world to sign the output of its camera. If the attacker can compromise any device, they can produce signed forgeries.
Again, nation states have always been able to doctor video of adversarial political candidates. Lookup pictures where the KGB made someone disappear.
Yes, if an attacker can compromise any device they can produce a signed forgery. But that's a really big if. There are a lot of potential attackers who can't compromise any and all devices, and signatures protect against them.
Scaling the image down seems like one of the best tricks if you can get away with it. Another cheap one would be shifting the image 4 pixels over to break up the DCT artifact grid.
With a good forgery it will be. Even then, the fact that it's noise means that you won't ever be sure about this.
Just saying "we need to sign photos" isn't enough and simply naïve.
Are you saying that by law devices should cryptographically sign pictures?
The reality is that for most of those tens of thousands of years justice systems were mostly a sham where the focal point wasn't actually determining innocence but rather the appearance of justice and pleasing (some) people.
Our justice system worked for a very long time in an environment where cell phones didn't exist, where cities weren't covered end-to-end in CCTV cameras, and our courts were able to do a decent job of protecting the innocent and putting away the bad guys. Distrust of video evidence only makes us revert back 30 years to when we weren't so monitored. It's something that we can survive. On the other hand, if we don't see an outright rejection of deepfakes in our courts, we're going to see it used as a political weapon. We can survive the former, but not the latter.
Unfortunately, I don't see it working out that way. Once courts and police get their hands on a new technology and it becomes sufficiently ingrained, it doesn't matter how little sense it makes. Drug dogs are bullshit, but they're still everywhere. [1] DNA evidence can be synthesized and planted, but it's the gold standard in terms of courtroom evidence. [2]
Given all of this, I don't have a lot of faith in our justice system getting deepfakes right, and that worries me a lot more than guilty people being presumed innocent.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/05/supreme-c...
[2]: Good reason to avoid giving your DNA to 23andMe or to the state. Unfortunately, both my parents did 23andMe, so I'm screwed regardless. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18dna.html
Actually, it probably is somewhat. I hate paying money but that my taxes go to useful things makes it bearable. I hate sucking up to a guy in a uniform but that he also arrests murderers makes it less infuriating.
But moreover, that's not the issue brought up originally, which was net damage to a group. The implication was that the justice system harmed minorities and as a group that's simply not true.
Also, the language used is trying to borrow outrage. Harmed minorities? No, harmed the poor. Many of whom were minorities. But there are rich racial minorities too.
Per the Innocence Project, 70% of the cases they have exonerated have been of a minority group, and often these cases involved underlying racial prejudice to railroad an innocent person into a long-term prison sentence or death.[2]
>As of November 2019, 367 people previously convicted of serious crimes in the United States had been exonerated by DNA testing since 1989, 21 of whom had been sentenced to death.[9] Almost all (99%) of the wrongful convictions were males,[19] with minority groups constituting approximately 70% (61% African American and 8% Latino).
1.https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-...
2.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_Project#Overturned_c...
If the problem is racism, in a country where sexism against women is said to be a major problem, why would there be a 99:1 preponderance of men? Are the racists also biased in favor of women and against men?
Are males a minority group? No, technically not, since sex split is about 50/50. Is the high preponderance of men ending up in prison concerning? Yes. Frankly our high incarceration rates for non-violent crimes is extremely concerning. Does this somehow invalidate the problems brought up around female equality? Absolutely not. I also believe there is probably additional negative bias towards African-American males because of racist tropes.
Also the 99% figure was from the Innocence Project, Google brings up Federal Bureau of Prisons stat suggesting active incarceration is closer to 93% male, 7% female. Still concerning.
Hasn't anyone told you that you learn more with questions than assertions?
No. I'm saying that the language used is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Regardless of all the stuff you mentioned, which is true, the system is still a benefit.
You should not go out of your way to further weaken trust in the system that has benefitted those minorities you mention more than it has hurt them. Especially as you are presumably not those groups, you should be careful not to wreck what they have. (You may not be aware, but white 'progressives' often speak for people of color. Their messages sound like ones of support initially, but because these people are often merely social signaling the rhetoric can often prove harmful to people who have to live with it.)
> [...] all disproportionately impact minority groups compared to Caucasians
Some minorities, yes. Others, no. Deeply troubling to the white v black narrative is that Nigerian immigrants often do very well in the USA, even when Americans don't know if they're american-descendants-of-slavery or not.
But yes, ADoS do have it rough. If you want to support someone though, vague "minorities" is not how you do it.
> Per the Innocence Project, 70% of the cases
You can't use that stat in that way, presumably they picked the most egregious cases which would be the poorest, etc.
>You can't use that stat in that way, presumably they picked the most egregious cases which would be the poorest, etc.
No, you cannot just ignore ingrained racism within the judicial system from day one as simply being a class issue. You can read more from the National Registry of Exonerations about racial bias in exonerated cases[1].
1. http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race_...
Nobody was asking. This is you retreating into the Motte after the Bailey was stormed.
> but racism still exist.
Who said otherwise? You sound so white "progressive" American. Consider if other people need you to say what you do, or if it takes the air from the people who would say it when actually needed?
>> You can't use that stat in that way
> No, you cannot just ignore ingrained racism
You're obviously trying to have an emotional moment not a serious conversation.
Edit: False flags reflect badly on you.
Just because some abuse them and have no proper training doesn't mean they are fake. You clearly have never seen a police dog work. They are able to find dead people, drugs, etc. that is at the bottom of the sea or follow the path the target took while inside a car. What is BS is the "police" and justice system in the US.
Yes, dogs are capable of sniffing out people, animals, and substances. This has been made use of for centuries.
Dogs are also capable of "hitting" on the trunk of a car, just because they guess that their master wants to look inside it. Plenty of evidence that this happens all the time.
Which undermines the right protecting against unreasonable search and seizure. All you have to do is be the wrong color, or driving in a "suspicious" way (which means whatever police want it to mean), and they can bring a K9 by, the dog will dutifully point at the trunk, and the cops get their search.
It's no different from the "I smelled pot" routine: there aren't any penalties to the police for doing an "I smelled pot" search and not finding cannabis, and there are no consequences for a K9 'hitting' on a trunk which turns out to have nothing more interesting than a gym bag.
That future sounds a lot like the past where we couldn't trust testimony and audiovisual evidence was practically nonexistent.
I remember that TruePic was especially awful, because their app fell for me just taking a photo of a printed out image. Plus their website overflows with Blockchain and Crypto buzzwords
Not to mention adversarial attacks will probably always exist, so there will always be a way to fool these systems.
The prosecution projected a film with audio [cutting edge technology at the time] demonstrating the crimes in question [bribery and related charges].
Lamont ['The Shadow'] was able to hear the audio and read lips at the same time and figure out that what was heard was not was what said. "Believe half of what you see, and nothing you hear" was his takeaway.
As the story goes, that's what happened. The film shown at court was dubbed for audio by a hired guy who did great vocal impersonations. The accused was innocent.
Short story long: deep fakes aren't a new idea. 100 years and counting. Same trick, different tools.
You could also certainly get an expert witness to give their opinion on whether that video is CGI or not.
To lay the foundation for admission for a photograph into evidence, ask questions such as these:
Q. Mr. Witness, I'm handing you a photograph that's been marked Exhibit 2 for identification. What is depicted in that photograph?
A. A stoplight at the intersection of 4th and Pine.
Q. Is that photograph a fair and accurate representation of the stoplight at 4th and Pine as it existed on the day of the collision?
A. Yes, it is.
At this point, you can move for admission of the photograph into evidence.
https://www.illinoistrialpractice.com/2004/11/foundational_q...
On cross examination the other side has the right to try to discredit the witness: “Aren’t you really blind, couldn’t this be a deepfake, “ etc. And, they have the right to put on an expert or other witness to testify that it’s fake or the wrong picture or whatever. In the end, it all goes to the jury and they get to make of it what they will.
But after contacting Reiss, the officer who investigated Spone, the Daily Dot learned that police never actually obtained the original vaping video. Instead, like what was seen on NBC News, police only had access to a cellphone recording taken by Spone of the vaping video being played on a separate device. Any metadata analysis would therefore fail to include information on the source video.
In response to questions on how it could have been determined that the vaping footage was manipulated without access to the original video, Reiss argued that he could see with his “naked eye” elements that “don’t make sense.”
-----
So... They can tell by the metadata on a copy of the file plus a naked eye analysis of the video that this is a deep fake? That's much worse evidence for the deep fake case than I assumed there would be.
This does make me wonder though: Should we default to believing video or doubting it? Does the victim here need to prove it is a deep fake or the perpetrator prove it's not?
Never expected to see a version of the "I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time." meme used as legal testimony.
When CNN starts using deep fake tech to show Trump throwing a bowl of fish food into a pond, then it's reached maturity.
You just get an expert witness (or opposing ones) to testify as to the likelihood of something being forgery or not and why, as well as take things like motivation, means, etc. into account.
There's literally nothing different about deepfakes. We have a well-established court system for handling this.
That's a bit disingenuous don't you think?
No. What's disingenuous about it?
From the legal perspective, I think you're right that "at the end of the day" faked evidence is faked evidence and we do have protocols and processes for that kind of thing. Dismissing faked evidence is not new.
However, earlier you said this:
> There's literally nothing different about deepfakes.
I'd argue requiring AI/ML to create or invalidate deep fakes is _literally_ very different from generating fake emails, fake photos, or fake audio. It's also _literally_ different from things like CGI video. The standard of what counts as evidence is _literally_ changing as deep fakes evolve.
Validating video evidence, in the new era of deep fakes is now very different.
Your clarification about the context of the courts ability to deal with them is an example of how you were being disingenuous, in my opinion. You made a blanket statement about deep fakes are literally the same as other faked evidence and then afterwards put a clarifying condition around the statement to narrow it to the court's ability to deal with faked evidence.
If we're just talking about faked evidence and how to deal with it - I think we agree: Determine if evidence is legitimate however you have to, and then toss it out if it's not legitimate.
But we're talking about deep fakes in this context and your statements dismissed all of the things that make deep fakes different in the context of determining legitimate evidence, or how deep fakes will impact the court system. We are transitioning (over decades, already) from a standard of evidence of "This is video evidence of the truth of what happened" to "Some people think this video is probably not real." That's a big difference.
but I suppose it will follow the same standard as sexual harassment and rape victims: if they’ve ever altered the truth in the past then their current experience is invalidated for the purpose of using a court to reduce freedom for someone else
so videos will have to be closest to raw sensor data or inadmissable
1. A cheerleader's mom anonymously texted some images and a video of a rival cheerleader to her coach. One of these images was a deepfake—a swimsuit photo off of Facebook edited to make the subject look nude. The other images and the video (of the girls drinking and smoking), were real.
2. The girl and her mom were charged with cyber harassment and harassment. The prosecutors weren't entirely clear on which of the photos + video were real and which were edited—the victim claimed they were all fake—but the whole thing was generally classed as harassment. Later, the police claimed that "metadata analysis" proved the video was fake.
3. ABC (among others, but ABC is mentioned in this article) ran a TV spot about this story, repeating the prosecutor's assertion that the video was manipulated
4. Twitter user @HenryAjder ("Deepfake expert"), among others, pointed out the error
5. The DailyDot published this article
This seems like a bit of a nothingburger? Any reason we're still talking about this? Nobody was "discrediting evidence", the videos & photos were only evidence to one thing—that someone sent them to her coach in order to get her kicked off the team. Whether they were real or not was immaterial to the harassment that occurred.
Nations state > Bigco > Smallco > Neckbeards > Karen
(skipping some steps but you catch the drift).
The metadata stuff the NSA was doing 20yr ago is what advertisers are doing today. SpaceX is doing stuff that was recently only the purview of nation states.
> Weintraub also stated during the press conference that investigators determined that the vaping video had been manipulated after analyzing its “metadata,” a term which refers to embedded information in digital media that can reveal how and when it was last edited.
> But after contacting Reiss, the officer who investigated Spone, the Daily Dot learned that police never actually obtained the original vaping video. Instead, like what was seen on NBC News, police only had access to a cellphone recording taken by Spone of the vaping video being played on a separate device. Any metadata analysis would therefore fail to include information on the source video.
It appears the police are calling the video of the vaping a deepfake
what was a takeaway here regardless of the story being wrong, is that the damage deepfakes will cause might not be what self-proclaimed futurists predicted (e.g. rampant use of the technology as a means to subvert evidence) but the opposite: that people will counter justified allegations of evidence as being deepfakes. So not the technology is doing most of the damage but the hypothetical possibility that allows that these arguments now exist.
Imagine any Karen or Kyle now being presented with video evidence will soon scream "deepfake". And few have seen this coming because we were more absorbed with hypothetical (but less realistic) scenarios.
This is even more fascinating (and was the simpler answer yet most have missed it).
https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmodernism...
That's not the opposite, that is subverting evidence.
Also, please stop using ordinary names as slurs.
Currently we have reached peak character assasination. And you can ruin a life at this point because of one moment caught on tape.
Who cares if Karen or Kyle did x,y,z. Specially if it was intended to be private.
The rising millennial generation is not ready for the chaos their progeny is about to unleash on the world.
> The statement is similar to claims made by Engelhart to the Daily Dot that Spone allegedly used legitimate video as a basis for the deepfake. Police did not know whether the alleged victim’s face was added to a video of another young female vaping or if a vaping pen and smoke was digitally added to a legitimate video of the alleged victim.
If you're saying that she started with one video or image that was publicly accessible and modified it, I'd expect them to have the original video or image so they could tell what was added.