If it "was AI" it should be easy enough for him to prove by pulling up his account on whatever AI video generation service he used and showing the generation in his account history.
True, and I agree with you on it not being AI, however, the burden is on the prosecution to prove guilt, not for a defendant to prove innocence.
But you are correct, if it was in fact AI, showing how he (or someone else) made it at the time would certainly help get him off the hook.
Guy could've probably picked a better place to base jump anyway, national parks are notorious for having a billion laws that don't really exist anywhere else.
Maybe he doesn't have to prove that though. If he can find an expert witness who will make claims that based on their expert analysis it is possible this video is AI generated, and he does not testify himself, then that may be enough to introduce reasonable doubt.
I'm not sure they have to bother. The video could be fake, and they still committed the crime. People certainly use AI and other tools to "enhance" video.
The article mentions evidence placing them at the scene of the crime, wearing a matching outfit, and they can probably find witnesses.
Also I’d be surprised if the only evidence introduced by the prosecution is the video. There may be other eyewitnesses, evidence of equipment usage, communications with others prior to the event about his intent, and so forth.
It's legal by default on US federal land, (e.g. BLM or USFS) which covers about a fifth of the country, and is especially concentrated in areas with mountainous and other earthen terrain that is favorable to BASE jumpers. We just take a very small portion of that land, designate it national parks or forests, make everything illegal there, dump all of our tourists there, and charge them to park.
There's far more to see outside of those national parks and forests than there is inside. Look up any paragliders or bush pilots on YouTube that live near federal land, and they pretty much go wherever they want to go.
If you're an avid hiker or camper and are visiting the US, find local documentation on where to visit or befriend someone in the area who can make recommendations, and you'll get to see our natural landscape without all of the tourists or regulations. You can legally BASE jump off a cliff, hike in the nude, mine for gold, set up an impromptu gun range, and camp there for a couple of weeks, or indefinitely if you hike two miles each day.
This seems like something a liability waiver and an escrow account with money for body clean up (if things go bad) would solve. A little red tape, sure, but not illegal.
there aren't that many accidents. It's also more dangerous to jump in ways that attempt to skirt laws (jumping near dark, trying to evade capture, etc)
then we need tort reform to address the root cause. This is so silly and unfortunate that wild spaces are litigated and made illegal for things that are normal and wonderful elsewhere.
Was it legitimately his instagram account that posted the video?
If it was a brand new account, then it seems possible that it's a fake.
But if somebody also had to hack his account to make this video... I suppose it's not impossible but you'd really, really be pushing "reasonable doubt" to it's limits.
Noteworthy that he claimed that when talking to an investigator prior to being charged. We'll see if he's willing to make the same claim in court. (He's apparently representing himself...)
SCOTUS ruled very strictly on this in 1998. James Brogan was visited by Federal agents at his home and asked if he had accepted illegal cash payments from a company. Brogan simply answered "No."
SCOTUS upheld his conviction for this under U.S.C. § 1001. His only legal options were to say “Yes” or state his choice to exercise his 5th amendment right to remain silent.
Similar laws apply to interactions with pretty much any LEO in any US state, though the lie must be material to a criminal investigation. Note that some states make nearly everything a misdemeanor crime (like speeding 5mph over the limit) whereas other states make many of those things civil infractions.
Gosh there's a lot of corollary evidence pointing to his guilt but this is likely going to become more and more common and force the use of a lot more technical forensic resources.
Finding an original copy on a go-pro would likely be pretty compelling evidence but this (and the more scary politically centered questions like this) are why I wish we had a way to build a durable chain of custody into these technologies. It is infeasible from everything I've seen but it would be a big win for society.
> I wish we had a way to build a durable chain of custody into these technologies
Do you? Consider for a moment all the dissidents and protestors who would be ensnared by their own devices then, with no "it was all ai" defense available?
I do - I think the videos and pictures that protestors smuggle out become less powerful if the state can dismiss them as fake and while most of us will remain skeptical of authority the more easy it is to fake something the more people you can convince of your falsehood.
I don't think the lack of a durable chain of custody really provides any protection - that protection needs to come from a strong legal system and social contract to protect whistleblowers. If you're thinking of, as an example, an Iranian smuggling out protest footage, they're already taking an extreme risk and have a state using numerous tools to try and track them down - but the lack of a durable chain gives a wide area of authorities to cast doubt on the truth.
I think your question is interesting to ponder and I think there are arguments in both directions - but my mind keeps coming back to the tank man photo being smuggled out of China and how much more difficult it would be in the modern world for a single image to carry such weight.
> I don't think the lack of a durable chain of custody really provides any protection - that protection needs to come from a strong legal system and social contract to protect whistleblowers.
That social contract is quite a bit of a hit&miss if you look at countries across the globe. Same for the strong legal system. Other concerns aside, does this not make the whole approach a non-starter?
I don't think it does but I do see the counter arguments. There have been prominent publicly open political dissidents and they do often suffer from assassination attempts. I think if you're considering political dissent the potential cost is a major factor in that decision. I have not had to make that decision personally so I am not an expert here - but it might be important to consider the value to those people of knowing your evidence can be proven true no matter what the authorities say.
Put private key into every digital camera and hash/sign every frame. That private key is accompanied with manufacturer signature and can't be easily extracted. Mark all unsigned media as suspicious.
"and can't be easily extracted" is doing a lot of work there. People are very good at reverse-engineering. There would soon be a black market for 'clean' private keys that could be used to sign any video you want.
There's also always the "analog loophole". Display the AI-generated video on a sufficiently high-resolution / color gamut display and record it on whatever device has convenient specs for making the recording, then do some light post-processing to fix moire/color/geometry. This would likely be detectable, but could shift the burden of (dis-)proof to the defendant, who might not have the money for the expert witnesses required to properly argue the technical merits of their case.
More likely, the signing would have to use compression-resistant steganography, otherwise it's pretty easy to just remux/re-encode the video to strip the metadata.
There would also be a requirement for all playback to actually properly check the private keys and for all the parties involved in the process to be acting in good faith. Not only would you have a black market for individuals to scalp clean keys but you'd likely have nation states with interests putting pressure on local manufacturers to give them backdoors.
We'd probably hit a lot of that with SSL if it wasn't so unimportant from a political perspective[1]... but if the thing we were trying to secure is going to boost or damage some prominent politician directly then the level of pressure is going to be on a whole different scale.
1. And we might still have that corruption of SSL when it comes to targeted phishing attacks.
> There would also be a requirement for all playback to actually properly check the private keys
I don't think that's true. Only for someone who wanted to prove authenticity to grab the signature. No private keys would be exposed (except those which were hacked.)
If Netflix and Amazon can't keep their 4k HDR webrips from being leaked (supposedly via extracted licenses from Nvidia Shields), I have no idea how we'd expect all camera manufacturers to do it. Maybe iPhones and flagship Apple devices, but even then we'd find vulns in older devices over time.
I was thinking more about the spread of disinformation at large - but yea, that playback requirement would only be necessary for anything that wanted to be considered a potential source and trying to protect against disinformation platforms is a much larger problem then technology can solve on its own.
"can't easily be extracted" = "the number of people who can extract it is small but still non-zero"
And those people now have the power to put you in jail, by putting your camera's signature on illegal content.
You've also just made journalism 3 notches harder. Like documenting atrocities in, say, North Korea. Or for whistleblowers in your home steel mill run by a corporate slavedriver.
Oh. Also. Why are you choosing the camera side to put this on? Why not the AI side? Require watermarks and signatures for anything created in such a way…
…of course that has its own set of intractable problems.
Ideally, the keys would be per-manufacturer, like HDCP or (DVD-)CSS. Personally I don't think I'd love the idea of any kind of attestation like this, but if TPTB did implement it, I'd prefer a key per-manufacturer rather than each unit having its own unique signing key. We do have precedent, in the form of printer tracking dots, which were kept 'secret' from the public for 20 years. [0]
Ideally, the prosecutor bears the burden of proof. We generally shouldn't impose systems that require defendants to prove a negative. I recognize that reality does not necessarily match this ideal.
It's ultimately up to juries to decide whether a defendant's assertion that evidence is fake is enough to constitute reasonable doubt in the absence of hard evidence for it. I imagine that's going to be very context-dependent. It would probably work if I was accused of this, with no history of anything like this, versus a guy who does this frequently, posts videos of himself doing it regularly, and never gave any indication they're fake until he got in trouble.
> Gosh there's a lot of corollary evidence pointing to his guilt but this is likely going to become more and more common and force the use of a lot more technical forensic resources.
Nah. People who do something like this can't help but brag. They'll incriminate themselves in seconds voluntarily.
Because it's very dangerous and first responders access in national parks isn't always easy. You can obtain a permit to do it, however, see this memo that summarizes the current situation:
The legal history is a bit more complex. TLDR: assholes that were BASE jumping in Yosemite in the early 1980s did things like throw burning barrels off the top of El Capitan and take trucks on trails not designed for vehicle traffic.
Comparing the number of BASE jumpers (small thousands) and the number of hikers and climbers (millions) BASE jumpers just can't have the political influence for access.
Maybe just refuse to try to help them? Why can't we let people win darwin awards anymore instead of criminalizing it? The people doing this are adrenaline junkies who often would LOVE to die this way if they had to. That's why they are doing it.
For similar reasons, suicide should not be criminalized. Yes I am serious.
NIMBYists concentrate their efforts on national forests and parks, so everything is illegal there. Cross the boarder outside of Yosemite, and you're in unregulated forestry land where you can camp for weeks without a permit and walk wherever you want.
Although, it would be nice if we could give people a general “I understand the risk and won’t ask for help if it goes wrong” waiver for dangerous activities.
I am sure prosecutors have AI expert witnesses on speed dial. Would probably testify under oath they ran it through their own AI analysis and it came back as not AI.
Even public defenders don’t bother with their own expert witnesses, much less a guy representing himself.
We have to plan for this to become more common in future.
You trying to start a union in your workplace? Expect video of you jacking off in public to leak online. Video of cop mercilessly beating a black guy? Inadmissible, could have been AI.
It will only get worse as video and audio generation get better and better.
It's not even the fact that digital evidence is being used in courts these days, the disturbing thought is, all in all, that it's not that implausible for malicious actors to fake anyone's activity. How would you prove that you weren't at the crime scene when there's a digital footprint of your phone's GPS data, corroborated by (albeit not crystal clear) images and video?
BASED jumping is an acronym that stand for five categories of fixed objects from which one can jump:
- Buildings
- Antennas
- Spans
- Earth
- Deepfakes
https://archive.is/tfznK
If it "was AI" it should be easy enough for him to prove by pulling up his account on whatever AI video generation service he used and showing the generation in his account history.
(I do not think it was AI.)
True, and I agree with you on it not being AI, however, the burden is on the prosecution to prove guilt, not for a defendant to prove innocence.
But you are correct, if it was in fact AI, showing how he (or someone else) made it at the time would certainly help get him off the hook.
Guy could've probably picked a better place to base jump anyway, national parks are notorious for having a billion laws that don't really exist anywhere else.
You can't even take your cat white river rafting on the grand canyon >:( https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/36/7.4
> You can't even take your cat white river rafting on the grand canyon
What are the chances that rule came about because of a dead/lost pet or because of some wildlife that was eaten? I'm 50/50 it was either.
Maybe he doesn't have to prove that though. If he can find an expert witness who will make claims that based on their expert analysis it is possible this video is AI generated, and he does not testify himself, then that may be enough to introduce reasonable doubt.
But shouldn't it be the prosecution proving the video is real?
I'm not sure they have to bother. The video could be fake, and they still committed the crime. People certainly use AI and other tools to "enhance" video.
The article mentions evidence placing them at the scene of the crime, wearing a matching outfit, and they can probably find witnesses.
Yes, but only if the judge who gets the case believes in silly things like "Federal Rules of Evidence."
Also I’d be surprised if the only evidence introduced by the prosecution is the video. There may be other eyewitnesses, evidence of equipment usage, communications with others prior to the event about his intent, and so forth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(law)
Maybe he did it with a local model!
(Yeah, me neither.)
That would also be easy to demonstrate, if true.
How?
I don't think it was AI either but I don't think that would hold up in court.
There are lots of places to legally BASE jump in Europe. You can even take a gondola to the jump point. But very very few legal options in the USA.
I wish there were more places to legally enjoy BASE jumping on US public lands.
It's legal by default on US federal land, (e.g. BLM or USFS) which covers about a fifth of the country, and is especially concentrated in areas with mountainous and other earthen terrain that is favorable to BASE jumpers. We just take a very small portion of that land, designate it national parks or forests, make everything illegal there, dump all of our tourists there, and charge them to park.
There's far more to see outside of those national parks and forests than there is inside. Look up any paragliders or bush pilots on YouTube that live near federal land, and they pretty much go wherever they want to go.
If you're an avid hiker or camper and are visiting the US, find local documentation on where to visit or befriend someone in the area who can make recommendations, and you'll get to see our natural landscape without all of the tourists or regulations. You can legally BASE jump off a cliff, hike in the nude, mine for gold, set up an impromptu gun range, and camp there for a couple of weeks, or indefinitely if you hike two miles each day.
They don’t want to deal with the liability lawsuits.
Would there be liability lawsuits for this happening on public land? Might it be more a matter of them not wanting to do body clean up once a week?
This seems like something a liability waiver and an escrow account with money for body clean up (if things go bad) would solve. A little red tape, sure, but not illegal.
there aren't that many accidents. It's also more dangerous to jump in ways that attempt to skirt laws (jumping near dark, trying to evade capture, etc)
I’m convinced this is how Dean Potter died. Jumping at dusk to try to evade capture my Yosemite rangers.
If it had been legal, and had he jumped in broad daylight, I think he’d have survived that day.
They probably don't want to deal with the bodies either. One man's thrill seeking is another man's lasting psychological trauma.
then we need tort reform to address the root cause. This is so silly and unfortunate that wild spaces are litigated and made illegal for things that are normal and wonderful elsewhere.
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Not sure what warrants the name-calling and whataboutism here. Who's talking about "predators"? This thread is about BASE jumping.
Was it legitimately his instagram account that posted the video?
If it was a brand new account, then it seems possible that it's a fake.
But if somebody also had to hack his account to make this video... I suppose it's not impossible but you'd really, really be pushing "reasonable doubt" to it's limits.
Noteworthy that he claimed that when talking to an investigator prior to being charged. We'll see if he's willing to make the same claim in court. (He's apparently representing himself...)
That tracks. BASE jumping and representing yourself share a common philosophy towards risk.
>talking to an investigator prior to being charged
Isn't lying to a federal investigator also a crime? Searching suggests 18 U.S.C. § 1001.
Yes.
SCOTUS ruled very strictly on this in 1998. James Brogan was visited by Federal agents at his home and asked if he had accepted illegal cash payments from a company. Brogan simply answered "No."
SCOTUS upheld his conviction for this under U.S.C. § 1001. His only legal options were to say “Yes” or state his choice to exercise his 5th amendment right to remain silent.
Similar laws apply to interactions with pretty much any LEO in any US state, though the lie must be material to a criminal investigation. Note that some states make nearly everything a misdemeanor crime (like speeding 5mph over the limit) whereas other states make many of those things civil infractions.
> Isn't lying to a federal investigator also a crime?
It depends on how much money you have.
Gosh there's a lot of corollary evidence pointing to his guilt but this is likely going to become more and more common and force the use of a lot more technical forensic resources.
Finding an original copy on a go-pro would likely be pretty compelling evidence but this (and the more scary politically centered questions like this) are why I wish we had a way to build a durable chain of custody into these technologies. It is infeasible from everything I've seen but it would be a big win for society.
> I wish we had a way to build a durable chain of custody into these technologies
Do you? Consider for a moment all the dissidents and protestors who would be ensnared by their own devices then, with no "it was all ai" defense available?
I do - I think the videos and pictures that protestors smuggle out become less powerful if the state can dismiss them as fake and while most of us will remain skeptical of authority the more easy it is to fake something the more people you can convince of your falsehood.
I don't think the lack of a durable chain of custody really provides any protection - that protection needs to come from a strong legal system and social contract to protect whistleblowers. If you're thinking of, as an example, an Iranian smuggling out protest footage, they're already taking an extreme risk and have a state using numerous tools to try and track them down - but the lack of a durable chain gives a wide area of authorities to cast doubt on the truth.
I think your question is interesting to ponder and I think there are arguments in both directions - but my mind keeps coming back to the tank man photo being smuggled out of China and how much more difficult it would be in the modern world for a single image to carry such weight.
> I don't think the lack of a durable chain of custody really provides any protection - that protection needs to come from a strong legal system and social contract to protect whistleblowers.
That social contract is quite a bit of a hit&miss if you look at countries across the globe. Same for the strong legal system. Other concerns aside, does this not make the whole approach a non-starter?
I don't think it does but I do see the counter arguments. There have been prominent publicly open political dissidents and they do often suffer from assassination attempts. I think if you're considering political dissent the potential cost is a major factor in that decision. I have not had to make that decision personally so I am not an expert here - but it might be important to consider the value to those people of knowing your evidence can be proven true no matter what the authorities say.
Put private key into every digital camera and hash/sign every frame. That private key is accompanied with manufacturer signature and can't be easily extracted. Mark all unsigned media as suspicious.
"and can't be easily extracted" is doing a lot of work there. People are very good at reverse-engineering. There would soon be a black market for 'clean' private keys that could be used to sign any video you want.
There's also always the "analog loophole". Display the AI-generated video on a sufficiently high-resolution / color gamut display and record it on whatever device has convenient specs for making the recording, then do some light post-processing to fix moire/color/geometry. This would likely be detectable, but could shift the burden of (dis-)proof to the defendant, who might not have the money for the expert witnesses required to properly argue the technical merits of their case.
More likely, the signing would have to use compression-resistant steganography, otherwise it's pretty easy to just remux/re-encode the video to strip the metadata.
There would also be a requirement for all playback to actually properly check the private keys and for all the parties involved in the process to be acting in good faith. Not only would you have a black market for individuals to scalp clean keys but you'd likely have nation states with interests putting pressure on local manufacturers to give them backdoors.
We'd probably hit a lot of that with SSL if it wasn't so unimportant from a political perspective[1]... but if the thing we were trying to secure is going to boost or damage some prominent politician directly then the level of pressure is going to be on a whole different scale.
1. And we might still have that corruption of SSL when it comes to targeted phishing attacks.
> There would also be a requirement for all playback to actually properly check the private keys
I don't think that's true. Only for someone who wanted to prove authenticity to grab the signature. No private keys would be exposed (except those which were hacked.)
If Netflix and Amazon can't keep their 4k HDR webrips from being leaked (supposedly via extracted licenses from Nvidia Shields), I have no idea how we'd expect all camera manufacturers to do it. Maybe iPhones and flagship Apple devices, but even then we'd find vulns in older devices over time.
I was thinking more about the spread of disinformation at large - but yea, that playback requirement would only be necessary for anything that wanted to be considered a potential source and trying to protect against disinformation platforms is a much larger problem then technology can solve on its own.
"can't easily be extracted" = "the number of people who can extract it is small but still non-zero"
And those people now have the power to put you in jail, by putting your camera's signature on illegal content.
You've also just made journalism 3 notches harder. Like documenting atrocities in, say, North Korea. Or for whistleblowers in your home steel mill run by a corporate slavedriver.
Oh. Also. Why are you choosing the camera side to put this on? Why not the AI side? Require watermarks and signatures for anything created in such a way…
…of course that has its own set of intractable problems.
Ideally, the keys would be per-manufacturer, like HDCP or (DVD-)CSS. Personally I don't think I'd love the idea of any kind of attestation like this, but if TPTB did implement it, I'd prefer a key per-manufacturer rather than each unit having its own unique signing key. We do have precedent, in the form of printer tracking dots, which were kept 'secret' from the public for 20 years. [0]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
That makes it easy to prove authenticity (has signature), but doesn’t solve the “prove it’s fake” problem.
Ideally, the prosecutor bears the burden of proof. We generally shouldn't impose systems that require defendants to prove a negative. I recognize that reality does not necessarily match this ideal.
It's ultimately up to juries to decide whether a defendant's assertion that evidence is fake is enough to constitute reasonable doubt in the absence of hard evidence for it. I imagine that's going to be very context-dependent. It would probably work if I was accused of this, with no history of anything like this, versus a guy who does this frequently, posts videos of himself doing it regularly, and never gave any indication they're fake until he got in trouble.
Isn't that similar to this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Authenticity_Initiativ...
That certainly won't be used to violate someone's privacy.
More surveillance and tracking won't be the solution.
Film cameras may be making a comeback.
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> Gosh there's a lot of corollary evidence pointing to his guilt but this is likely going to become more and more common and force the use of a lot more technical forensic resources.
Nah. People who do something like this can't help but brag. They'll incriminate themselves in seconds voluntarily.
Couldn't you just match the noise profile of the camera with the video?
How do you find the camera?
"I extracted and added the noise profile to the AI generated video with a goPro to make it look legitimate"
They got him for illegal BASE jumping and now they are going to get him for lying to the police about it too.
Why the hell is based jumping illegal?
Because it's very dangerous and first responders access in national parks isn't always easy. You can obtain a permit to do it, however, see this memo that summarizes the current situation:
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/policy/upload/NPS_Guidance_Memo...
The legal history is a bit more complex. TLDR: assholes that were BASE jumping in Yosemite in the early 1980s did things like throw burning barrels off the top of El Capitan and take trucks on trails not designed for vehicle traffic.
Comparing the number of BASE jumpers (small thousands) and the number of hikers and climbers (millions) BASE jumpers just can't have the political influence for access.
Random note, Brendan Weinstein who posted here on occasion recently died BASE jumping: https://www.reddit.com/r/SkyDiving/comments/1q6n7v2/brendan_...
It seems danger and first responder access would also be a problem for free solo climbing, yet that gets a pass.
Maybe just refuse to try to help them? Why can't we let people win darwin awards anymore instead of criminalizing it? The people doing this are adrenaline junkies who often would LOVE to die this way if they had to. That's why they are doing it.
For similar reasons, suicide should not be criminalized. Yes I am serious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_die
If they're doing it anyway, then why bother making it legal? Just to attract more people who might otherwise be dissuaded?
NIMBYists concentrate their efforts on national forests and parks, so everything is illegal there. Cross the boarder outside of Yosemite, and you're in unregulated forestry land where you can camp for weeks without a permit and walk wherever you want.
Most likely to avoid wasting emergency services.
Although, it would be nice if we could give people a general “I understand the risk and won’t ask for help if it goes wrong” waiver for dangerous activities.
Would you say the same for 191 people rescued hiking in Yosemite a year?
Anyone who base jumps with a bulky videotape recorder instead of GoPro deserves to arrested ;)
Do you have a link? Dudes got class.
I'm sure it was a GoPro - was mocking the journalist's use of the Ye olde term 'videotaped'
Haha, that’s kinda dated. Still I’d love to see a vhs camcorder strapped to someone’s head.
Ha ... everything is AI now. No accountability.
Plausible denAIbility
Oof. Risky move.
If the prosecution can prove it was legit, that's prison for sure.
I am sure prosecutors have AI expert witnesses on speed dial. Would probably testify under oath they ran it through their own AI analysis and it came back as not AI.
Even public defenders don’t bother with their own expert witnesses, much less a guy representing himself.
lying to federal officers is what nailed Martha Stewart
We have to plan for this to become more common in future.
You trying to start a union in your workplace? Expect video of you jacking off in public to leak online. Video of cop mercilessly beating a black guy? Inadmissible, could have been AI.
It will only get worse as video and audio generation get better and better.
>>A license plate reader detected his car entering the national park on Oct. 7 and leaving Oct. 8,
This flock stuff is b.a.d.
It's not even the fact that digital evidence is being used in courts these days, the disturbing thought is, all in all, that it's not that implausible for malicious actors to fake anyone's activity. How would you prove that you weren't at the crime scene when there's a digital footprint of your phone's GPS data, corroborated by (albeit not crystal clear) images and video?
Maybe AI was driving his car.
The fact that this is simultaneously a joke yet also has to be realistically considered is… alarming.
I'd probably be most inspired to make an AI video of doing something awesome in a national park just after having visited the park, too.
They'll need a flock cam on the summit if they want to push that any further.
bikes into thread
bikes outhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1ULJ92aldE (<- finally found the track used in so many CNC machining youtube shorts).