Slashdot Mirror
US Lawmakers Say AI Deepfakes 'Have the Potential To Disrupt Every Facet of Our Society' (theverge.com)
Yesterday, several lawmakers sent a letter to the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, asking him to assess the threat posed to national security by deepfakes -- a new type of AI-assisted video editing that creates realistic results with minimal effort. The Verge reports: The letter says "hyper-realistic digital forgeries" showing "convincing depictions of individuals doing or saying things they never did" could be used for blackmail and misinformation. "As deep fake technology becomes more advanced and more accessible, it could pose a threat to United States public discourse and national security," say the letter's signatories, House representatives Adam Schiff (D-CA), Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), and Carlos Curbelo (R-FL). The trio want the intelligence community to produce a report that includes descriptions of when "confirmed or suspected" deepfakes have been produced by foreign individuals (there are no current examples of this), and to suggest potential countermeasures. In a press statement, Curbelo said: "Deep fakes have the potential to disrupt every facet of our society and trigger dangerous international and domestic consequences [...] As with any threat, our Intelligence Community must be prepared to combat deep fakes, be vigilant against them, and stand ready to protect our nation and the American people."
Why else would the start to push these headlines
This Congress? Nothing except verbally distance themselves from him (if they even do that) while lining their pockets with his policies. The next Congress though -- that's a whole different matter.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
They're obviously lying. Politicians are gonna love the proliferation of deepfakes. That way, the next time they say something stupid in an interview, they can say the clip is a deepfake. They're just starting to blame them as an upcoming problem now so they can start using it as an excuse ASAP.
You already tired of winning, snowflake?
Photos use to be considered "strong evidence", then Photoshop etc. came along to make doctoring cheap and common, and people stopped trusting photos. The same will happen to audio and video once they see enough fudged examples.
Table-ized A.I.
When it comes out you know Trump's going to say it's a deepfake, but the truth is he's not that deep. And he probably did get pissed on by the whores, the dumb traitor fuck lol he has no idea what he's doing. Get a rope, drain swamp time.
something something pgp signing ...
Dan Coats is actually in the Bahamas collecting a free pay check. He answers all of Congress by video deep fake AI produced political jargon. The report says "no significant threat posed".
Means the Russians are very interested in this
This is a potential problem that directly affects congress critters and famous people and really nobody else, so clearly it has the potential to destroy civilization and we must prioritize dealing with it.
" ... individuals doing or saying things they never did"
Yeah, it's deep-fakes, not fake news that causes that.
Ditto.
We already see fake news and a 'gubbermint is eevil' mindset (created by fake news), allow the rich to manipulate voters into asinine decisions that damage those same voters.
This is 'Mission impossible' territory, where imposters assume the place of military and intelligence personnel.
We're headed back to that horrible time a few decades ago without pervasive reliable audio and visual surveillance. Quick! Let's pass more laws curtailing freedom of expression and individual liberty!
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/14/manafort-plea-mueller-probe-825753 Manafort got tired of winning...
This is just preemptive damage control in case the videos of him from comet ping pong happen to surface.
He's disrupting every facet of our society. What is congress going to do about him?
-
Congress is going to feed you to negroes in a maximum-security prison. By the end of the first night, you will never again have a solid turd.
Robert A. Heinlein imagined this problem, and in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land he described a new profession: "Fair Witness"
A Fair Witness is a person who is trained to observe and remember without jumping to any conclusions. A Fair Witness should be able to describe in court what he/she saw, and only that. As an example, a Fair Witness would say something like "I observed a house, and the side I saw appeared white" rather than "I observed a white house." It's possible that other sides of the house, not seen by the Fair Witness, could be a different color; and it's possible the house was repainted after the Fair Witness saw it... the Fair Witness keeps such things in mind.
Surprisingly, Wikipedia doesn't seem to think that the idea of "Fair Witness" is notable. I Google searched for a reference, and I found a reference that claims to be quoting Wikipedia, but I can't find it on Wikipedia now.
http://dlkphotography.com/fair-witness/stranger-in-a-strange-land
I found the "Fair Witness" idea to be one of the most interesting things in the book, and I have long wondered if we would one day see that profession in real life.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Simple solution: don't trust any one source. Even if they're supposedly impeccable. Look for corroboration from multiple independent sources (and make sure they're really independent and not all getting their information from the same source). For instance if you have a video of someone checking into a hotel with a compromising companion, look for corroboration from the hotel's records, hotel staff who should have interacted with them, and the person's credit-card records. This is what we used to do before people got lazy and started believing everything they were told without question.
are simply afraid of the competition.
The US ( and everyone else ) has been altering both modern and historical facts to suit their own agendas since the very beginning. :|
I'm curious why the sudden concern
Pot. . . meet kettle.
I suppose the solution is to create AI's that can quickly detect fakes and remove them from any website that posts them. Otherwise no video or photo can ever be trusted. That would be catastrophic. Maybe all videos and photos will need to be authenticated and stamped in some way so that no alteration is possible.
Lawmakers don't have many facets, maybe as few as two: graft and porn. I can see how they might project that onto society in general.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The shallow fakes worked just fine. The half-scrupulous aren't even a target.
that this will be able to create
That's something that was said over and over again in my private investigator and security officer training.
You DON'T tell the client "yes I caught your spouse cheating on you with his ex". You write notes as its happening if possible saying "I observed a white sedan park near 124 Oak Street". It's possible that the car isn't the subject's car, it only looks similar. It's possible that the suspected companion doesn't currently live at that address. It's possible that the subject went there to meet with his ex-brother-in-law about a business deal. You report only what you directly observe.
What could be possible:
* Cryptographic signatures on raw data leaving a camera, or Cryptographic signatures on the default recording app as the videos/photos are taken
Probably won't help that much though, but might help to identify unedited footage.
* Give images/videos timestamps signed by a third party immediately as they are taken
This can prove that a piece of information existed no earlier than that time.
None of these can thwart recording a video screen playing back pre-edited video.
They were never "strong evidence".
I think everyone knows the pictures in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonperson that show how Stalin made people "nonperson". (The inspiration for the unperson of "1984".)
In fact, the entire legal system uses nothing but scientifically invalid "proof". Real science knows that all we have, is statistically significant observation of a pattern. Most of the time, we do not even have that, but merely anecdotal evidence of that statistically significant observation (in a paper) and anecdotal evidence of other peers having statistically significant observation too (=peer review).
Our legal system doesn't even remotely adhere to that. Basically, it's all bullshit. All of it. Every type of "proof" they have. None of that would ever stand up in a scientific community.
Who watches the watchdogs? ... The answer is: No matter how long you make the chain of watchdogs watching watchdogs ... In the end, it still requires YOU, personally, to verify anything. Even if it is only the reliability and trustworthiness of that watchdog.
In this case, for example, you're forgetting, that digital signatures either require a CA ... (Which is an "argument from authority" fallacy. Or simpler: Who watches the CA?) ... or a web of trust (like PGP), with a flawless chain between you and that signature.
Otherwise, digital signatures are security theater, and actually more dangerous than not having any verification at all.
Way back when, when we first had cameras, that was the saying. Because it was really hard to make a convincing "wrong" photo. (Early: One, Two, Three, Four.
And then came along tape, and audio editing, and auto-tune and computerized voice editing. And Hatsune Miku, who not only doesn't exist, her VOICE doesn't even exist: She was created by taking vocal samples [which] all contain a single Japanese phonic that, when strung together, creates full lyrics and phrases. Video. The people with glowing green sticks, though, are real.
And now with movies have placed people's heads on other's bodies, never mind body-doubles. The trick is that's it's becoming better, cheaper and more widespread to create. (And I *SWEAR* that people are more gullible now-a-days than they used to be. Or maybe it's because things just move so much faster.) So we're back to a century or so ago: just because there's an audio/video of it, doesn't mean it's HAS to be true.
No worries though, since you're innocent until proven guilty, which has worked so well with MeToo and everything else in the last few years. We'll all just have to have a 2-way shoulder mounted camera that does a real-time blockchain video feed to verify where we are all of the time and that it's really is US in the video.
Now if blockchain would only run at Visa-level transaction speeds instead of a slow 8mm Movie Motion Picture Camera. Oh, and that's 7 BitCoin transactions system-wide and not just per camera. The limit for Litecoin is 56 TPS and the limit for Bitcoin is 7. Visa: 24,000 TPS (Link. And far be it your mounted camera loses WiFi/Cell connection or runs out of power.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
it's the ability to create a doctored video that makes it look like your opponent said something they did not. You could litter the net with these and destroy the political career of anyone. A person who would do such a thing would be inherently dishonest and evil. Left unchecked this will drive out the few remaining honest people in politics. I'm sure the folks who are left in politics will support a surveillance state.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Agreed. The problem is that with photos, video and voice all untrustable, what is left? How can someone come to an independent conclusion about anything?
The same way we did before the proliferation of movie/video cameras and audio recorders. These are only very recent inventions.
The deepfakes that the US intelligence produces have destroyed every faced of many societies across the globe, and the "US lawmakers", that is, the corrupt bunch that orchestrated these didn't even care.
All they care about is losing the monopoly to making deepfakes.
As a citizen of WA state, when I tune in to the local evening news, & see newscasters & reporters dressed like cheap whores from chinatown, I know somethin's not right. Perhaps this AI deepfake shit is behind it? The only reasonable explanation I can fathom is that they're 'stalker' decoys.
And what gives them power? Laws criminalizing things. There is no way in this universe they can stop this. But they can profit from it and they are certainly trying to.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
its usually because something has come out that they haven't figured out how to manipulate or abuse. when this technology has fallen out of the news, you will know that at least some political bodies are abusing it for their benefit.
The best defense is a strong offense. Our law makers are focusing on the effect of deep fake AI technology toward our own society, but the same technology can be applied toward our adversaries, showing Putin and Xi Jinping in compromising positions doing things that ruin their reputations and weaken their standing in their own countries. Deep fakes can further be used to play our adversaries off against each other. Law makers should be funding deep fake AI research rather than curbing it.
Ones who don't try to weasel out of situations with denials, false claims (I was not told about .... ), redefinition of meaning or refusing to answer questions.
And if they can be seen not to be corrupt or self-serving then when they are confronted by "deepfakes" of them acting as normal politicians do now, we will know that they are the victims, not the criminals.
[ File under: fantasy land ]
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
there is no such thing as objective truth anyway. truth is whatever the person left standing says it is after the dust settles.
we may as well get comfortable with the idea that the only real authority is violence, whether monopolized by the state or
meted out by whoever is best equipped to rise to the top of the pecking order.
You are suggesting Trump is real. I'd like to suggest he has always been a computer generated image. That will make him all that much easier to dethrone. Er, to uninstall...
I work with a lot of people from different backgrounds. They watch things like movies all the time and they see things like science fiction and see it as purely Hollywood and not simply forseeing the ambitions of many creative people around them.
I have a habit of writing documents describing technology that I would implement myself given the time, budget and drive. Examples of this would be RAID systems capable of online live healing and automated scaling with almost zero risk for loss due to transactional strip databases across asymmetric disk sizes with additional attention placed on "intelligent" wear leveling. Another would be a means of employing statistical human behavioral analysis and prerendering technologies based on MPEG spatial and temporal scaling to within MPEG transport streams delivered over HTTP to optimize bitrate based on predicted and perceived areas of interest while watermarking ingress video in such a manor that would survive multiple generations of reencoding.
I release these papers to the public domain which don't tend to take me more than a few hours to write and then companies like Netflix and storage vendors invest in formalizing my theories and implementing the technology to great financial gain to themselves. And the result is that I get to use or buy the technology which I envisioned would benefit me.
This is no different than watching a science fiction film. People making these films are releasing their ideas publicly for all to see. Even today, individuals and military funded organizations work towards implementing many ideas from comic books (bullet proof fabrics for example), Marvel movies (search for Iron Man suit), and science fiction (EMP drive is an example).
We need to stop attempting to assess threats and regulate at a government level after decades of R&D have occurred after someone in the cinema makes some cool technology a kind of holy grail for engineers and scientists.
I work on full body scanners as a hobby. I love the idea of employing three dimensional covnets to 3d sonograms provided by full body airport security scanners to identify medical conditions such as high blood pressures, tumors, damaged tissues, dental anomalies etc... I believe very strongly many of the worlds illnesses are related to severe shortcomings in doctors and more specifically general practitioners. They need to be replaced as soon as possible by machines since a machine can perform a full body scan multiple times a week that is far more thorough and accurate than these fools in their offices who wait until lumps are big enough to see or feel before treating them.
Consider how much money the governments of the world would save on medical treatment of their people if we knew that a cancerous tumor was beginning to form within days of it starting as opposed to waiting a year or two before symptoms became visible. Most cancers would be treatable with little more than a pill or even a focused laser. Instead we have these idiot GPs with their blood pressure devices and thermometers and idiotic blood tests.
Will the stuff I'm working on happen... yes it will. But when will the governments eventually get on board and consider what it means at a federal level? When big pharm is pissed that their poisons for Chemo aren't selling, when universities like Harvard can't find jobs for their medical graduates, etc... they don't focus on that now.
And to be honest... police complain about encryption causing them problems. Tough shit... adapt. Police and lawyers will complain that videos that are perfect fakes are making more or less all video evidence insubmissible... tough shit.. adapt. People like Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Watson are really upset that first people try to steal their nudie pictures from their phones... now they complain that instead of trying to get their hands on real videos and pictures, people are making deep fakes of them... deal.
Here's the thing... there are pervs everywhere. Hell I'll admit to being a perv at least at the
Looks like he's about to turn on Podesta.
Just make it illegal! That always fixes every problem!
Anything electronic can be faked, and so we need to start encouraging people to UNDERSTAND that "Seeing Isn't Believing". Just because you saw it on a screen doesn't mean it's true.
It's all phony.
the next congress will line their pockets also
People will currently believe absolutely anything provided you get the narrative right and appeal to their emotions. There's no need to even doctor videos anymore. You just have to tell them.
The cat is out of the bag, now learn to live this way.
In USSR and Latvia the video recordings were not usable as evidence in court. I don't know how about photos and audio recordings, but in early 2000's one man I know was set free because only evidence was video recording of him doing criminal act. The criminal case was dismissed due to lack of evidence. It means that there was a criminal act, but he was not found guilty because insufficient evidence.
I think society as a whole should treat all video, audio recordings as well as all forms of pictures as fakes. No expert can dismiss forgery, because state-sponsored forgers know what forensic expert will look for in forgery and create perfect fakes that pass scrutiny of forensic experts. Deepfakes are just a technological progress.
This another example of government blaming technology. We already have tools to create fakes. AI is just another tool.
all "famous" people, the publicity craving time-wasters, are probably rubbing their hands in glee:
soon we will see the likes of kim kardashian as the face of the president, elon musk, kim young and what not.
even the clubberment critters going on record denoucing the demon nature of fake photons will most probably will be possessed by one of the demons infecting the media landscape ...
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Hey, asshole: snitches get stitches.
the pee-pee tape, Trump will call it a deep fake and his followers will believe him.
We've been heating plastics in microwave ovens for at least 2 generations now, and all the "reproductive harm" caused by the BPA is causing us to get dumber and dumber.
because some one may acutally post a deep fake of of one of our genuine perversions.
> And the jury (who have absolutely no clue how to tell which expert is reliable)
The best experts will explain to the jury how they can look at the evidence and draw conclusions, rarher than just proclaiming a conclusion.
As one example, a blood spatter expert can demonstrate, either live or on video, that slinging a wet sponge at high speed leaves a pattern of very small droplets, while carrying it or slinging it slowly let's much larger drops form. The jury can then see for themselves whether the crime scene has tiny droplets (high speed) or large drops (low speed). Thr expert can show that at low speed the drops make circles on the surface, at high speed they streak as the impact the surface.
If the experts show and and explain, rather than tell, the jury can see for for themselves how things actually work.
When the next video comes out, showing them saying Nazi/racist/whatever stuff, they can just claim:
Deepfake news!
Whoosh
Just like photoshop changed how trusted photos could be.
Realistic video can show exactly what President Clinton and "that woman" did. It can also show what President Trump and all-those-50-women did.
It might even show what that SCOTUS nominee is alleged to have done in 1982.
Nothing can show the despicable things that GOP and DNC leaders have done, but we get to live that daily with all the govt abuses.
So basically, nothing has really changed, except ugly people can be the stand-ins for these movies since famous people's faces will be overlayed.
They can already get away with blatant lying and fool 51% of voters. We are seeing just how extreme 1 side can go with it already.
Profound affects on everybody's lives are already happening. It's so fast that the majority are aware of the shift; but as it becomes the new normal it'll be hardly any different over time than the gradual slide we've had since WW2; when weaponized psychology became widespread.
It'll probably take another horrific shameful war before "Lying Press" becomes a taboo phrase in this culture like it did in Germany. They know what that helped create; people here do not-- hell, we named our unified federal police Fatherland Security - some neo-nazi must feel great having slipped that one bye everybody.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
That really wasn't me having sex with your mom and sister at the same time.It's a deepfake.
What is "reasonable doubt" anyway? The decider's neural triggers causing strong enough emotions that he also *wants* that to be true, which he can "find" to be true?
The whole thing is silly, and it is obvious to any sane person. We just comfortly cling to this ignorant view that we all always had, because we can't handle actually properly solving this problem.
(The proper solution is that reality is relative, and right and wrong are too. So there is no legitimate punishment, that is not itself a crime too. The only legitimate and fair thing you can do, is separate the disagreeing parties. But even that might only be fair from my own point of view. A for-profit murderer might see it as harm against him, if he can't murder other people anymore, even if he gets his own island of murderers.)
First of all, you can digitally sign your fake photo too.
And you can take a real signed photo of a fake image/scene.
But inherently, digital signing always comes down to blindly trusting some CA instead of blindly trusting some image.
A CA is manipulated way easier, and an argument from authority fallacy anyway.
(In a PGP web of trust, YOU are the CA, which is good. But you still need to have a chain of trust. Which is as "reliable" as communication via Chinese whispers. So it is still useless.)
Stop struggling and clinging to the unscientific delusion of absolute truth and absolute right and wrong.
It is pseudo-science at best. (Even among popular opinion of so-called scientists in the US, sadly.)
Face the relativity of reality. And that you can't "know" anything for sure, let alone absolutely.
Otherwise, you support a harmful delusion and are willfully ignorant.
un-whoosh
See https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/do... for details on the scheme and comments on prior solutions.
------DO NOT WRITE BELOW THIS LINE------
2-minute papers have several vids on the rapidly growing capability to do this.
https://youtu.be/GRQuRcpf5Gc
Maybe Giuliani is right when he says "Truth isn't truth".
When anything and everything, such as photos, videos, audio, facts, etc., become as muddied and confused as a psychotic break, then does "Truth" still matter? When "Truth" becomes unknowable, then it becomes useless. You can only react to what you perceive. Like for a person having a psychotic break, that often means reacting in a chaotic or harmful way.
I can't imagine what this will do to society. Perhaps society will react to things in ways more fitting to ancient times, when people had no idea how nature really worked, and chalked events up to the gods, fate, or the supernatural.
A couple of his grandchildren speak some Mandarin, but he does not. It was startling when I heard an audio in decent Chinese with Trumps voice. Fake generated from a deep learning ststem trained in Trump voice samples and Mandarin.
The most memorable use in film for me is The Running Man, where an autocracy implementing barbaric (and corrupt) punishments attempts to create footage showing our hero meeting his end. For a slice of 80's schlock it's actually a pretty decent guess at the future!
Making sure the clock is set accurately is a huge problem in itself. Maybe satellite internet connections could solve that, but radio connections are often intermittent and clocks drift when left to run on their own and can be disrupted by electrical events.
Some types of deep fake problems are only a problem for people whose faces are known and are no problem for everyone else. A fake video showing you proclaiming you are Jesus would elicit a "who cares" from most of the world. If you're well known though, it could be a problem. Other types of deep fakes need to get the details right to be convincing. The sun has to be at the right angle, the location needs to be right, the buildings need to be the right buildings, the flesh tones have to match, etc. See Hany Farid's work on detecting Photoshopping; the same can be done with video to detect deep fakes that combine different elements.
My guess is it is mainly people who have a known face and are widely known (e.g., politicians) who are the ones concerned about deep fakes, because even if the fake is detectable, that doesn't stop people from thinking (or wishing) it was true. In other words, it will be mostly used to make fun of the famous. Using it to pull off crimes or convince large populations that someone important has done something bad would require a very high bar be met by the fake. One simple solution for the famous might be to continuously track their location using a tamper resistant device so they can prove where they were. If the location track shows them moving, and the fake video shows them standing still...
I don't see this as demolishing our society.
It will simply require that we, as a group, come to realize that video and audio recordings, once seen as the gold-standard in unimpeachable truth-telling about the facts of a case, will be relegated to the same dubious reliability as the "I seed it!" guy.
"I done seed it, I seed the whole thang! It was like this, right?" ~ I Seed The Whole Thang Guy.
They once had a saying, "don't believe everything you read," pointing out that people who WRITE things aren't necessarily writing the truth. Sometimes they write things, (specifically, in newspapers, magazines, and books,) that are accidentally not true due to implicit bias, due to the writer having been fooled or tricked, or due to the writer simply not having all the facts. Then some writers are just plain, flat-out, making shit up. Hence, you can't believe every single thing you read.
We will, as a society, simply have to come to grips with the fact that with the introduction, spread, and ever-widening availability to anyone and proliferation around the interwebz of "AI/DeepFake" technology, anyone can be made, almost trivially, to seem to be saying or doing anything in a sound or video recording. (Seen DOING? Oh, yes. You just take video of ONE person doing something, and plaster someone else's HEAD's image onto it in each frame, correcting for angle, position, movement, etc.) So we simply will have to get used to going back to eyewitnesses as the gold-colored, gold-appearing standard, if you will, because of course that's NEVER been that reliable.
In a sense, it would be like the power grid going irretrievably down. LOCALLY, you can still make power and all your electrically-powered devices will work, provided you can MAKE sufficient power to run them, with, i.e., solar power, wind power, etc., but you can't really KNOW that when you take your device anywhere with you, (by donkey-drawn cart, for instance,) that in the next village, there will be any way to get it to work. In this instance, when you're looking at footage you shot yourself, or a recording you yourself made, preferably on the device that made it, YOU know that's true, but you show that to anyone you don't know, and they should regard that with suspicion.
It's going to be a bitter pill to swallow, knowing as a society that video and audio recordings are no longer in any way reliable. Maybe a better analogy will be if it were announced that all processors of all computing devices since the Sperry UNIVAC, even seemingly air-gapped ones, locked in Faraday-cages, in underground vaults with platoons of Marines guarding them can STILL be hacked, and made to divulge any information they've EVER processed, and so the only way to safeguard your data is to take your computer, and the biggest sledgehammer you can wield, and USE ITEM, if you will, to smash the computer into tiny little pieces. The resulting society, in which even the digital CALCULATOR is seen as unsafe, does not "go back to zero". It simply dusts off its old slide-rules, and trig and log tables, and starts printing THEM again.
Then of course, someone points out that someone has corrupted the log tables, obviously it was printed on one of the haywire computers that wasn't smashed up, since it states plainly, in black & white, that the log to the base 10 of 1000 is 7, which hopefully, every slashdotter knows is totally wrong. It's negative 9. (LOL)
All kidding aside, we will survive this, but I think it does mean we are at the end of a golden age when you could just point to a recording, video or audio, of a given event or situation, and have your evidence regarded as indisputable. There will be a while, of course, before everyone realizes that video and audio recorded evidence is no longer anymore reliable than hearsay, and probably a lot of bad things will happen as a result before everyone gets it, but some people are still convinced the Earth is flat, the moon is made of green cheese, and no man has ever walked upon its surfac
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
There is a fairly well-known solution to a potential problem they are describing. Assume it's already happening and act accordingly. And that means encouraging wide use of strong cryptographic signatures of all digital content as the only content to be trusted. But they won't encourage that. They want to look like they are fighting foreign influence, but want to continue peddling the same bullshit that they accuse others of doing.
For example, what's the difference if it is a foreign power doing this or a nefarious political rival? Well, none really. Both foist a lie on the voting public. But politicians want one of those lies to trusted.
They could create a new division of the copyright office which would track signatures of verifiable facts (eg. "this set of public signatures belong to a US citizen whose name shall remain unknown", "this set of signatures belong to someone with a medical license", etc.). But that would mean that you can't have verifiable anonymous sources. So you can't make anonymous accusations. Come to think of it, why doesn't everyone who is entitled to being called a "senior White House official" have access to the same 1 private key PGP key? This way any newsource claiming that a statement was made by a senior White House official would have to be able to produce a signature of that statement that can only be produced by senior WH officials. But there is more politicking to be done by making this shit up. So it won't happen.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.