This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Official Joe Biden NFTs comfirmed
I have said for years all media that needs to be verifiable needs to be signed. Gpg signing lets gooo
I think this is a great idea. Hopefully it becomes the standard soon, cryptographically signing clips or parts of clips so there's no doubt as to the original source.
Huh. They actually do something right for once instead of spending years trying to ban A.I tools. I'm pleasantly surprised.
Digital signature as a means of non repudiation is exactly the way this should be done. Any official docs or releases should be signed and easily verifiable by any public official.
Maybe deepfakes are enough of a scare that this becomes standard practice, and protects encryption from getting government backdoors.
i wouldn’t say signature exactly, because that ensures that a video hasn’t been altered in any way: no re-encoded, resized, cropped, trimmed, etc… platforms almost always do some of these things to videos, even if it’s not noticeable to the end-user
there are perceptual hashes, but i’m not sure if they work in a way that covers all those things or if they’re secure hashes. i would assume not
perhaps platforms would read the metadata in a video for a signature and have to serve the video entirely unaltered if it’s there?
You don't need to bother with cryptographically verifying downstream videos, only the source video needs to be able to be cryptographically verified. That way you have an unedited, untampered cut that can be verified to be factually accurate to the broadcast.
The White House could serve the video themselves if they so wanted to. Just use something similar to PGP for signature validation and voila. Studios can still do all the editing, cutting, etc - it shouldn't be up to the end user to do the footwork on this, just for the studios to provide a kind of 'chain of custody' - they can point to the original verification video for anyone to compare to; in order to make sure alterations are things such as simple cuts, and not anything more than that.
Rather that using a hash of the video data, you could just include within the video the timestamp of when it was originally posted, encrypted with the White House’s private key.
Would someone have a high level overview or ELI5 of what this would look like, especially for the average user. Would we need special apps to verify it? How would it work for stuff posted to social media
linking an article is also ok :)
The best way this could be handled is a green check mark near the video that you could click on it and it would give you all the meta data of the video (location, time, source, etc) with a digital signature (what would look like a random string of text) that you could click on and your browser would show you the chain of trust, where the signature came from, that it's valid, probably the manufacturer of the equipment it was recorded on, etc.
Depending on the implementation, there are two cryptographic functions that might be used (perhaps in conjunction):
Cryptographic hash: An arbitrary amount of data (like a video file) is used to create a “hash”—a shorter, (effectively) unique text string. Anyone can run the file through the same function to see if it produces the same hash; if even a single bit of the file is changed, the hash will be completely different and you’ll know the data was altered.
Public key cryptography: A pair of keys are created, one of which can only encrypt data (but can’t decrypt its own output), and the other, “public” key can only decrypt data that was encrypted by the first key. Users (like the White House) can post their public key on their website; then if a subsequent message purporting to come from that user can be decrypted using their public key, it proves it came from them.
it would potentially be associated with a law that states that you must not misrepresent a “verified” UI element like a check mark etc, and whilst they could technically add a verified mark wherever they like, the law would prevent that - at least for US companies
it may work in the same way as hardware certifications - i believe that HDMI has a certification standard that cables and devices must be manufactured to certain specifications to bear the HDMI logo, and the HDMI logo is trademarked so using it without permission is illegal… it doesn’t stop cheap knock offs, but it means if you buy things in stores in most US-aligned countries that bear the HDMI mark, they’re going to work
There’s already some kind of legal structure for what you’re talking about: trademark. It’s called “I’m Joe Biden and I approve this message.”
If you’re talking about HDCP you can break that with an HDMI splitter so IDK.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The White House is increasingly aware that the American public needs a way to tell that statements from President Joe Biden and related information are real in the new age of easy-to-use generative AI.
Big Tech players such as Meta, Google, Microsoft, and a range of startups have raced to release consumer-friendly AI tools, leading to a new wave of deepfakes — last month, an AI-generated robocall attempted to undermine voting efforts related to the 2024 presidential election using Biden's voice.
Yet, there is no end in sight for more sophisticated new generative-AI tools that make it easy for people with little to no technical know-how to create fake images, videos, and calls that seem authentic.
Ben Buchanan, Biden's Special Advisor for Artificial Intelligence, told Business Insider that the White House is working on a way to verify all of its official communications due to the rise in fake generative-AI content.
While last year's executive order on AI created an AI Safety Institute at the Department of Commerce tasked with creating standards for watermarking content to show provenance, the effort to verify White House communications is separate.
Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that anyone who sees a video of Biden released by the White House can immediately tell it is authentic and unaltered by a third party.
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