Videos You Cannot Believe In

On November 16^th, a Trump-appointed federal district court judge, Timothy J. Kelley, issued a temporary restraining order against the White House’s pulling the “hard” press pass (open access) from CNN reporter, Jim Acosta, for what Donald Trump labeled “rude” behavior at a November 7^th White House press conference. “The White House initially claimed that it was because [Acosta] put his hands on a staffer as she tried to grab a microphone from him. Acosta denied that, and video of the incident shows only that his hand inadvertently touched her arm as she tried to get the mic.

“In a filing on Wednesday [11/14], the Trump administration said they had a compelling reason to pull his pass — that he had disrupted the press event after refusing to yield the floor to another reporter.” Variety, November 16^th. Earlier, to bolster Trump’s position, a video showing the incident was provided by White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders as proof of Acosta’s rude disrespect for the President. It was the same video, the White House claimed, that showed the inadvertent touching noted above. The White House-sanctioned video went viral. Conservative America reinforced their outrage. Yet in the new video, Acosta’s move seemed intentional and violent, contradicting both CNN’s position and the earlier video. Why?

“In an interview with ‘Fox News Sunday’ host Chris Wallace, [Kellyanne Conway,] the White House counselor known for coining the term ‘alternative facts’ was trying to defend the administration’s decision to promote a video experts say was edited to make Acosta’s actions toward a White House intern seem more aggressive than they were. The video, which at first looks authentic, shows Acosta’s arm swiftly coming down on the arm of the young female aide who is trying to take the microphone from him. Missing from the seconds-long clip is Acosta saying, ‘Pardon me, ma’am,’ as he maintains a firm grip on the microphone and continues peppering Trump with questions.

“Wallace asked Conway on Sunday about the White House’s responses to what he described as the ‘now infamous confrontation’ that disrupted Trump’s post-midterms news conference. Wallace specifically made reference to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders tweeting the video that was ‘clearly altered to make it look like it was more of a physical confrontation’ and the decision to yank Acosta’s White House press credentials… [Conway admitted to Wallace:] ‘That’s not altered. That’s sped up. They do it all the time in sports.’” Washington Post, November 12^th. Wow! Speeding up a video of petting a kitten would seem violent if sped up!

Attorney Eric J. Sinrod’s article, The Danger of Manipulated Videos, reproduced in the November 16^th Lexology.com responded to the above incident with an alarming, notably extreme, scenario: “Imagine that a doctored video goes viral that shows a major world leader announcing the he immediately intends to have his country deploy nuclear weapons to strike another country. The world leader actually did not say that, but his moving facial image was altered and words were added sounding in his voice to make the fake attack announcement.

“Once this video goes viral, it is picked up by the leader of the country supposedly facing imminent nuclear attack. This second world leader then actually launches his weapons in counter-attack, before they might be taken out by the perceived incoming nuclear weapons.

“Hopefully, steps would be taken to verify the authenticity of the originally threatened attack, so that the crisis could be averted once it is learned the video has been doctored and that the first world leader actually did not intend an attack. However, it is possible that when time is of the essence, cooler minds might not prevail. Indeed, what if the hypothetical crisis were compounded by manipulated videos showing both of these world leaders threatening each other’s countries with imminent attack? It would be even more difficult to unravel the situation and impose calm on chaos…

“Yet technology has advanced to the point that videos can be doctored in terms of words spoken or physical actions taken to the point that those videos can look quite authentic.” Indeed, in my May 24^th blog, I Have Absolute Proof!, I addressed the evolving ability for technology to so mimic reality that truth is completely replaced by highly-credible fiction.

“Franklin Foer, writing for the May 18^th issue of The Atlantic, provides a coarse example of this new technological phenomenon: ‘In a dank corner of the internet, it is possible to find actresses from Game of Thrones or Harry Potter engaged in all manner of sex acts. Or at least to the world the carnal figures look like those actresses, and the faces in the videos are indeed their own. Everything south of the neck, however, belongs to different women. An artificial intelligence has almost seamlessly stitched the familiar visages into pornographic scenes, one face swapped for another. The genre is one of the cruelest, most invasive forms of identity theft invented in the internet era. At the core of the cruelty is the acuity of the technology: A casual observer can’t easily detect the hoax.

“‘This development, which has been the subject of much hand-wringing in the tech press, is the work of a programmer who goes by the nom de hack ‘deepfakes.’ And it is merely a beta version of a much more ambitious project. One of deepfakes’s compatriots told Vice’s Motherboard site in January that he intends to democratize this work. He wants to refine the process, further automating it, which would allow anyone to transpose the disembodied head of a crush or an ex or a co-worker into an extant pornographic clip with just a few simple steps. No technical knowledge would be required. And because academic and commercial labs are developing even more-sophisticated tools for non-pornographic purposes—algorithms that map facial expressions and mimic voices with precision—the sordid fakes will soon acquire even greater verisimilitude… In this respect, the rise of deepfakes is the culmination of the internet’s history to date—and probably only a low-grade version of what’s to come…

“‘But the problem isn’t just the proliferation of falsehoods. Fabricated videos will create new and understandable suspicions about everything we watch. Politicians and publicists will exploit those doubts. When captured in a moment of wrongdoing, a culprit will simply declare the visual evidence a malicious concoction.’” And you know that technology will continue to evolve towards increasingly credible imaging.

The real challenge will be how a First-Amendment-Protected-American-Democracy can effectively negate the democracy-destroying impact of speech and press reports that are depicted as real but are total fabrications. It gets worse when such offenses are so numerous as to defy tracking, verification and control.

In an administration build on falsehoods, where our very leadership believes that releasing “false facts” and manipulation are legitimate governmental tools, what happens to democracy? The conundrum is particularly pronounced in democracy’s support of First Amendment free speech versus a government’s willingness to lie to its constituency to maintain and grow its power. Democracy is fragile, and proclivity towards autocracy and plutocracy is ruthless.

I’m Peter Dekom, and global democracy has not faced this level of peril since the early 19^th century.