<
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/11/she-was-accused-of-faking-an-incriminating-video-of-teenage-cheerleaders-she-was-arrested-outcast-and-condemned-the-problem-nothing-was-fake-after-all>
"Madi Hime is taking a deep drag on a blue vape in the video, her eyes shut,
her face flushed with pleasure. The 16-year-old exhales with her head thrown
back, collapsing into laughter that causes smoke to billow out of her mouth.
The clip is grainy and shaky – as if shot in low light by someone who had
zoomed in on Madi’s face – but it was damning. Madi was a cheerleader with the
Victory Vipers, a highly competitive “all-star” squad based in Doylestown,
Pennsylvania. The Vipers had a strict code of conduct; being caught partying
and vaping could have got her thrown out of the team. And in July 2020, an
anonymous person sent the incriminating video directly to Madi’s coaches.
Eight months later, that footage was the subject of a police news conference.
“The police reviewed the video and other photographic images and found them to
be what we now know to be called deepfakes,” district attorney Matt Weintraub
told the assembled journalists at the Bucks County courthouse on 15 March 2021.
Someone was deploying cutting-edge technology to tarnish a teenage
cheerleader’s reputation.
The vaping video was just one of many disturbing communications brought to the
attention of Hilltown Township police department, Weintraub said. Madi had been
receiving messages telling her she should kill herself. Her mother, Jennifer
Hime, had told officers someone had been taking images from Madi’s social media
and manipulating them “to make her appear to be drinking”. A photograph of Madi
in swimwear had been altered: “Her bathing suit was edited out.”
Madi wasn’t the only member of the Victory Vipers cheer team to have been
victimised. In August 2020, Sherri Ratel had been sent anonymous texts accusing
her 18-year-old daughter, Kayla, of drinking and smoking pot. Noelle Nero had
been sent images of her 17-year-old daughter in a bikini with captions about
“toxic traits, revenge, dating boys and smoking”. These, too, were “all altered
and shown as deepfakes”, Weintraub added.
The anonymous sender had used “spoofing” software to disguise their identity
behind an unknown number. The police had managed to trace it to the IP address
of Raffaella Spone, a 50-year-old woman with no previous criminal record. In
her mugshot, she wears a lime green turtleneck with her hair scraped back in a
tight ponytail. Her eyes, thickly lined in black, look up at the camera in a
cold stare; her brightly painted lips are pursed with anger. She looks
terrifying.
“It appears that her daughter cheers – or did cheer – with the victims at the
Victory Vipers gym,” Weintraub told the assembled journalists. Spone had taken
it upon herself to smear her 16-year-old’s rivals in an attempt to get them
thrown off the team.
As microphone after microphone was placed before him on the podium, Weintraub
didn’t mince his words. “This tech is now available to anyone with a smartphone
– your neighbour, somebody who holds a grudge,” he said, waving his own phone
in the air. “Here in Bucks County, we have an adult with specific intent,
preying on juveniles through the use of deepfake technology.”
This went further than cheerleader rivalry in suburban Pennsylvania. Anyone
could be a victim of this new kind of crime, and anyone a perpetrator. “All one
needs to do is download an app and you’re off to the races,” Weintraub
continued. “Sometimes these deepfakes are so good, we can’t even discern them
with the naked eye.” The authorities would always be on the back foot, he
added: “It takes minutes to make a deepfake video, but it takes us months to
investigate.” The woman in the mugshot was the canary in the coalmine: the era
of believing your own eyes was officially over."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
