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Graphics Advances Make Identifying Real Images Difficult
Posted by
timothy
on Fri Jun 06, 2008 08:06 AM
from the click-here-to-convict-your-enemy dept.
from the click-here-to-convict-your-enemy dept.
destinyland writes "The FBI's geeks admitted they were nervous over computer-generated images at a recent forensics conference. In court they're now arguing that a jury 'can tell' if an image is real or computer-generated — which marks the current boundary between legal and illegal. But reporter Debbie Nathan argues that that distinction is getting fuzzy, and that geeks will inevitably make it obsolete." Note: some of the linked (computer-generated) images may be disturbing.
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with that tagline (Score:5, Funny)
"Note: some of the linked (computer-generated) images may be disturbing."
Re:with that tagline (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:with that tagline (Score:5, Informative)
http://debbienathan.com.nyud.net:8080/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/display_16329441.jpg [nyud.net]
I couldn't get the rest of the images into the Corel Cache before the server went down completely.
Here's the text from the blog post:
Child porn: real or virtual? A day in the burbs and the forensics conference
(ALL IMAGES IN THIS POST ARE COMPUTER GENERATED)
To go right to the real or virtual article, skip all the emo in italics. I wont be offended!
A funny thing happened to me this weekend in Huntington, Long Island. Iâ(TM)d taken a commuter train there from Manhattan, to interview someone in a neighborhood thatâ(TM)s walking distance from the local railroad station. (In case youre wondering why I havent posted lately, Im really busy with other work these days. Why else would I go to Huntington?) So I was hoofing it down New York Avenue when a cabbie screeched up and offered me a ride â" for free. âoeThanks,â I said, leaning into his window. âoeBut why?â âoeBecause you have to pass the day-labor site. Thereâ(TM)s lots of men there from Central America. They yell bad words to women going by.â
Iâ(TM)m 57 years old and slowly shrinking, maybe, but people seldom mistake me for a shrinking violet. I can deal with a few catcalls and âoeMamiâ(TM)sâ (assuming my wrinkled old self could evoke them in the first place). I tried to elucidate my philosophy to the driver: Itâ(TM)s always worth a few bad words to learn about stuff â" then communicate the stuff to others.
Well lah-dee-dah, youâ(TM)re probably saying. Nice story, but whatâ(TM)s the point? Especially when the real subject of this post isChild Porn®.
So hereâ(TM)s the point. Lately, when it comes to writing about child pornography issues, I suspect Iâ(TM)ve caught Huntingtonâ(TM)s Taxi Disease from my colleagues in the journalism biz. I notice that whenever I get an urge to report on the subject, I start worrying that if I publish it, Iâ(TM)ll hear âoebad wordsâ from people from âoeCentral-Weirdo Americaâ â" people who actually like child porn. Iâ(TM)ll have to read their emails (some of which make interesting points about free speech, the fourth amendment, government repression, etc.), then decide whether or not to post them. And if I post, the journos of MSM-villeâ"my colleagues! might look askance. After all, some have already told me that they, themselves, will not write about child pornography for precisely this reason: it freaks them out to get follow-up email from the pedos.
Iâ(TM)m also afraid my colleagues will tsk-tsk about why I write about this icky subject in the first place. âoeIs she obsessed or something?â they could be thinking. Perhaps they ask why I donâ(TM)t insert boiler plate into the first paragraphs of my articles. Riffs like, âoeOf course, child porn is the most horrible thing in the world, and the people involved deserve strong punishment.â This is supposed to show everyone the writer is a normal person who does not want to hear from pedos. I try to avoid such verbiage because I think itâ(TM)s knee jerk and stupid. Besides, Iâ(TM)m extremely reluctant to close off communication with anyone. I get some of my best tips about the malfunctioning of our various civic institutions from people close to those institutions â" who are often criminals, both apprehended and as yet uncaught. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022100/ [slashdot.org]">M is still one of my favorite movies.)
I went to a conference a couple months ago where law enforcement officials gave fascinating presentations
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Re:with that tagline (Score:5, Insightful)
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So SFW, or NSFW? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So SFW, or NSFW? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:So SFW, or NSFW? (Score:4, Informative)
The 10 Zen Monkeys is SFW. The only thing that could be objected to is the headline "Is It Legal Porn or Illegal Porn?" which is to say not very objectionable at all.
The other one contains "G-rated" images according to the link to it from the 10 Zen Monkeys article.
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Why does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as no children are hurt in the production of these images, why does it matter how real they look?
Re:Why does it matter? (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is when it's impossible to tell the real from the fake. At that point you couldn't prosecute any of the real ones because they'll just say it's a really good fake.
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Re:Why does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, how novel.
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Re:Why does it matter? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Why does it matter? (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't that what people are getting arrested for?
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Re:Why does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of child-porn laws is to create fear in parents and then tell them your party will take care of their children and they needn't worry - if only the vote for you. In other words: The purpose of child-porn laws is to generate votes.
I've yet to see the slightest bit of evidence that any of these laws had any meaningful effect on actual child abuse at all. It's probably because the aim of those laws is the dangerous foreign stranger who abducts and abuses your child (a nightmare for all parents) instead of father/mother/uncle who abuses a kid (the by far most common case in real life).
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Re:Why does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
So yeah, many of those laws are for show, as in they can be used to punish and try to prevent recidivism, they will not prevent most of such crimes in the first place.
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Re:Why does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
Read what I wrote. Then go back and RTFA.
Let's say I take a picture of you. Then, I work some magic on the picture and combine it with a naked child.
Then I use a trojan or other malware to put the photo on your laptop.
Then I suggest to the police that you may be carrying child pr0n on your laptop, that's why you fly to China every month.
At the airport, DHS searches your laptop and finds the picture.
That clear enough for you?
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It's even easier (Score:5, Interesting)
Just post a few of those photos online, and chances are the Interpol will start wondering who's the adult child molester there. See, for example: Interpol appeal unmasks US actor as child abuse suspect [theregister.co.uk].
There's even a funny bit at the end about another guy where the police had photos with his face "swirled" to hide his identity, so the police just reversed the filter. So you could even make it more damning by doing just that with that CG photo: apply some easy to undo Photoshop or Gimp filter, so it looks more believable. (After all, someone trying to frame him, wouldn't have tried to hide his face, right?;) Heck, if done right, it could even hide the imperfections of that CG photo.
There we go. No access to his laptop is needed.
Now, admittedly, actually planting it on the computer would make it easier to prosecute all the wayx through. But then again, if you just want to make someone's life hell for a few weeks, even the purely online version will do just fine.
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I think I see why the FBI would be nervous. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I think I see why the FBI would be nervous. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I think I see why the FBI would be nervous. (Score:5, Interesting)
IANAL, but I think video from surveillance cameras will be alright because all you have to do is have the person in charge of the surveillance swear the films haven't been altered. This would force the defense to posit that someone is trying to frame the defendant and is lying about the films being genuine. That would usually be considered unreasonable doubt (unless of course you've got some actual evicence and not just the accusation that the video is fake).
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Re:I think I see why the FBI would be nervous. (Score:4, Interesting)
At the moment (as far as I'm aware - I have a friend who works in forensic IT who has a colleague that specialises in detecting doctored images and video), even the top-end CGI is relatively easy to distinguish from the real thing, especially where humans are involved (even more so for video). Whilst I agree there's a possibility that tech and skills capable of making realistic human animations and the like may only be a few years away, I still think it'll be a long time before such fare becomes indistinguishable from the real thing, and even if it was there'd be an inevitable paper trail (or lack of it) concerning the origin of the pics/vids.
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They can tell it's a 'shop (Score:5, Funny)
NSFW (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NSFW... Well... (Score:4, Funny)
Kind regards,
Your Boss...
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Coral Cache for the 1st site (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a coral cache link for the 1st site:
Click me [nyud.net]
The last one won't work at all
Disturbing images (Score:4, Funny)
Oh don't worry, we've seen goatse and tubgirl already.
It goes like this.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It goes like this.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Have you seen Google today? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hard for a layman to tell a photo of a Velázquez from a photo of its model. Like everything else, today's artists just have better tools. A good painter could have fooled the FBI in 1920, only easier than with a computer-generated image today.
The cameras weren't as good then, so it would have been harder to tell a photo of a model from a photo of a painting of the model. The cameras were not in color. Nobody expected a photo of a painting to be anything but a photo.
Lets see any of you lay persons who haven't been trained in art make a photoshop image as good as a Velázquez painting.
Had to deal with this in a jury (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Had to deal with this in a jury (Score:5, Informative)
1) In a jury you follow the rule of law. According to the law, he was guilty.
2) The images were manufactured. They included real faces of his daughters and kids on his soccer team that he coached. These were just as damaging as any other "child porn" you can think of.
3) If I'm a "part of the problem" then I don't want to know *your* solution!
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Re:Had to deal with this in a jury (Score:5, Interesting)
2) so what? Prove your stupid assertion. By your logic he already caused "trauma" to those kids the first time he fantasized about them. He had pictures of kids he knew. Unless he was distributing this hackneyed concoction there was no "trauma" involved except the trauma he now faces in prison, convicted of a thought crime.
3) Way to think for yourself. Baaaah.
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Re:Had to deal with this in a jury (Score:5, Informative)
-[d]-
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Re:Had to deal with this in a jury (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
That reminds me of Ken Thompson's argument that video game violence increases real-world violence.
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
There may be an argument for legalizing and strictly controlling CG child porn, so that people who are aware of their sexual disorder and do not want children to get hurt have the option to stay legal, but I think this is not like computer games: The barrier between games and the real world does not need to hold up against one of the most basic drives. Also, the often-touted assumption with computer games is that people might transfer their game behavior to the real world, whereas with child porn there would only be the hope that a suppressed real world behavior stays suppressed as long as a surrogate is available. That is a very slim hope.
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, if there seems to be a link, support that assertion with something besides what comes out of your ass.
I agree, I wouldn't say those are harmless. However, I also wouldn't say that those examples are comparable to the kiddie porn/child molestation link.
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
The main thing I learned from studying psychology for six years in university is that every study apparently has an agenda, and with all the ones I participated in as a member or a researcher, they are all based on faulty assumptions about how humans work, and how people respond when they know they're being studied.
The "conclusions" below, are inherently rife with all sorts of debatable points.
* developed an increased sexual callousness toward women
Or the kind of people that will get paid/studied to watch hard core porn for weeks are the kind of people that already have sexual callousness.
What the hell is sexual callousness anyway? I'd argue that it's the default setting for males, who are not mate-for-life animals, despite what the Bride Magazine and the Bible leads us to believe.
* began to trivialize rape as a criminal offense or no longer considered it a crime at all
Or were just being more honest about what they actually thought. Few people run around telling everyone they know they trivialize rape, murder or such due to the social consequences. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first person to consider murder as a viable alternative to dealing with customers or employers or family members. In America we trivialize rape, murder, and violence constantly in our culture. Football and UFC are acceptable "alternatives" to violence that we aren't allowing ourselves to do, so we invent a rule-based sport, unless we can make a case for war somewhere on earth, then we do it with a vengence. Rape was never considered a crime in marriage, until very very recently. Women married in their early teens. Hard core porn exists because it's something we cannot acceptably do, though plenty of people want to. Porn doesn't invent the desire. We have the desire so some people like it. We don't like abused children, but B. Spears claimed to be a virgin in a schoolgirl costume and sold a whole lot of albums. I'm sure eveyone watched her videos for the music.
* developed distorted perceptions about sexuality
That's agenda all over. What is "distorted"? Anything other than missionary? Bologna. Define normal please.
* developed an appetite for more deviant, bizarre, or violent types of pornography (normal sex no longer seemed to do the job)
Normal sex rarely does the job anyway, but I'm a pervert. I'm sure oral sex is deviant and bizarre too (so silly, you'll never make a baby that way). I feel sure that this study should have concluded that wasting time trying to give the girl an orgasm is bizarre and distorted. In my biology classes they stressed that female orgasms are not relevent to procreation. The Bible we're supposed to procreate, not enjoy it, so she doesn't get one. Amen.
* devalued the importance of monogamy and lacked confidence in marriage as either a viable or lasting institution
Agenda. Monogamy is an invention from thousands of years ago to protect children and provide for women. It isn't natural at all, for men or women. I base this on the observation that almost everyone has had sex with more than one person (slashdot excepted) and many times cheat on each other. Also, we apparently have divorces from monogamy, when it get's too boring, so we don't take it that seriously.
* viewed nonmonogamous relationships as normal and natural behaviorxi
Agenda. That's because it isn't normal behavior. We lust or have sexual thoughts about other people all the time. We may emotionally have strong connections to an individual, but sexually it's normal to think of someone else now and then or appreciate a woman's assets as she walks by.
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I doubt it (Score:5, Insightful)
Since 1984, porn has become a lot wider available. Not that it didn't exist before, but now you don't even have to drive and rent a VHS cassette. A majority of men has seen a lot more than six weeks worth of porn in their lives, and the numbers for women are rising too. (I wonder what porn causes in those, then. They start thinking rape is OK too?) Look around you at the mall, and at least half the people you see are viewing porn regularly, or did at some point.
If there were that big an influence, we'd see the effects all over the bloody place. I mean, seriously, you if you have causation you must have correlation too. Not the other way around, duly noted, but causation => correlation every single time.
Did the number of rape offenses rise signifficantly? No, I don't think so. In fact, it seems to decline with the availability of internet porn. Hmm.
Did it cause widespread mis-treating and demeaning attitudes towards women? I don't know about the USA, so feel free to fill in the blanks, but at least in the less-prudish continental western Europe I see not much of that. You see naked boobs even on billboards and on ads on busses here in Germany (no hardcore stuff, though), and brothels are all over the place, but it's also one of the most equal minded countries. IIRC, it's got one of the most equal women/men ratios in tech jobs, and in a lot of other jobs too. And I just don't see that callousness towards women all around me by now. Do you?
If it causes an appetite for more deviant, bizarre, or violent kinds of pornography, then there must be a cap to that slope. Because we haven't had any "breakthrough" in extreme porn since 1984. All those guys watching porn for all these years, should by now be at the stage of raging lunatics that don't get off on anything short of Death By A Thousand Cuts by now. And it just didn't happen. Most people barely progress a bit past missionary position in their taste for perversions. There are some more "extreme" niches, but the keyword is that they're niches.
And here we come to the meat of what that study's about:
Ah, heh, so that's what it's about. "Oh noes! People get as immoral as to sometimes have a mistress too! And some even have sex without marriage!!" I.e., OMFG, some people are no longer (pretending to be) models of puritan morals! The world is coming to an end! Heh. I'm sorry. You had my attention for a bit while it was about rape (a heinous crime, no doubt) and demeaning women. But if they had to pad the list with, basically, "oh noes! people are not staying monogamous!!" as teh uber-danger to humanity, it speaks volumes about the mind-set that produced it and for which audience.
;) We have stuff like Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund thanking the city of Konstanz in writing for providing some 1500 prostitutes for the Council of Constance. (You know, the famous one where they burned Jan Hus at the stake and thus started the Hussite Wars.) We have such civilizations as the ancient greeks, which were as close to amoral sexually as it gets, even by the standards of a modern hardcore addict. Etc
And never mind that they did so before porn too. I hate to be the one who breaks your (or their) fantasy bubble, but we have a stretch of some thousands of years where people had lovers and mistresses and premarital sex, long before porn movies. We have renaissance authors writing such things as that the unmarried women of their time being saits from the front, and martyrs from the back. A reference as thinly veiled as it gets to anal sex. (I know, buggrit, and here we were enjoying a nice fantasy in which only porn causes people to get such perverted ideas
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, try again. I'll look for the studies mentioned, but so far, I still have squat.
If you can't find the actual articles listed in the reference page from this article [protectkids.com], then I suggest you google the author's names and/or the title of the publication.
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Sheesh, what passes for a math and logic education these days...
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
Correlation != Causation.
I really wish people would understand this. Correctly, it's "Correlation is not necessarily Causation." Too many people think this is some magic mantra that proves (or disproves) something. Correlation may, and very often does, lead to conclude Causation. Correlation is evidence.
And if you think porn isn't harmful to some people, you are just delusional. Porn is similar to alcohol. In moderation it's not harmful, but excessive exposure can be damaging.
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, sez who? You and your baptist minister? Perhaps you can look to Denmark for evidence - porn is freely available, has been for a long time. Perhaps their low sex crime rates are evidence of porn causing a harmful repression of initiative, or...?
I would submit that anyone that pornogrpahic material can 'harm' has already been harmed by some other cause. People with anything resembling a healthy mental state are not moved to violent acts by pictures. I further submit that children are not harmed by porn. Having had a certain amount of exposure from the time I was 12, I feel qualified to comment that until you are old enough to care about sex, porn is uninteresting, and then once you -are- old enough, it tends to lead to fairly predictable behavior. If masturbation strikes you as illegal and dangerous, perhaps porn is harmful. But few will agree with you, I'm afraid.
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
Um, sez who? You and your baptist minister?
I'm an atheist. But nice bigotry.
People with anything resembling a healthy mental state are not moved to violent acts by pictures.
I didn't say it moves people to violent acts. But is often damaging to forming healthy relationships.
Having had a certain amount of exposure from the time I was 12, I feel qualified to comment that...
You are qualified to comment about yourself. That's like saying, "Having consumed alcohol since I was in High School, I feel qualified to conclude that alcohol is never harmful."
If masturbation strikes you as illegal and dangerous, perhaps porn is harmful.
Search for "porn addiction" and be educated. A lot of our brain wiring is devoted to seeking orgasms. Taken to excess, certain people basically can't get what they need anymore in real life and start living in a porn-fueled fantasy world that real life can never live up to, and that makes it very difficult to form real attachments. Porn is a relationship with all frosting and no cake.
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
But you see....a weak or weak minded individual can be susceptible to most anything....but, is that reason to remove the choice to view pr0n or play vi0lent video games? Some people are going to get addicted to any number of things, and abuse any number of things...some of those acts are criminal. But for the majority of us that are 'normal'...why should our freedom to indulge in pleasurable things, as long as they don't physically harm REAL people (ok, a little leeway on the S&M people who enjoy being hurt, but, that's a side topic) be infringed upon. If someone gets off on watching rape videos, why not let them...if the act (which is illegal in real life) is simulated by actors or CGI...what's the harm?
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
and in actual life, according to two studies... Does that qualify as harm? I would think so. However, since you seem to value my own opinion over that of trained psychologists, I'll answer that question for you with another question. Is the damaged caused by violent video games greater than the harm caused by the gov't stepping in trying to regulate such things? Then ask yourself the same thing about child molestation and child porn. Be sure to recognize that while violent video games are not illegal, child porn is. Also, be sure to consider if your opinion would change if you had been a victim of either crime.
There are TONS of things that are harmful...and proven harmful to adults, that are perfectly legal. Alcohol and smoking are two great examples. Let's target booze. It is proven to be harmful if abused in humans. It provably DOES change and alter behavior, with many cases linked to violent and/or sexual behavior that is illegal. Yet...do we ban booze? No...we make the person responsible for their actions, whether under the influence or not.
Same with violent video games and pr0n, (which have much less concrete data behind their influence on behavior than alcohol)...you are responsible for your actions after being exposed to them.
Bottom line, IMHO, as an adult, you should be allowed to do pretty much what you want UNTIL it violates anothers freedoms or harms them.
Viewing CGI depictions of crime causes no harm to a victim...whether it be simulated murder, incarceration, or sexually deviant behavior. So, what is the harm? Seems pretty much like playing some video games actually...just more realistic, and some people get their jollies off on it.
I don't think it is the govt.'s place to tell you as an adult what you can do, use, view or participate in unless it harms another person directly. It is not the place of the govt to protect you from yourself....do what you will, but, face the consequences if you fsck up....THEN the govt steps in.
Just my $0.02...
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
What? That conclusion doesn't follow from the premises you gave.
The justification for making the production of child porn illegal is that it harms children. The justification for making owning child porn illegal is that it encourages producing child porn (and thus encouraging more harming of children).
CG child porn doesn't harm children in its production, because its production doesn't actually involve children. And following the analogy, consumption of CG child porn would encourage the production of more child porn, but given the fact that you can produce it without running afoul of the law, you'd get more CG than real child porn produced.
How does producing images that look like child porn without actually abusing children encourage crimes against children?
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Re:Should be criminal anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
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