



published by the MIT Technology Review in July 1, 2000, provides impressive information about technological developments that would permit someone to manipulate real-time videos. An article under the title Lying With Pixels published by the MIT Technology Review in July 1, 2000, provides impressive information about technological developments that would permit someone to manipulate real-time videos.





It is worth reading the whole article, but we picked the most interesting points below:





Last year, Steven Livingston, professor of political communication at George Washington University, astonished attendees at a conference on the geopolitical pros and cons of satellite imagery. He didn’t produce evidence of new military mobilizations or global pandemics. Instead, he showed a video of figure skater Katarina Witt during a 1998 skating competition.





In the clip, Witt gracefully plies the ice for about 20 seconds. Then came what is perhaps one of the most unusual sports replays ever seen. The background was the same, the camera movements were the same. In fact, the image was identical to the original in all ways except for a rather important one: Witt had disappeared, along with all signs of her, such as shadows or plumes of ice flying from her skates. In their place was exactly what you would expect if Witt had never been there to begin with-the ice, the walls of the rink and the crowd.





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What sets the Witt demo apart-way apart-is that the technology used to “virtually delete” the skater can now be applied in real time, live, even as a camera records a scene and instantly broadcasts it to viewers. In the fraction of a second between video frames, any person or object moving in the foreground can be edited out, and objects that aren’t there can be edited in and made to look real. “Pixel plasticity,” Livingston calls it. The implication for those at the satellite imagery conference was sobering: Pictures from orbit may not necessarily be what the satellite’s electronic camera actually recorded.





But the ramifications of this new technology reach beyond satellite imagery. As live electronic manipulation becomes practical, the credibility of all video will become just as suspect as Soviet Cold War photos. The problem stems from the nature of modern video. Live or not, it is made of pixels, and as Livingston says, pixels can be changed.





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A team of engineers from Sarnoff Corp. in Princeton, N.J., flew to the Coalition Allied Operations Center of NATO’s Operation Allied Force in Vicenza, Italy. Their mission: transform their experimental video processing technology into an operational tool for rapidly locating and targeting Serbian military vehicles in Kosovo. The project was dubbed TIGER, for “targeting by image georegistration.” [...] Compared to PVI’s job, the military’s technical task was more difficult-and the stakes were much higher. Instead of altering a football broadcast, the TIGER team manipulated a live video feed from a Predator, an unmanned reconnaissance craft flying some 450 meters above Kosovo battlefields. Rather than superimposing virtual lines or ads into sports settings, the task was to overlay, in real time, “georegistered” images of Kosovo onto the corresponding scenes streaming in live from the Predator’s video camera. The terrain images had been previously captured with aerial photography and digitally stored. The TIGER system, which automatically detected moving objects against the background, could almost instantly feed to the targeting officers the coordinates for any piece of Serbian hardware in the Predator’s view. This was quite a technical feat, since the Predator was moving and its angle of view was constantly changing, yet those views had to be electronically aligned and registered with the stored imagery in less than one-thirtieth of a second (to match the frame rate of video recording).





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A demo tape supplied by PVI bolsters the point in the prosaic setting of a suburban parking lot. The scene appears ordinary except for a disturbing feature: Amidst the SUVs and minivans are several parked tanks and one armored behemoth rolling incongruously along. Imagine a tape of virtual Pakistani tanks rolling over the border into India pitched to news outlets as authentic, and you get a feel for the kind of trouble that deceptive imagery could stir up.





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Deleting people or objects from live video, or inserting prerecorded people or objects into live scenes, is only the beginning of the deceptions becoming possible. Pretty much any piece of video that has ever been recorded is becoming clip art that producers can digitally sculpt into the story they want to tell, according to Eric Haseltine, senior vice president for R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale, Calif.





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“ The CNN effect is real,” says James Currie, professor of political science at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington. “Every office you go into at the Pentagon has CNN on.” And that means, he says, that a government, terrorist or advocacy group could set geopolitical events in motion on the strength of a few hours’ worth of credibility achieved by distributing a snippet of well-doctored video.





With experience as an army reservist, as a staffer with a top-secret clearance on the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, and as a legislative liaison for the Secretary of the Army, Currie has seen governmental decision-making and politicking up close. He is convinced that real-time video manipulation will be, or already is, in the hands of the military and intelligence communities. And while he has no evidence yet that any government or nongovernment organization has deployed video manipulation techniques, real-time or not, for political or military purposes, he has no problem conjuring up disinformation scenarios. For example, he says, consider the impact of a fabricated video that seemed to show Saddam Hussein “pouring himself a Scotch and taking a big drink of it. You could run it on Middle Eastern television and it would totally undermine his credibility with Islamic audiences.”









Note that the article was written more than a year before the 9/11 attacks, therefore, the technology of real-time video manipulation was already there, before the 9/11 events, if that means something.





The paper clearly proves why you should not believe even real-time 'evidence' produced by the mainstream media to justify US military interventions.





As has been pointed out recently through the article The spaghetti-tree hoax: an 'innocent' experiment showed the overwhelming power of the mainstream media over the masses , d uring the post-WWII era, inside the Cold War, the mainstream media in the West had built a strong propaganda veil from which Western societies would be impossible to escape. Entire generations have grown with the perception of 'evil Communism' as a threat to the Western values and way of life. Dirty wars conducted mainly by the US as the emerged big power in the global scene, based on lies and deception manufactured by the mainstream media, in order to secure the consent of the majority, even after the collapse of Soviet Communism.





For decades, before the invention of the Internet and the rise of the alternative media, people had to rely solely on the mainstream media for their information about what's going on around the world. During previous decades, what was being broadcast by the big TV channels and printed by the biggest newspapers, was taken for granted by the vast majority of the people in Western societies.





The spaghetti-tree hoax showed that, in order to manipulate the public, all you needed was a good scenario, a persuasive narrative, and a few good film shots. Just think how easily you could be tricked with today's digital technology.





Indeed, considering that real-time video manipulation technology was there at least 20 years ago, imagine how easily you could be led to believe false evidence with today's technological potentialities.





The implications are devastating in our effort to approach reality in a digital world where no one can tell you if what you see with your own eyes is true or false. You have to be there, at the heart of the events to report by yourself. Yet, imagine that the technology will permit in the close future (if not now already), to be manipulated even if you are reporting from the ground. Highly sophisticated holograms may convince people for just about anything.





The technology is particularly useful to those who want to impose power over the masses through the so-called 'non-linear' politics, where nothing seems to make sense and the line between good and bad, victory and defeat has been blurred to such an extent that every resistance against the power of current dominant system appears to be futile.







