Digital forensics
OSINT, deep fakes, and the provenance of information
2020-02-03 — 2025-01-07
Wherein the provenance of information is examined as it is complicated by deepfakes, and methods such as satellite imagery analysis and open‑source investigation toolkits are indicated for forensic corroboration.
Provenance of information is hard, and will get harder, in the era of deep fakes. Still, let’s see what we can do and what is being done. It would be nice if we had better verifiability of our information, so that we needed less forensic reconstruction.
1 Examples
The Adrian Dittmann Story (Is Adrian Dittmann a real person or an Elon Musk catspaw?)
Civilian fatality estimates in the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Here are two mainstream sources. You can go very deep on more fringey ones.
Pig butchering systems: 7 Months Inside an Online Scam Labour Camp
2 Tools
- Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit { bit.ly/bcattools }
- Google’s assembler packages several ML detectors of image doctoring. (I do not have high hopes for this being generally viable)