BUSINESS AND RESEARCH
THE MAKING OF FAKE The old English saying that “by the time the Truth gets its shoes on, a lie has already gone around the globe” has never seemed so accurate. In the age of deep fakes and social networks, how can we trust images? Une A blurred head emerging from the waters of Loch Ness, former collaborators of Stalin erased from official photos... If the manipulation of images is not new and if forgery and airbrushing are consubstantial with the history of photography, the digital revolution is nevertheless changing the current situation - a question of scale, explains Sylvain Hajri, founder of the OSINT-FR community (see insert) and of the company Epieos, which specialises in open intelligence. “Yesterday, fake photos circulated thanks to the propaganda services. Today, they are spreading all over WhatsApp, Twitter... Technology also makes it possible to go one step further: Photoshop can of course manipulate a photo, but a site like This Person Does Not Exist proposes to generate a strikingly realistic image of a person who does not exist, which makes it possible to create credible fake accounts. Deep fakes, on the other hand, can make anyone say anything.”
DEMOCRATIZATION OF THE FAKE
And the faking industry is almost within the reach of the average person. Yesterday, reserved only for connoisseurs, the manipulation of images and videos is more accessible today, using software that is often free, tutorials that are freely available, and equipment that most often boils down to a PC with a good graphics card. With a little patience, almost anyone can hijack an image and distribute it. But technology is not the only way to deceive your audience, insists Sylvain Hajri: “Most of the fake images and fake videos that circulate on the web are not that sophisticated. One of the most common techniques is to relay an image that is real but taken in a context that is different from the event to which it is attached, for example, by passing off an image taken five years ago in Syria as one taken today in Ukraine. We have known since Churchill’s era that truth is the first casualty of war, and the RussianUkrainian conflict proves this every day,”
notes Sylvain Hajri, “Most of the manipulation techniques used in Ukraine have already been used elsewhere, but this war is closer, which exposes us more to this constant competition of images”. At the pace of a veritable digital guerrilla war, each side is trying to impose its own narrative of events in order to influence public opinion. At the official level as well as on the networks, each side contests the pictures or videos broadcast by the other side, such as those of the massacre of civilians in Butcha, contested to the point of absurdity by the Russian authorities. Another method is the use of images taken from... video games. For example, images supposedly showing the escape of a Russian plane from flak fire were taken straight out of Arma III, a game that is almost ten years old. Beyond the political and geopolitical confrontations, the business world would be wrong to believe that it is spared by the phenomenon, stresses Sylvain Hajri,
GETTING INFORMED AND FIGHTING BACK: THE OSINT-FR COMMUNITY Created in 2019 by Sylvain Hajri and Hugo Benoist, both from the world of cybersecurity, OSINT-FR is a community that brings together connoisseurs and the curious who are interested in Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) in English. The goal? To collect and analyse information extracted from freely accessible sources (websites, public data, accounts on social networks or media, satellite imagery, paper newspapers...) to establish facts, verify information and allow for rigorous and reliable analyses. While professionals in the field of journalism or cybersecurity are obviously primarily concerned, the community also aims to be a place of education and pedagogy available to every citizen interested in the veracity of information.
WWW.OSINTFR.COM
12
N°07 I A new way of talking business