Russia's SVR Rigs Slovakian Election

Deep fakes aren't coming, they're already HERE.

A deep fake of a Slovakian politician Michal Šimečka influenced their recent election. It came out concurrent with an SVR press release and the outcome benefited Russia.

The United States is going to face a tsunami of this sort of thing

• 1st Amendment protections for political speech make it almost impossible to punish anyone trafficking deep fakes.

• The anti-social media companies most likely to host problematic material - Facebook and Twitter - are at best disinclined to act against such things.

• AI generated audio, stills, and video sufficient to engage in such schemes are within reach for prices similar to typical individual political donations.

The only hard and fast technical solution I can envision involves audio/video notarization using some sort of blockchain solution. Things like this exist for other types of documents, but I’ve yet to observe an A/V authentication scheme done in that manner.

That particular video was attributed to the SVR. Here’s a longer piece on the activities of the GRU’s Unit 29155, a larger, well characterized problem. I bookmarked this several days ago but haven’t had a chance to digest it yet, as I’m a trifle busy IRL.

So I’m going to watch this. Then I expect I’m going to have to do a bunch of background reading.

And then maybe I’ll settle in for another viewing of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I love the 2011 version with Gary Oldman and John Hurt, but the entire 1979 BBC Miniseries is readily available. This IS what our world has become, a second great spy game is afoot, only this time participation is democratized by the very network we designed to survive a nuclear war.