It just pressures us to come up with ways to prove authenticity. Those ways definitely exist but are not common yet and we have courts and governments full of people with a poor grasp on technology. But basically it calls for chains of evidence that are cryptographically tamper proof. That's not a thing right now. But it's going to become a hard requirement when evidence can be fabricated, falsified, etc. It's also the key to countering fake news and a few other things.
People accepting everything at face value is not going to stay a thing when world+dog is going to abuse their new powers. Only fools would believe what they see after they've been fooled a few times and suffered the consequences.
Short term it's going to be a mess, but long term it's a good thing for us to figure this out and move on.
This is not a technical problem IMO. You can't cryptographically sign reality. There's always the analog hole[1].
It's a problem of trust within society. Look at many very mainstream conspiracy theories these days: there's ample proof that it's not true, but people want to believe so they'll believe.
You can't fix the lack of trust in society with cryptography.
I just went on a constructionist website I sometimes lurk when I'm bored, literally the first story I find is titled `The Age of "Credentialism" and "Experts" is over. Every Single Institution works against your interests'. You can't fix this mindset with maths.
Video is cryptographically signed? But what about the secret computers in the Pentagon's basement that run on Quantum CPUs using ancient alien technology found in the pyramids? They can certainly break ECC. Here, watch this Youtube video...
You can't sign reality, but people can sign statements.
If you see a video at a date D1 where you say Statement1, and cryptographically sign it with your key K, then at a later date someone can verify that at least you said you've watched an backed your statement.
In a way all of security relies on the physical safety of some kind of secret data. So you have the deniability of key compromise in any case.
If everything a president states publicly is signed with his key Kp, then:
1) If something controversial is published without signature, the president can say it's not standard procedure and a plausible forgery;
2) If the president publishes officially without a signature, the public can demand one so there's no later equivocation;
3) Anything that has been said can be verified in the future by checking the presidential signature.
In this case, the worst case is really a compromised key (although key scheduling should mitigate it), but most forgery cases of statements (and potentially documents, mandates, etc.) are eliminated.
In practice, it would be difficult to get your public figures to sign everything they say (and difficult to get them to accept this kind of potential auto-incrimination for the public good).
That doesn't work for adversarial recordings. No one will sign an embarrassing or damning video of themselves, and those are the cases where authenticity is the most important.
Your solution is technologically cool, but I think the current system of "was this published by a domain controlled by the office of the press secretary" is probably accomplishing this case well enough.
For adversarial recordings, I wonder if we could have a camera that instantly uploads a timestamp and hash of each video taken to a blockchain. This way, we could have videos that we know for a fact were recorded at the latest at a certain time. It would still be vulnerable for a fake video to be post dated, but never pre dated.
Seconding this. The fracture at the heart of our society is not rooted in unintelligence, or lack of education or access to facts. It's rooted in a lack of trust. The most rigorous science is only as good as the trust people place in those performing it (and the entire chain of reporting from there to its reception). Those links are being/have been broken. No amount of added rigor will fix that. I don't know what will.
I'd argue it's the opposite. We've relied too much on trust and promises and not enough on rigor and exactness. Most people aren't given facts, constraints and limitations until it's too late, if ever. What they're given are viewpoints with selective evidence and glaring omissions. It's remained a unsolved since the beginning of humanity. A solution to this problem is a rigorous self-proving system that wouldn't need one to convince another of the facts.
I don't want to live in a trustless society. What you describe sounds like a totalitarian dystopia to me.
I want escape hatches. I want plausible deniability. Facts in a vacuum are useless and can be used to propel all sorts of narratives. Facts without framing and contextualization aren't worth much. You can manipulate easily without technically lying, just by cherry picking facts that suit your agenda.
You need some amount of trust and solidarity if you want to live in a healthy society.
> Those links are being/have been broken. No amount of added rigor will fix that. I don't know what will.
The institutions could start telling the truth once in a while. Statements like "27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London" (BBC) and "Fiery but mostly peaceful protests" (CNN) with the city burning down in the background account for why trust in media is rapidly approaching zero. It makes it clear that the violence and devastation is just a curiosity to the upper-class elites that control these institutions, but normal people who actually have to live with aftermath are not amused.
Fauci is another huge contributor. First don't wear masks, they can actually hurt. Then you have to wear masks. Now wear two or three! But earlier he was ridiculing people who wore multiple masks. Along with all the knowingly false statements about how long lockdowns would last. Clearly Fauci should not be allowed to speak in public, but unfortunately the blast radius of his mistakes extends beyond him to the government and media institutions that defend him and amplified his misinformation.
I get that you're complaining about 'liberal' media downplaying disorderly and often dangerous events such as riots to suit a political agenda, but the converse is also true; if one relies on 'conservative' media then you'd think many major American cities are post-apocalyptic smoking holes in the ground.
My larger complaint was about rich people who don't care about the several dozen deaths, uncounted injuries, and billions of dollars of property damage caused by the riots because it doesn't affect their class. I don't watch conservative media, so I don't know anything about the portrayal of major American cities therein.
This is not a technical problem IMO. You can't cryptographically sign reality. There's always the analog hole
Reality has a pretty strong "hash" naturally built in. Even manipulated picture carries a huge amount of information that isn't changed or isn't changed as much as one thinks.
The manipulated pictures the motorcyclist uploaded still would give someone a good idea where and even when they were taken. That doesn't matter here but if you're making a more detailed argument, it's harder.
Just consider, "computer forensics" is a thing even though any single bit on the computer can be overwritten and "faked".
What is this analog hole of which you speak? Only nature delivers analog ;)
But nature doesn't create deep fakes - though not as the term is being used here. I would argue that nature has been making deep fakes for millions of years.
Anything that is created by CNN Deep Fake tech is delivered via computer - either using printer or with some sort of screen screen. Let's eliminate printers as nobody uses them anymore. What about screens? I smell a business opportunity.
I was recently watching The Brainwashing of My Dad. Rush Limbaugh made millions of dollars selling lies to the American public. At one point there is a video clip of him admitting that the truth of what he is saying on radio is irrelevant. It doesn't matter to him. He lays out the recipe for generating fear and uncertainty. Basically, if you say something loud enough and with enough confidence no one will stand in your way. Because, as fact checkers know, it takes considerable time to research a bullshit claim. By the time the research is done and published, the bullshitter has moved on and told an additional 20 lies. He also makes a statistical argument for how his business works. He doesn't need to hook every listener. But he does know that enough people will fall for his shtick.
The troubling aspect is that all of this bullshit is blending together. My dad watched Fox News. Now he's hooked on Youtube conspiracy garbage. I'd be terrified if he ever became a QAnon type. We're dealing with literal internet cults becoming a mainstream phenomenon. We're nowhere near equipped for the mess we, the technologists, have made. You have Alex Jones out there claiming that an elementary school shooting didn't happen. You think these guys are going to trust encryption? Or anything that their Youtube priest tells them is a "hoax"?
Education would be the answer. But education is at war with engagement algorithms and attention spans.
The goal is not necessarily to convince people of a particular claim, it's to levy so many claims and use the scrambling of media acting in good faith to vet those claims as an overloading mechanism to get regular people to tune out entirely.
Also known as 'flooding the zone'. Like many political tropes, this originates in team sports which in turn is an abstraction of war. It's an awful lot easier to understand the media landscape if you consider it as cultural warfare with ideas and tropes as territory, although this is hard to visualize in spatial terms.
The answer to this (and the accompanying tribalism that pervades public discourse nowadays) is often said to be education and critical thinking, but that requires years of investment and often-unwelcome external discipline to internalize and actuate; it's a statement of what we would like to have instead rather than an actionable solution to its own absence.
This is also helpful for gathering information to understand the dynamics and attractiveness of false information, even if no changing of mind can occur; think of it as the difference between carefully dismantling an unexploded munition in order to figure out how it works vs. a controlled explosion to minimize future risk at the expense of continued vulnerability.
Where conflict is unavoidable or deliberately fomented (eg people arguing in bad faith rather than sincerely believing falsehoods), an overtly hostile response imposes a cost on the aggressor, and when consistently and predictably applied it effectively alters the payoff matrix in an adversarial game: https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/
Many people are aware of Mutual Assured Destruction as a kind of nuclear diplomacy, where you are deterred from nuking me because I've made it very clear that if you do I will take you down with me, leading to a heavily armed but uneasy peace. There are also lesser-known concepts like Power Transition Theory (about how wars originate from weaker countries challenging stronger ones) and nowadays scholars of international relations tend to adhere to Hegemonic Stability Theory (one very powerful country plays Teacher/cop) or World System Theory (every dog has its day). Developing familiarity with the broad concepts of interstate conflict (without going too deep down any intellectual rabbit hole) can be helpful in modeling smaller scale political conflicts, divisions in civil society etc.
>People accepting everything at face value is not going to stay a thing when world+dog is going to abuse their new powers. Only fools would believe what they see after they've been fooled a few times and suffered the consequences
This seems overly optimistic, and requires people to themselves suffer unambiguously from the doctored evidence.
On an individual level, regular discovery of police and prosecutorial has not led widespread reform in those areas. And on a larger scale, even after things like the Gulf of Tonkin people largely accepted claims of WMD's in Iraq.
I don't see how you can cryptographically validate much more than "this was validated by this source before this time", which doesn't seem to solve the problem stated by the parent at all.
Maybe you could have some DRMish thing where the camera signs it with a "secret" key, but this would be terrible for various reasons and also likely broken very fast.
I don't think so. You can cryptographically sign anything much like how SSL works now. You'll have to rely on certificate authorities to assign these certs, but it works.
Videos should be cryptographically signed, and verified once online. You can spoof certs but you can't really fake the cert authority
But, signing some data with a certificate only indicates that a key belongs to a particular name. It doesn't tell you whether the person or organization with that name is trustworthy.
That's what I meant by "validated by this source". But unlike with CAs, where they're (meant to) just base issuance on the simple objectively testable criterion of whether you control the domain in question, an external authority cannot easily know whether a video represents real events, whatever that means.
Maybe a service or a public blockchain where you send a hash of a digital artefact which is signed with a time constrained key. The signed hash is attached to the digital artefact and you can check the hash on the blockchain or on the api's service.
A blockchain is more wasteful, but a service requires a leap of faith in the provider.
If you authenticate the video comes from a credible unrelated source, that would be different than if it came from a mysterious unknown source. Additionally if you have the chain of trust, you can interrogate every step manually for credibility and consistency.
The value of it is that the legwork only has to be done once, instead of requiring everyone to independently do it (which would basically turn every accusation of crime into a DDoS against the accused).
If you have cameras that sign their video feed with some id; editing software where an editor signs off on any edits, peopling handling/validating the content adding their signatures, etc. you build a chain of digitally signed content based evidence that you can follow all the way back to the original recording.
Then you can get people into court testifying whether they used a given piece of equipment to film something, edit something, etc. and you can guarantee that you are watching the exact output of that chain of recordings, edits, etc.
As I said, not a thing right now. But also not that technically hard to build. Right now we're just trusting witnesses that might be lying through their teeth without us knowing or being able to prove otherwise. Once we had such capability; anything else would be inadmissible in a court and no self respecting journalist would touch equipment without this capability. Why would they?
A deep fake would look plausible but lack this chain of evidence.
This doesn't seem significantly better than just having the organization providing a video sign it as "authentically theirs", in cases where that's possible; if you mean some sort of thing where editing software and cameras will sign things as "not tampered with", then this is effectively a DRM system and subject to the excitingly wide range of issues affecting that. This would not work for many situations, particularly the ones SamBam describes (not least due to the anonymity thing), as it is unlikely that there will conveniently be someone there with chain-of-trust-capable recording equipment and software.
Even if I don’t have the private key to sign the video nothing stops me from sending the processing element of the camera the same signals as the photo array. Even if you encrypted the connection between the processing elements and the photo array. A photosensitive array is already an exposed die so I could easily just set some needles on a few internal traces and again do the same thing.
There are people who still claim in public to believe that the US election was stolen.
Acceptance of evidence is socially constructed. If it's politically convenient to go along with the beliefs of your faction, and you're rewarded for saying increasingly ludicrous things in public, then people are going to do it.
Isn't this what Adobe is trying to do? [1] It was posted on HN a few times but never started a discussion that I saw. Personally, I'm scared of it although I can't put my finger on why.
Just because some opportunists did a few ICOs does not mean all crypto is bad. Without crypto there would be no online banking, or any form of digital security, secure logins, etc. Crypto is a useful tool. Blockchains are a tool. And so are digital signatures. If you combine those tools, you can do some useful things like creating tamper proof audit logs documenting where information came from all the way from the sensor to your eyeballs. It's just a chain of digital signatures.
I tried hard to avoid using the word block chain in the original comment to avoid exactly this kind of knee jerk response. But yes, kind of an obvious tool to use to record chains of evidence in a tamper proof way. Glad you jumped to that conclusion as well.
Contrary to the popular belief, not every block chain based thing has to be an investment scam. I don't think we need a separate coin for this; just a shared repository of truth and fact with full auditing. Blockchains are kind of designed to be that. If you know a better way, please provide it.
And just to pre-empt it, obviously my preferred flavor of block chain for this would be miner free proof of stake rather than proof of work.
You jest, but distributed publicly verifiable proof that a certain piece of information existed, and was cryptographically signed at a certain date and time, and has not since been modified, is basically the only thing blockchains are actually useful for. And that sounds much like what we need here.
Even then it's not required, because it's overly distributed. You only need one copy of the Merkle tree (+ backups as necessary); to verify it hasn't been changed you don't need everyone else to copy the whole thing, just random samples of it to verify it hasn't been rewritten recently.
People accepting everything at face value is not going to stay a thing when world+dog is going to abuse their new powers. Only fools would believe what they see after they've been fooled a few times and suffered the consequences.
Short term it's going to be a mess, but long term it's a good thing for us to figure this out and move on.