A recent deepfake video of Tom Cruise has some analysts wondering if such technology has gotten so good that a deepfake video of a world leader could possibly lead to an inadvertent war. Below is an excerpt from one in depth article on the subject that was recently published by ABC Australia. Let me know in the comments below what you think – could this potentially threaten world peace and security or will societies be able to sufficiently rein in this technology in the near future?

By Mark Corcoran and Matt Henry, ABC Australia, 6/24/21

Weaponising deepfakes

It’s a possibility that keeps former CIA officer and disinformation specialist Matt Ferraro up at night.

When deepfake Tom started doing the rounds in Washington DC’s national security and intelligence community, some feared a dystopian future had taken one giant leap closer. Matt was one of them.

“I think that ‘terror’ is probably not too strong a word,” says Ferraro, who worked for America’s top spymaster, the director of National Intelligence, during the Bush and Obama administrations. 

“It’s because they realise how dangerous [deepfakes] are. It does seem like it’s really going to be a fundamental challenge to the information environment.”

When Ferraro started writing about deepfakes two years ago, most were easily detected by the naked eye. But that has changed dramatically in the past 18 months, he says. Today’s deepfakes have become “radically good” and now pose an imminent risk to the political system.

Early deepfakes, such as filmmaker and actor Jordan Peele’s 2018 Obama video — in which a synthesised likeness of the former president calls his successor a “total and complete dipshit” and then signs off with the straight-faced salutation “stay woke, bitches” — highlighted the potential for deepfakes to sow political chaos. But the visual sophistication was lacking, Ferraro says.

“It was mostly old video of Barack Obama with only his lips moving. You could tell that was fake. Now with the Tom Cruise deepfakes, it’s getting harder and harder”.

The spectre of a deepfaked political leader has already arisen in Africa, where a video of Gabon’s reclusive president looking odd triggered widespread allegations it was a deepfake. A week later the military attempted a coup.

In the lead-up to the 2020 US presidential election, deepfake parody TV commercials of Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin were commissioned by non-profit organisation RepresentUs to warn about the fragility of democracy. But RepresentUs says American TV networks refused to run the videos as they were too realistic.

For Ferraro, the nightmare scenario would be a deepfake video of US President Joe Biden declaring war on North Korea, potentially released at a time of heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula, with hackers posting the video on the White House Twitter account. Ferraro suggests such a video could create mass confusion in a matter of minutes, potentially triggering conflict and even casualties before it could be debunked.

“If the North Koreans are 80 per cent sure it’s him — maybe only 20 per cent sure it’s him — are they willing to just sit back and take a missile strike that will end their regime? Probably not.”

If one person with a computer and an internet connection can make a convincing Tom Cruise, Ferraro fears the risks the technology could pose in the hands of well-resourced actors.

Read full article here.

“The great curse of our press in the West is willingness to accept the official narrative. So many people in the American press who write about the world are merely stenographers.” – Stephen Kinzer, author, columnist for Boston Globe and former correspondent for New York Times.

Bartlett’s write-up based on her interview with Kinzer is available here.

After a summit that didn’t seem to offer much of substance a couple of weeks ago, I was hoping that maybe at least these sorts of vindictive and counterproductive stunts would be dialed back, if nothing else. But just days after the summit, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced that another round of sanctions regarding Alexey Navalny would be forthcoming against Russia. Now, earlier this week, the State Department issued an advisory warning Americans not to travel to Russia for any reason. The advisory stated that Americans risked possible unjust imprisonment, terrorism, and all manner of horrible actions that could befall them if they visited that vast hellacious land. I’m surprised the advisory didn’t include a warning about something my mom’s former neighbor said he heard about in Russia: that there is a trapdoor you open that leads into hell somewhere in the country.

By Marcy Winograd & Medea Benjamin, Responsible Statecraft, 5/26/21

Democrats might control the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government right now, but a small Republican-dominated Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) Coalition exercises outsized influence in a frightening campaign for nuclear rearmament. 

The coalition, comprising six senators from states that house, develop, or test underground land-based nuclear weapons, is pushing a wasteful and dangerous $1.7 trillion, decades-long plan to produce new nuclear weapons, some with warheads 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

While the 1980s witnessed the nuclear freeze and a mass movement to demand nuclear disarmament between the U.S. and Soviet Union, the 1990s gave birth to the missile caucus, the Congressional engine careening the U.S. into a renewed nuclear arms race.

All but one of the members of this caucus is a Republican from a deep red state — including North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and South Dakota — that didn’t vote for Joe Biden. Members of the Senate ICBM Coalition are Co-Chairs John Hoeven (R-N.D.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.); John Barrasso (R-Wyo.); Steve Daines (R-Mont); Mike Lee (R-Utah); and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.).

The lone Democrat, Tester, a third-generation farmer and former elementary school music teacher, wields a critical gavel as Chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, a committee that will write the appropriations bill for military expenditures. Tester told the D.C.-based Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance this year that he was committed to keeping new nuclear weapons production “on track.”

Read the full article here.