Technology, For Better and Worse

Israel’s precision attacks on Hezbollah have brought warfare to a new level of sophistication. This New York Post story mostly summarizes reporting by others, but it is a good compendium:

Former Israeli intelligence officials and Lebanese politicians told the FT that the battle in Syria unearthed a trove of information from the otherwise secretive terror group, with Hezbollah constantly publishing information on its slain fighters that revealed their personal information.
***
Narrowing its targets, the Jewish state then began hacking into the terror group’s communication devices, with spies able to track down the exact movements of Hezbollah’s operatives — sometimes through their wives’ cell phones.

Israel’s spies also tracked Hezbollah leaders’ movements by hacking surveillance cameras in Lebanon, and even reading their cars’ odometers.

Let’s pause there: Israel can hack into surveillance cameras in Lebanon and get a birds-eye view of, say, a Beirut street. Not to mention following terrorists around on their (or their wives’) cell phones.

Israel uses its capabilities for good, but what it can do, totalitarian states can also do. Maybe the Chinese already are, although I think their surveillance is mostly directed at their own people.

Now something completely different, but also in the realm of technology. We hear a lot about deep fakes these days. Here is more of a shallow fake, if I am right. This brief clip of Tim Walz giving the finger to football fans in Michigan is all over Twitter:

Walz got heckled and he flipped them off.

What a class act as a VP candidate.

pic.twitter.com/UDYHJF3oAC

— Spitfire (@DogRightGirl) September 29, 2024

Tim Walz is a jerk, thin-skinned and with a hair-trigger temper. It is easy to believe that he might flip off someone in a crowd who criticizes him. But if you look carefully at his hand, when it turns to a finger in the video, I think it looks fake. I think there are countless thousands of amateurs who could substitute a hand with a finger into the original video with at least this much verisimilitude.

I might be wrong. But along with the fact that the video looks phony to me, I have seen no news accounts commenting on what would surely be a newsworthy action by a vice presidential candidate. It would be newsworthy if he were a Republican, anyway.

“Seeing is believing” is one of the adages that I absorbed as a kid. That saying been valid for thousands of years. But we are now entering an era in which seeing is not believing–in which we can no more rely on things we see than on things we hear about. That is sad, but I don’t know what to do about it. I think there will be a significant shift in human consciousness as what was once our most reliable sense becomes less so, at least on the internet and in the media.

It is the tritest possible observation that the pace of technological change is accelerating, for good and for ill. We are seeing the consequences of some of those changes. There are vastly greater consequences to come.