When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing
By William M. Arkin
Special to WashingtonPost.com
Monday, Feb. 1, 1999
"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.
PSYOPS seeks to
exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and
populations.
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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.
What if the U.S.
projected a holographic image of Allah floating over Baghdad?
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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
Chocolates
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.
Arkin can be reached for comment at
william_arkin@washingtonpost.com.
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