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by William M.
Arkin
Washingtonpost.com
"Gentlemen! We
have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow
the United States government." So begins a statement being delivered by
Gen. Carl W. Steiner, former Commander-in-chief, U.S. Special Operations
Command.
At least the voice
sounds amazingly like him.
But it is not
Steiner. It is the result of voice "morphing" technology developed at
the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
By taking just a
10-minute digital recording of Steiner's voice, scientist George Papcun
is able, in near real time, to clone speech patterns and develop an
accurate facsimile. Steiner was so impressed, he asked for a copy of the
tape.
Steiner was hardly
the first or last victim to be spoofed by Papcun's team members. To
refine their method, they took various high quality recordings of
generals and experimented with creating fake statements. One of the most
memorable is Colin Powell stating "I am being treated well by my
captors."
"They chose to
have him say something he would never otherwise have said," chuckled one
of Papcun's colleagues.
A Box of
Chocolates is Like War
Most Americans
were introduced to the tricks of the digital age in the movie Forrest
Gump, when the character played by Tom Hanks appeared to shake hands
with President Kennedy.
For Hollywood,
it is special effects. For covert operators in the U.S. military and
intelligence agencies, it is a weapon of the future.
"Once you can
take any kind of information and reduce it into ones and zeros, you can
do some pretty interesting things," says Daniel T. Kuehl, chairman of
the Information Operations department of the National Defense University
in Washington, the military's school for information warfare.
Digital morphing —
voice, video, and photo — has come of age, available for use in
psychological operations. PSYOPS, as the military calls it, seek to
exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and
populations to pursue national and battlefield objectives.
To some, PSYOPS is
a backwater military discipline of leaflet dropping and radio
propaganda. To a growing group of information war technologists, it is
the nexus of fantasy and reality. Being able to manufacture convincing
audio or video, they say, might be the difference in a successful
military operation or coup.
Allah on the
Holodeck
Pentagon
planners started to discuss digital morphing after Iraq's invasion of
Kuwait in 1990. Covert operators kicked around the idea of creating a
computer-faked videotape of Saddam Hussein crying or showing other such
manly weaknesses, or in some sexually compromising situation. The
nascent plan was for the tapes to be flooded into Iraq and the Arab
world.
The tape war never
proceeded, killed, participants say, by bureaucratic fights over
jurisdiction, skepticism over the technology, and concerns raised by
Arab coalition partners.
But the
"strategic" PSYOPS scheming didn't die. What if the U.S. projected a
holographic image of Allah floating over Baghdad urging the Iraqi people
and Army to rise up against Saddam, a senior Air Force officer asked in
1990?
According to a
military physicist given the task of looking into the hologram idea, the
feasibility had been established of projecting large, three-dimensional
objects that appeared to float in the air.
But doing so over
the skies of Iraq? To project such a hologram over Baghdad on the order
of several hundred feet, they calculated, would take a mirror more than
a mile square in space, as well as huge projectors and power sources.
And besides,
investigators came back, what does Allah look like?
The Gulf War
hologram story might be dismissed were it not the case that
washingtonpost.com has learned that a super secret program was
established in 1994 to pursue the very technology for PSYOPS
application. The
"Holographic Projector" is described in a classified Air Force document
as a system to "project information power from space ... for special
operations deception missions."
War is Like a Box
of Chocolate
Voice-morphing?
Fake video? Holographic projection? They sound more like Mission
Impossible and Star Trek gimmicks than weapons. Yet for each, there are
corresponding and growing research efforts as the technologies improve
and offensive information warfare expands.
Whereas early
voice morphing required cutting and pasting speech to put letters or
words together to make a composite, Papcun's software developed at Los
Alamos can far more accurately replicate the way one actually speaks.
Eliminated are the robotic intonations.
The irony is that
after Papcun finished his speech cloning research, there were no takers
in the military. Luckily for him, Hollywood is interested: The promise
of creating a virtual Clark Gable is mightier than the sword.
Video and photo
manipulation has already raised profound questions of authenticity for
the journalistic world. With audio joining the mix, it is not only
journalists but also privacy advocates and the conspiracy-minded who
will no doubt ponder the worrisome mischief that lurks in the not too
distant future.
"We already
know that seeing isn't necessarily believing," says Dan Kuehl, "now I
guess hearing isn't either."
William M. Arkin,
author of "The U.S. Military Online," is a leading expert on national
security and the Internet. He lectures and writes on nuclear weapons,
military matters and information warfare. An Army intelligence analyst
from 1974-1978, Arkin currently consults for Washingtonpost.Newsweek
Interactive, MSNBC and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
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