GREAT CCTV FAKE- OFF
Rise of doctored video evidence will be a risk to justice, warns CPS chief
‘Technology is accelerating’
PROSECUTORS will soon have to decipher whether evidence is real or ‘deep fake’, the Director of Public Prosecutions has warned.
In a chilling vision of the future, Max Hill QC said lawyers may have to routinely consider if voice recordings and video footage had been mocked up or tampered with to implicate or exonerate offenders.
His warning evoked comparisons with BBC1 drama The Capture, a six-part spy thriller which was broadcast last year.
It tells the story of a British soldier who is arrested after CCTV video is manipulated to suggest he killed a barrister and the uncovering of a secret programme to convict suspects using bogus evidence.
Yesterday, in an essay on the importance of independent prosecutions, Mr Hill said: ‘We also need to be conscious that the wider world in which the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] operates is changing rapidly.
‘Technological advances are accelerating in almost every area; the age of the population is steadily increasing; the volume and variety of data is growing but its trustworthiness is subject to greater scrutiny and doubt; and our societal views are diversifying.
‘The criminal justice system, including the CPS, may soon have to routinely be able to distinguish between a real voice recording or video and a “deep fake”.’
Mr Hill also predicted that society’s perceptions about hate speech would change and there was also likely to be a surge in environmental crime as more regulations were brought in to tackle climate change. Prosecutors are already dealing with ‘deep fake’ cases in revenge porn where a person’s face is superimposed on a pornographic photo or video. Following a rise in cases, ministers last year ordered a review by the Law Commission to consider putting revenge porn on a par with sexual assaults and rapes, automatically granting anonymity to victims.
Only last month, Facebook announced it had shut down a new attempt by Russia’s Internet Research Agency to meddle in US and UK politics via a radical news website called PeaceData. Its ‘editors’ appeared to be deep fakes using AI-generated photos.
Videos, faces and voices created by artificial intelligence have also been used to cause political scandal in Malaysia, swindle corporate executives and help trigger an attempted coup in Gabon, west Africa. In the first six months of this year, deep fake detection firm Deep Trace Lab said the number of manipulated videos it was spotting had doubled.
In a lecture to the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law in London today, Mr Hill will also discuss the pressure on the CPS during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Its caseload rose to 179,000 cases last week compared with 101,000 in February.
Mr Hill said prosecutors had been reviewing cases to see if they could be dealt with by way of community resolution instead of waiting months for a court slot. He said: ‘This allowed us to be realistic in a time of national crisis, and to provide much timelier conclusion of cases.’