Seeing Hasn't Been Believing For Some Time

As you may have been reminded recently, the second person to walk on the moon was Edwin Eugene "Buzz" Aldrin Jr., who accompanied Neil Armstrong in the lunar module during the Apollo 11 flight in July of 1969.  A common problem faced by the lunar astronauts was what to do with the rest of your life afterwards, and one thing Aldrin did was to make public appearances about his astronaut career.  On Sept. 9, 2002, Aldrin showed up at a Beverly Hills hotel expecting to be interviewed on camera for a Japanese children's television program.  Instead, waiting for him was one Bart Sibrel, a sometime documentary filmmaker who has made a career out of promoting the idea that NASA's moon landings were all faked in a secret CIA-operated studio.  Sibrel, accompanied by his own film crew, aggressively tried to get Aldrin to swear on a Bible that he had landed on the moon, and when Aldrin declined to do that in front of cameras and told Sibrel to leave him alone, Sibrel called him a "thief, liar, and coward" and reportedly backed him against a wall and poked him with the Bible.  In response, the 72-year-old Aldrin punched the 250-pound Sibrel in the jaw, but no charges were filed. 

Sibrel has made a career out of claiming that all the visual evidence (as well as physical evidence in the form of moon rocks distributed around the world) showing that men have been to the moon was essentially an elaborate "deepfake."  The word was not invented in 1969, but the concept of lying is as old as humanity.  For reasons of his own, Sibrel thinks (or at least appears to think) that NASA and the CIA concocted an extremely elaborate lie and backed it up with artificially-generated visual evidence. 

In 1969, there was no such thing as advanced computer graphics that could take images from different sources and combine them seamlessly to make it look like, for example, actor Tom Hanks was in the same room with President John F. Kennedy, as the movie "Forrest Gump" showed in 1994 in one of the first films that took advantage of computer-generated imagery (CGI).  Well, the great democratizing force known as IT has now brought the simpler kinds of digital fakery to the masses.  Some people are worried that simple tricks such as speeding up or slowing down authentic videos will cause more trouble than the sophisticated deepfakes that even experts have problems detecting. 

A recent Associated Press article describes how U. S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was made to appear physically impaired by simply playing back a recording of her at a slower speed.  While some such tricks are pulled purely for satirical purposes, digital forensics expert Hany Field worries that unsophisticated voters will be fooled by them nonetheless.  He called the doctored Pelosi video, which got over two million views on Facebook, "a canary in a coal mine," and expects the 2020 election year will see many more such crude trick fakes, which one could call shallowfakes.

According to some studies quoted in the article, some groups of voters (older ones and "ultra-conservatives," whatever that means) tend to trust videos more and will retweet, and otherwise treat as credible, videos that younger and less conservative people will quickly recognize as having been altered.  I have seen this sort of effect myself as I have watched an otherwise sensible and well-balanced woman of my acquaintance lap up stuff on Facebook that I consider arrant nonsense, on occasion. 

It's possible that such people hold all Facebook information in a different category in their minds from things that people they trust tell them in person, and that it's a sort of entertainment more than a serious search for the real truth.  But all this lies in the uncertain realm of what may influence voters, which includes everything from the weather to the state of one's health.  And as such, we can only speculate on its effects.

Two possible ways mentioned by the news article to mitigate any negative effects of shallowfakes are so-called "downranking" by social media outlets such as Facebook, and adding fact-checking information to suspicious-looking videos or information such as labels saying "This video has been altered from its original state."  The problem with this is that it puts the social-media operators in the role of censor, or at least editor.  And depending on the political character of the shallowfake and the political leanings of the censor or editor, someone is sure to cry "Foul!" at such actions, or at least point out equally egregious shallowfakes on the opposite end of the political spectrum that haven't been censored, edited, or labeled as such.  That is a quagmire that organizations like Facebook may not care to wade into, and I'm not sure they should.

One thing is for certain:  the video-altering genie of cheap and easily available software is not going back into its bottle.  And any thought of government regulation or censorship moves us in the direction of dictatorships like China, where members of minority groups such as Uighurs get sent to what amounts to concentration camps simply for trying to get in touch with other Uighurs on social media. 

So perhaps the answer is a better-educated electorate.  Civics education in this country is reportedly in terrible shape anyway, as many history texts seem to concentrate on everything bad our forefathers did (excuse me, should I say "forepeople"?  No, I shouldn't.).  I do recall one lesson I learned from a high-school history book, which was that after the famous purges of the 1930s in the Soviet Union where whole rafts of bureaucrats were executed at Stalin's whim, new editions of history books carried photos of the Great Leader from which certain undesirables had been airbrushed away, without comment.  I was warned in the 1970s against that sort of thing happening, and so today we should warn our high-schoolers against the danger of both deepfakes and shallowfakes.  But after that, it's up to them to judge—and to vote.

Sources:  The Associated Press article about deepfakes and shallowfakes by Beatrice Dupuy and Barbara Ortutay, dated July 19,was carried by many news outlets, including the Longview (Texas) News-Journal at https://www.news-journal.com/ap/politics/deepfake-videos-pose-a-threat-but-dumbfakes-may-be-worse/article_20f82829-5abd-5e83-8456-2630fc4b097b.html.  The Aldrin-Sibrel incident is described in the Wikipedia article "Buzz Aldrin."

What Are the Rules of Cyberwarfare?

We are now well into the era of cyberwarfare—the use of computers and computer networks in military, terrorist, and diplomatic conflicts.  But to judge by the recent tiff between President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, neither the U. S. nor Russia has figured out exactly how to use these new weapons, or how to defend against them effectively.

Last July, Wikileaks unleashed a flood of embarrassing emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, leading to the resignation of that organization's chairwoman Debbie Wassermann Schultz and undoubtedly influencing the Presidential selection process, though to what degree it is impossible to say.  In December, the CIA announced that they were confident that Russian hackers were responsible for stealing the emails and giving them to Wikileaks.  And on Dec. 23, President Obama announced that he was retaliating for the hacks by sending home 35 Russian diplomats and taking other actions against the Russian diplomatic corps in the U. S.  After initial talk by Russian officials of retaliation against the retaliation, Russian President Vladimir Putin surprised many by saying he would suspend any actions against U. S. diplomats in Russia, at least until the Trump administration takes office. 

Retaliation against diplomats has been around ever since there have been diplomats.  Over the decades, countries have developed traditional ways of treating official representatives from foreign lands with policies such as diplomatic immunity from routine prosecution, the suspension of normal customs inspection for diplomatic materials, special diplomatic zones around embassies, and other perks.  But one reason for all these special privileges is that they can be revoked at any time. 

This writer is old enough to recall some of the many times that the old Soviet Union (USSR) engaged in these kinds of games with the U. S. on any pretext or sometimes no pretext at all.  It was all part of the Cold War chess game, and watched closely for indications that the Soviets might be wanting to warm up the war a little.  Everyone agrees that sending a diplomat packing is a lot better than throwing bombs, so while tensions are raised by such incidents, it's usually a sign that serious conflicts are not in the immediate offing.

Still, there are a couple of notable and disturbing aspects of the DNC hacks and their consequences.  One concerns the identity of the hackers, and the other concerns what constitutes a truly effective response to such attacks.

It took nearly six months for the CIA to be confident enough to announce publicly that Russians were in fact responsible.  In that aspect, hacking and other hard-to-trace cyberattacks resemble terrorism, in that the identity of the terrorists responsible for a given attack is usually not immediately known, and may not ever be discovered.  Although good detective and investigative work often uncovers the perpetrators eventually, the delay between the attack and the discovery of who did it allows for uncertainty to dominate the situation, leading to general confusion, controversy, and other problems that are usually exactly what the attacker wants to achieve in the enemy camp.  It's possible that the CIA made its announcement when it did not because it took all that long to figure out who did it, but for other diplomatic or political reasons.  Still, it's hard to fight back against an enemy if you don't know who he is.

Identifying the source of a cyberattack is only the first step in an effective response.  As in conventional warfare, one doesn't want to overreact, but on the other hand, just letting an enemy get away with anything isn't good either.  An important factor in these not-yet-open-warfare conflicts is how the public perceives them.  Both the U. S. and the Russian presidents do everything with an eye to their constituents, so things done in secret which have secret effects are not that useful.  Instead of using the hacked emails for their own purposes, whoever hacked them (probably the Russians) gave them maximum publicity, and to the extent that the DNC was hampered in its operations, the attack was a success. 

What's new and disturbing about this particular incident is that it represents a significant intrusion into the domestic electoral process by a foreign power which overtly favored a particular candidate—one who will take office on Jan. 20, barring unforeseen circumstances.  What makes the situation worse is that the President-elect does not seem to be all that troubled about it.  Four years in office is a long time, though, and it's likely that Trump and Putin will at some point fail to agree on something, after which it's anyone's guess what will happen.

Part of what makes it so hard to defend against cyberattacks is the global nature of the Internet environment—Moscow or Paris or Adelaide is just as close to my Internet connection as the neighbor down the street.  Traditional military defenses were geographically fixed and you could draw contours of safety within them—here, you have to be concerned about ground attacks, there you are subject to air bombings, and way back behind the front lines, there was almost nothing to worry about.  But cyberattacks can go anywhere there's an Internet connection, and the targets are often only as well-defended as the private organizations and their IT people can make them.  As we know, these defenses range from the almost impregnable to the nearly nonexistent, and so many attractive cyber-targets are almost defenseless against a concerted attack by well-resourced agents of a foreign power.

It's not clear that the best defense is a good offense either, especially when it's not immediately clear who is doing the attacking.  And when many thefts of data are not discovered until months or years after the damage is done, it's even harder to mount an effective response.

It looks like international cyberwarfare will muddle along in this confused state unless and until such a major attack occurs that we get serious about some sort of national defense policy against foreign cyberwarfare.  There are serious concerns being voiced these days about the hacking of power grids and other vital infrastructure systems such as air-traffic control and the domestic Internet itself.  Our best defense for these systems right now is that nobody has a strong reason to attack them, but that could change at any time.  And if it does, I just hope we're ready for what comes afterwards.

Sources:  I referred to a report on President Obama's retaliatory actions against Russia carried by CNN on Dec. 29 at http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/29/politics/russia-sanctions-announced-by-white-house/, and also a report on Putin's non-response at https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russia-plans-retaliation-and-serious-discomfortoverus-hacking-sanctions/2016/12/30/4efd3650-ce12-11e6-85cd-e66532e35a44_story.html.