Fake Deep Fake
May 11, 2024 11:42 AM Subscribe
The Guardian (2021): "Mother charged with deepfake plot against daughter's cheerleading rivals". The Guardian (2024):
"She was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and condemned. The problem? Nothing was fake after all"
When The Daily Dot, a tech news website, looked into the deepfake claims in May 2021, and asked Reiss about the methods he had used to establish that the videos had been digitally altered, he admitted he had relied on his “naked eye”, adding, “We hope Mrs Spone during the course of the preliminary hearing or trial will enlighten us as far as what her source and intent was.”
These would be the last public comments Reiss made about the case. On 26 May 2021 he was arrested on suspicion of possessing images of child sexual abuse. Two images had been uploaded to his Gmail account, and detectives had traced them to his IP address. When they raided his home and seized his electronic devices, they found more than 1,700 images and videos depicting children, including 84 of toddlers and infants. Reiss pleaded guilty in March 2022, and was later sentenced to 11 and a half to 23 months in jail. To use Weintraub’s language, if anyone was “preying on juveniles”, it was the police officer who led the investigation.
Consider the likelihood that investigations are riddled with abusive creeps also.
posted by Artw at 12:00 PM on May 11 [18 favorites]
These would be the last public comments Reiss made about the case. On 26 May 2021 he was arrested on suspicion of possessing images of child sexual abuse. Two images had been uploaded to his Gmail account, and detectives had traced them to his IP address. When they raided his home and seized his electronic devices, they found more than 1,700 images and videos depicting children, including 84 of toddlers and infants. Reiss pleaded guilty in March 2022, and was later sentenced to 11 and a half to 23 months in jail. To use Weintraub’s language, if anyone was “preying on juveniles”, it was the police officer who led the investigation.
Consider the likelihood that investigations are riddled with abusive creeps also.
posted by Artw at 12:00 PM on May 11 [18 favorites]
That is a shorter sentence than I would have expected for having that much illegal imagery.
posted by Dip Flash at 12:06 PM on May 11 [5 favorites]
posted by Dip Flash at 12:06 PM on May 11 [5 favorites]
i have been investigating metadata, digital tool marks, and the buried ephemera from electronic files for 20 years now. it's rarely a smoking gun, and should mostly be considered circumstantial at best, even when they say "this deepfake brought to you by rye bread".
most tool markings are regularly altered by their users specifically to confuse attribution. you usually need another set of coordinates from some external system (ideally the devices used to make the files, or physical records of a person using a device) to make the connection between person, metadata, and device.
any investigator making an inculpatory conclusion should be able to point to the evidence connecting all three (evidence of person usig device, device making file, person making file with device), and they should all be coherent. accept nothing less. everything else is conjecture and hand-waving.
posted by rye bread at 12:50 PM on May 11 [12 favorites]
most tool markings are regularly altered by their users specifically to confuse attribution. you usually need another set of coordinates from some external system (ideally the devices used to make the files, or physical records of a person using a device) to make the connection between person, metadata, and device.
any investigator making an inculpatory conclusion should be able to point to the evidence connecting all three (evidence of person usig device, device making file, person making file with device), and they should all be coherent. accept nothing less. everything else is conjecture and hand-waving.
posted by rye bread at 12:50 PM on May 11 [12 favorites]
The cheer squad that supposedly had the deepfakes made about them, such as
It might be a little less obvious than a College Bowl team calling themselves 'The Master Debaters', but tell me that team wasn’t trying to evoke 'The Victory Vapers' in the minds of their peers and having a lot of fun pulling the wool over naïve adult eyes.
posted by jamjam at 1:36 PM on May 11 [4 favorites]
Madi Hime is taking a deep drag on a blue vape in the video, her eyes shut, her face flushed with pleasure. The 16-year-old exhales with her head thrown back, collapsing into laughter that causes smoke to billow out of her mouth. The clip is grainy and shaky – as if shot in low light by someone who had zoomed in on Madi’s face – but it was damning. Madi was a cheerleader with the Victory Vipers, a highly competitive “all-star” squad based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Vipers had a strict code of conduct; being caught partying and vaping could have got her thrown out of the team. And in July 2020, an anonymous person sent the incriminating video directly to Madi’s coaches.was called 'The Victory Vipers'.
It might be a little less obvious than a College Bowl team calling themselves 'The Master Debaters', but tell me that team wasn’t trying to evoke 'The Victory Vapers' in the minds of their peers and having a lot of fun pulling the wool over naïve adult eyes.
posted by jamjam at 1:36 PM on May 11 [4 favorites]
That is a shorter sentence than I would have expected for having that much illegal imagery.
He's a cop, it's unfortunately surprising that he got even that much. In fact, looking up the case, he only had to serve eight months before he got work release.
posted by tavella at 1:39 PM on May 11 [6 favorites]
He's a cop, it's unfortunately surprising that he got even that much. In fact, looking up the case, he only had to serve eight months before he got work release.
posted by tavella at 1:39 PM on May 11 [6 favorites]
I feel bad for some prosecutors in these situations. They're not technically trained; they have to rely on law enforcement "experts" that they usually don't choose. The quality of the IT/data forensics people doing government work can, unfortunately, be very low (personal experience). It's very hard to say, "I'm not going to prosecute this particular, high-visibility case because I don't, in general, trust my colleagues/contractors retained by the jurisdiction to find their noses with both hands, much less deal with new and challenging technical problems, and so I have no confidence in their 'evidence.'"
(Note that there is a subset of prosecutors who generally don't give a damn and are happy to throw any garbage evidence at whoever they've decided is guilty, and to hell with those guys, but this is far from all of them.)
posted by praemunire at 1:50 PM on May 11
(Note that there is a subset of prosecutors who generally don't give a damn and are happy to throw any garbage evidence at whoever they've decided is guilty, and to hell with those guys, but this is far from all of them.)
posted by praemunire at 1:50 PM on May 11
It's very hard to say, I'm not going to prosecute this particular, high-visibility case . . .
It became a high profile case because Weintraub chose to hold a press conference and emphasize the sensationlistic parts of it. He went on Good Morning America and the Today Show. The actual prosecution took place after the lead investigator was arrested for pornographic video images.
He was not railroaded into doing anything. And beyond that poor judgment to prosecute in the first place, the collateral damage to the people he prosecuted was high because of the way he chose to publicize it.
posted by mark k at 2:08 PM on May 11 [7 favorites]
It became a high profile case because Weintraub chose to hold a press conference and emphasize the sensationlistic parts of it. He went on Good Morning America and the Today Show. The actual prosecution took place after the lead investigator was arrested for pornographic video images.
He was not railroaded into doing anything. And beyond that poor judgment to prosecute in the first place, the collateral damage to the people he prosecuted was high because of the way he chose to publicize it.
posted by mark k at 2:08 PM on May 11 [7 favorites]
"I feel bad for some prosecutors in these situations." I wonder why I phrased it like that, as opposed to "I feel bad for this prosecutor in this case." A mystery for the ages, I guess.
If you've never had to rely at work on colleagues who are not reliable but whom you can't avoid having to use, you've led a blessed existence. That's all I'll say.
posted by praemunire at 2:28 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]
If you've never had to rely at work on colleagues who are not reliable but whom you can't avoid having to use, you've led a blessed existence. That's all I'll say.
posted by praemunire at 2:28 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]
It might be a little less obvious than a College Bowl team calling themselves 'The Master Debaters', but tell me that team wasn’t trying to evoke 'The Victory Vapers' in the minds of their peers and having a lot of fun pulling the wool over naïve adult eyes.
The Viper/Vaper pun is more likely, but "viper" was also a term used in 1920s/1930s jazz circles to refer to a pot smoker, as popularized by the 1927 jazz recording by Rosetta Howard & the Harlem Hamfats, If You're A Viper.
posted by jonp72 at 2:49 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]
The Viper/Vaper pun is more likely, but "viper" was also a term used in 1920s/1930s jazz circles to refer to a pot smoker, as popularized by the 1927 jazz recording by Rosetta Howard & the Harlem Hamfats, If You're A Viper.
posted by jonp72 at 2:49 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]
tell me that team wasn’t trying to evoke 'The Victory Vapers'
The Victory Vipers is the name of the cheerleading business that was created in 2013 (by adults) when the kids in this story would have been something like 8 or 9 years old. Now I can't speak to the cofounders' feelings on vaping per se (although it's pointed out that such behavior was enough to get one booted from the team), and certainly 2013 was a time when vaping was already popular so I guess it's possible they wanted to wink at 'Victory Vapers' but uh... but that's probably a weird choice of name inspiration by adults looking to get parents of children/teens to join their cheerleading squad.
posted by axiom at 2:49 PM on May 11 [1 favorite]
The Victory Vipers is the name of the cheerleading business that was created in 2013 (by adults) when the kids in this story would have been something like 8 or 9 years old. Now I can't speak to the cofounders' feelings on vaping per se (although it's pointed out that such behavior was enough to get one booted from the team), and certainly 2013 was a time when vaping was already popular so I guess it's possible they wanted to wink at 'Victory Vapers' but uh... but that's probably a weird choice of name inspiration by adults looking to get parents of children/teens to join their cheerleading squad.
posted by axiom at 2:49 PM on May 11 [1 favorite]
Recently I've been giving the side-eye to that story about the teacher who allegedly framed his school principal with deepfaked racist comments -- according to the police report:
People are rightfully worried about using these tools to spread fake slander, but it's equally possible to use it to claim real footage is fake, or to accuse someone of faking who's actually telling the truth. (Not saying that happened here, just that the police account is questionable).
posted by Rhaomi at 3:22 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]
Detectives allege that Darien used his Large Language Models, such as OpenAI and Bing chat, to create the recording. The charging document claimed that Darien has a paid OpenAI account, which gives users more features than the free version.I'm 100% certain that you can't make audio with OpenAI or Bing, only text and images (audio and video are possible but in *extremely* limited access right now).
People are rightfully worried about using these tools to spread fake slander, but it's equally possible to use it to claim real footage is fake, or to accuse someone of faking who's actually telling the truth. (Not saying that happened here, just that the police account is questionable).
posted by Rhaomi at 3:22 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]
People are rightfully worried about using these tools to spread fake slander, but it's equally possible to use it to claim real footage is fake, or to accuse someone of faking who's actually telling the truth.
Yes, ultimately the point is to destabilize the truth altogether.
posted by praemunire at 3:36 PM on May 11 [4 favorites]
Yes, ultimately the point is to destabilize the truth altogether.
posted by praemunire at 3:36 PM on May 11 [4 favorites]
The crazy part to me is that the big deal that started all this was about 16 year old kids vaping and posting party shots online. I and everyone I knew was doing much worse stuff when we were teens and the general normie parenting attitude of the time was it's all good as long as you're not dying or killing someone and you stayed away from cocaine and heroin. It feels like something major has been left out of the story like perhaps a megachurch lurking in the background.
It's like a modern version of Footloose but without a good ending.
posted by srboisvert at 3:48 PM on May 11 [5 favorites]
It's like a modern version of Footloose but without a good ending.
posted by srboisvert at 3:48 PM on May 11 [5 favorites]
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