Greetings from Portsmouth, NH!

It's been a weird week here in Seacoast New Hampshire. Residents woke up last Sunday morning to a Winter Wonderland. By Wednesday, we had an early taste of spring, with temperatures soaring above 70 degrees. It was warm enough to open the windows in my house, while comfortably sporting a T-shirt and shorts. Winter's cold-hearted reality swiftly reemerged, though, as temperatures once again dropped below freezing Thursday and snow recovered what was exposed during Wednesday's warm spring hiatus. Alas, life in New England. 

And on to the news.

In recent years, Privacy Perspectives has featured several posts discussing the seriousness of nonconsensual pornography. Since then, states around the country have passed various laws to tackle it and other forms of online extortion. We're now seeing the repercussions of these laws play out in courts and headlines. On Thursday, a St. Louis grand jury indicted the sitting governor of Missouri on invasion of privacy charges for allegedly taking a compromising and intimate photo of his mistress. The law under which the governor is being charged went into effect Jan. 1, 2017. It appears the governor will fight the charges, but he does face up to four years in prison if convicted (not to mention a shaky political future). 

Here in New Hampshire, a 21-year-old woman was also indicted for posting a compromising photo of another person. The case has been brought under the state's new law, passed in 2016. In this woman's case, she is being accused of posting the image "with the intent to harass, intimidate, threaten or coerce," the Union Leader reports. 

It's good to see the accountability these laws are bringing to people who are taking and sharing intimate photos of other people without consent, but, on the horizon, there's new technology that will complicate things further for individuals, companies, and, even, democracies.

So-called "deep fake" technology, as professors Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron defined it, is the "digital manipulation of sound, images, or video to impersonate someone or make it appear that a person did something — and to do so in a manner that is increasingly realistic, to the point that the unaided observer cannot detect the fake."

Chesney and Citron wrote this week in Lawfare about the far-reaching implications of this new and disturbing technology, warning that it is a "looming crisis" that could affect national security, democracy and privacy. Artificial intelligence is helping give rise to this digital impersonation. As they point out, "Machine learning algorithms (often neural networks) combined with facial-mapping software enable the cheap and easy fabrication of content that hijacks one's identity - voice, face, body." In addition to harms on individuals from vengeful people, the technology will complicate the "fake news" phenomenon to an exponential degree. Videos could be manufactured to make it look like politicians or public figures are taking bribes or committing adultery. This is but one example of many that Chesney and Citron provide. 

Perhaps it will be possible to fight deep fakes with technology that can detect it. Chesney and Citron also posit the possibility of vendors that provide personal and comprehensive tracking to combat fake videos. But, of course, that brings with it a whole host of privacy issues, breaches and ransom of collected data, and government access issues involving the third-party doctrine. 

At the very least, it's worth understanding that this deep fake technology is becoming a reality, and some tech businesses, and maybe some privacy pros, will have to help come up with ways of dealing with it. 

Prosecutions against nonconsensual pornography are up, so there is hope that this new form of digital exploitation can be dealt with through awareness, technological innovation, and most importantly, justice. 

Jedidiah Bracy
Publications Editor
IAPP