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Clearly forged video footage was submitted as evidence recently regarding an international crime investigation. The forgery was detected because it not smoothly done. But that is changing. So while the countries involved might seem out of the way, recent news about algorithm-enhanced falsified video footage and the social and legal repercussions of realistic but completely fabricated videos make this kind of a warning shot for the admissibility of recordings in general.
Regarding the particular case in question and the forged video, YLE reports:
Aliganyira said that local police were using doctored footage which contained "insertions, removal of images, creating someone to look like [the victim] yet it wasn't him."
Earlier, The Daily Monitor had reported on the footage.
The Internal Security Organisation (ISO) on Tuesday said the footage that is currently in the hands of security and intelligence agencies on the death of the Finnish national who died at Pearl of Hotel on February 6, in Kampala was manipulated.
Already, realistic voice forgery can be done affordably. Soon video capabilities will be realistic enough to cause real difficulties. Then investigations will depend even more so on advanced forensics, if audio and video are even still admissible. Realistic forgeries also allow real snakes to stir up denials and long delays when real evidence is produced by asserting that it is "fake news".
Sources :
Fake video? New twist in case of Finnish businessman's death in Uganda. .
CCTV footage of Kampala hotel where Finnish businessman died was doctored, says ISO. Daily Monitor.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday March 10 2018, @02:41PM (13 children)
Ok, I expect clueless journos to sensationalize... but come on now, I don't believe any of the S/N submitters or editors will be granted any prize for fiction prose or scifi, at least not based on the stories pushed on the front page of S/N.
Reading the linkoes in TFA related to the case (shudders), you'll see that none of then suggest the inserted passages are generated algorithmically.
Where those speculative twists of "realistic voice forgery" (no sound on the footage) and "video capabilities will be realistic enough to cause real difficulties" come from? Certainly, not from Uganda!
The Ugandan "Daily monitor"
It seems to me like a forgery using low tech mean, possibly - photo-realistic hair [khanacademy.org] is 2012 technology.
---
The yle.fi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Saturday March 10 2018, @02:58PM (12 children)
Correct. None of the changes talked about in the current case was generated algorithmically. That's one of the reasons why it was detected. The thing to note is that someone(s) tried to pull off a forgery anyway. The stakes are high enough in this case that someone tried a long shot. When they get better tools later this year and still better tools next year, and even better the year after that, the forgeries will get harder to spot and probably much more common. So similar cases will more likely to temp crooks into forging video or audio. Forensics will probably still be able to discern real from fabricated recordings but if it is good enough to avoid suspicion and thus the attention of a forensics team then it is good enough to not matter.
Because forgery is getting easier and easier by the month, eventually there will be a crossover point at which it'll be very difficult to detect. The time to figure out what to do about that is coming up soon and this attempt shows that the threat is not theoretical.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 10 2018, @04:46PM (1 child)
Have each security camera calculate a cryptographic hash of each frame it records in real time, and immediately publish it to a public repository that can be read by anyone, with several copies being stored by several independent organizations. That would make tampering the evidence much harder, as you'd have to doctor the images right as they are taken; any later addition would make the image hashes not agree with those in the public archives.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 11 2018, @08:15AM
What!? A sensible use of blockchain tech?!
What is the world coming to, that this kind of sane idea would come out on soyle-oh right, https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/01/16/1217213 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday March 11 2018, @01:20AM (9 children)
You mean: this is not a piece of news, it's speculation. Maybe plausible speculation, but speculation nevertheless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday March 11 2018, @06:07AM (7 children)
Two pieces of news pointing a direction.
Most people can see a thrown object and calculate where it will be in a moment based on where it started, how fast it launched in a particular direction, and the rate of change based on several vectors. Surprisingly most people can't do that even with a small amount of other data, not even plotting to points and drawing a line as in linear regression. Tracking first and second derivatives seems to be off the table. (Can't say about the upcoming tablet-raised generation though. They're probably even worse. Word is they aren't coordinated enough to even hold crayons or pencils)
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday March 11 2018, @07:05AM (6 children)
Mate, come on.
Hand-writing/signature forgery is nothing new, yet didn't plunge the justice into chaos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday March 11 2018, @07:42AM (5 children)
Yes, neither hand-writing nor signature forgery are new. You have a point and there is a long-established whole, called diplomatics, dedicated to the study of documents and assessing authenticity or lack thereof. However, with what has been seen in the last decades, level heads are not prevailing when computers become involved. it is enough to append "... with a computer" to just about anything all sense of proportion gets thrown out the window. It may or may not affect evidence proper. You say it won't. I say it might. I say also that it will greatly facilitate trial by social media.
But, yeah it's too early to tell for sure though I see it heading in a particular direction clearly enough that I'm convinced for now.
I'm not even a little confident that rational thought will prevail in the matter of forged video and audio evidence. Anything even remotely about computers, like what happened to Steve Jackson Games [sjgames.com] just because of their cyberpunk modules gets treated irrationally. Even the infamous social engineer, Kevin Mitnick, had the full force of his government descend on him "because computers".
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Sunday March 11 2018, @08:52AM (3 children)
Speaking of "signature" and "on a computer", cryptographic signatures are easy to compute and very hard to forge.
It's a small technical matter to equip the cameras with chips to compute and stamp every frame with a crypto signature and require, for a trusted recording chain, the camera and the recorder to be operated by two separate independent orgs (anything else being not trusted in justice). Perhaps "the cloud" may have some good uses.
The considerations above can be traced to "what makes photos/videos captured by mobile devices admissible as evidence?" [attorney-myers.com] (relevance and authenticity). In the present, the GPS coordinates, time-of-day, the details of receiving/publishing the clip on youtube/facebook etc, lend a photo/video enough credibility for authenticating it - mainly because they are handled by independent parties or by means outside the control of the operator
To my mind, it doesn't matter if it becomes easier to fabricate the visual part of it as long as the authenticity of it goes beyond resemblance (i.e. it looks like that person) and authenticity is very hard to fabricate - crypto means are quite good for this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday March 11 2018, @10:05AM (2 children)
I'll leave that to others. It probably needs some months of dedicated thought to come up with several possible solutions that could possible withstand the first round of pre-peer review. Any hash functon speedy enough to run real time, frame-by-frame in an affordable camera is probably weak enough to allow collisions when set upon by real hardware.
... with a crypto signature and require, for a trusted recording chain ...
Hmm. That appears you are saying "blockchain" even you do have a lot of words there to try to hide it. I assume the standard rules of order apply here. Gan bei.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday March 11 2018, @11:24AM
Addressing the prices, Field-programmable gate array [wikipedia.org]
$27 [digikey.com] at retail price. In ASIC implementation, probably in the <$10 range per chip for a 256bit signature, I'm quite tempted to say in the $1 range more likely than $10 range
Besides the collisions aren't as relevant for signatures as you may think: to insert a replacement that signature-collides with the original frame and does show something visually recognizable (instead of just visual noise) is computational expensive. Even more so if you want a substitute frame that needs to show a person against the same background but doing something else. Do it for every frame for some minutes of footage and the expense for an attacker becomes prohibitive
(remember, there's no absolute security, it is only a game of "with cheap means, make the would-be attack too expensive to worth being carried").
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday March 11 2018, @11:32AM
No, there's nothing in what I said that has any touch-point with "blockchain".
I said "trusted recording chain" in the sense of: camera (e.g. mobile device), transmission (e.g. mobile comms provider), storage (e.g. Apple cloud, Facebook, youtube, etc) - all of them keep a trace of the interaction and all of them are controlled by different/independent entities - thus the corroboration between the traces left in each part of the chain contribute to the authenticity of the recording.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday March 11 2018, @09:28AM
You have a point here, though.
But even if this happens and many may suffer because of it, the humans will learn to discern between what matters and what not, what you can trust and what is garbage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday March 11 2018, @01:01PM
It's not video material, but it is a high-stakes forgery, Japan PM Shinzo Abe and finance minister face mounting pressure over doctored documents in school scandal [scmp.com].
However, as of yet it is not fully confirmed and the report is expected tomorrow.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.