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As 'Deep Fakes' Get More Difficult to Detect, They May Become a National Security Threat

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The House Intelligence Committee held a hearing Thursday to take a deep dive on "deep fakes" which some consider to be the next big threat to national security.

These so-called "deep fakes" are altered media clips that appear to be legitimate but are designed to disrupt and undermine political opponents or even other countries. 

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said deep fakes "enable malicious actors to foment chaos, division or crisis." These fake videos "have the capacity to disrupt entire campaigns, including that for the presidency," he continued. 

Committee members and experts pointed to a recent viral video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that had been edited to make her appear sluggish and raise questions about her mental state.

Danielle Citron, law professor at the University of Maryland, said, "I think the answer is it should have been taken down. We should have a default rule... platforms should have a default rule that if we're going to have impersonation or manipulation that do not reflect what we've done or said, then platforms should, once they've figured it out, take it down."

Experts say that standard should not apply in instances of satire or scientific research, rather where there is an intent to deceive for some sort of gain.  

It's an issue lawmakers continue to grapple with but have to do so carefully to avoid infringing on First Amendment rights.

The level of "deep fakes" that can be created by deep learning and artificial intelligence is getting harder and harder to detect. 

"When you look at an image or a video online, can you tell if it's been manipulated or not?" That's the central question posed by Dr. Matt Turek, the program manager for the Media Forensics program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

"The ability to detect whether an image or video has been manipulated may provide you some clue that maybe there's a disinformation campaign that's going on," said Turek. 

CBN News previously reported that faking pictures is not new, a portrait painter in 1865 stuck Abraham Lincoln's head on a southern Civil War politician's body. 

A famous 1902 image of former General of the US Army and later President Ulysses S. Grant is actually a composite of three other photographs. 

And Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's army of photo-retouchers removed an official from an image after the official was executed in the 1930s. 
 

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