Shocking paper written almost 20 years ago proves why you should not believe even real-time 'evidence' produced by the MSM to justify US military interventions
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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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).
[...]
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.
[...]
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.
[...]
“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,
during
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.
The
implications of real-time video manipulation technology are obviously
very serious concerning also crucial political decisions that will
determine military interventions. Because even if some politicians
strongly stand against such interventions may be led to believe that
are necessary, or even be pushed to vote in favor of such
interventions, even if they are extremely skeptical against real-time
'evidence' presented to them.
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