Paperless has it's problems because once the disk drive crashes or the data is corrupted or incorrect, you have no method of recovering the information. Paper can preserve things longer but modern paper is poorly made and doesn't hold up very long in a historical sense.
It is a conundrum but a dangerous one to ignore.
Forging or Fakes 2 have been around for as long as there has been anything of value to steal with a false document, painting or sculpture. Many of today's museums are filled with forgeries and it seems that every other month a new multi-million dollar ancient master painting is discovered; a production rate which, as anyone who knows or can guess what it takes to make such a masterpiece, is not possible, probable or even remotely theoretical to achieve in a any one lifetime.
The curious thing about masterpiece forgeries is this:
Until the painting is revealed to have less-than-authentic signature, the painting has pride of place on the gallery wall. Articles are written to describe the beauty of the painting, texture, colors and applications etc. etc. etc.
Once the painting has a signature change, it disappears into the dark vaults of embarrassment. Or on rare occasions, moved to the Modern Art section of the museum.
It's the SAME PAINTING...
Modern technology is now able to forge just about anything you can imagine and stuff you haven't even considered that can be forged or manipulated. There isn't much left that cannot be faked.
In old times (and current times), the best method Prosecutors in the USA have to guarantee a conviction is to withhold evidence and documents from the Defense. In the USA that is not what is supposed to happen, but if the Defense doesn't get a document how would anyone know? The lack of a document without knowledge of the existence of it, means a free ride for the Prosecutor, who's livelihood, and political ambitions rely on the number of convictions they get. They figure it's SOK to fudge and not turn over the items that show the Accused is Not The One because it would ding their stats.
90% Conviction Rate - Reelect Me - Make Me President
Sometimes though, this method backfires and someone with a bit of Moral Fiber squeaks and the truth drips out. Generally, not without a whole lot of anguish on the part of the Prosecutor's Victim, and the Prosecutor declaiming They Did It For The Betterment of Society and of course the true winner is the person(s) who actually Got Away With The Crime.
Any Conviction is a Good Conviction
Innocence isn't Important to getting Reelected
With electronic documents however, there's a wrinkle. They might erase a document but erasing an electronic document does leave holes - tiny future embarrassments when they are found on the Way Back Machine3 or sitting on the drives in Bluffdale Utah4.
What is much easier is to alter the documents, video, voice, images or any other electronically stored data. There are now techniques that can create or alter any item without leaving an audit trail or footprint or indication that anything has been tampered with.
Make It So - Make It How You Want It - No One Can Tell
Part of the reason this is a Big Deal is that now a great deal of our society runs on electronic data and as anyone who has run afoul of a "computer error" can attest, fixing a "computer error" is nigh on impossible.
Computers Do NOT Make Mistakes.
They do EXACTLY what they are programmed to do.
Programmers MAKE Mistakes.
YOU Pay the Piper.
So, considering how easy it is to create a "deep fake"5, this is going to be a big problemo. And one that not too many are thinking about as they calculate that next statistical bump up.
This is something besides the normal trash-level computing that is passed off as Artificial Intelligence (AI) that purports to know you based on some dataset held in Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix private data stores, this in beyond plain old manipulation and greed, it's the complete Falsification of ALL Electronic Data.
If any one piece of electronic data is faked,
where will you find unaltered data?
Millions of electronic letters or documents become useless once fakes penetrate the database.
Got a Birth Certificate?
Prove it!
Fake!
We have already seen the opening salvo of the "fake document" problem but in the world of fakes the problem will go deeper. There either won't be any document at all or the document will have been altered beyond forensic ability to uncover. People with less access to specialists claiming new found ancient masterpieces are authentic, are going to be severely impacted.
Most courts now require electronic submissions of documents, depositions, videos, audio, interviews. When these are faked and the courts stamp these as authentic, how can anyone "Prove It"?
We TRUST Computers
We do not see the HUMAN in the background
In My Fair Town, there was a community sponsored event to help shred old documents. Gosh knows, I have boxes and boxes of old paper, crumbling and fading in storage boxes stacked one atop another in the garage. Some years back, I was able to take them to an office-supply-store and shred them for a nominal fee, then the fee became not-nominal and so I stopped shredding there. When I stopped shredding the stack got higher and higher.
So, when the community sponsored event came around I packed up some of the oldest of the old boxes and headed to the event. It was extremely well organized. Surprisingly so. Cars neatly tracked into 2 lanes, snaking their way to the location of the big shredders. More folks waiting at the unloading area, taking the boxes, dumping them into security containers and wheeling them to the biggest shredders you can imagine. 10 seconds and my old paper was gone.
And in theory, the now dead and shredded letters and documents make me safer from Bad Dudettes, primarily since paper with names, addresses, IDs, Bank Statements, Utility Statements and every other sort of document is beyond their reach.... It's also beyond mine.
I no longer have proof of - anything
I can no longer prove 5 years or 40 years of continuous existence with rent, utility, pay stubs or any other ephemera of modern life.
Do you think that's not a problem?
It is.
Some countries now require their citizens....
to prove they are citizens.
How can you do that if the data is wrong, gone, altered or misfiled? How can you do that after 5 - 10 - 15 - 30 - 40 years of no paper? Where can you find pay stubs for companies that have gone out of business? Schools that have been closed? Records destroyed? Landlords long gone across the river? Towns that have been abandoned due to climate, water, fire and flood?
As I was snaking my way towards the Big Shred I thought about what a Great Event it was for the community. Old documents of perhaps not much value, safely destroyed, recovering room in my garage, and watching the cars in front of me unloading 5-10-15 boxes of life-long documents being tossed into the maw of a big machine. I wasn't really thinking too hard about the downside of not having a paper trail, like the others in line, I was just happy to get rid of this stuff that the IRS said I had to collect and now had hit its expiration date. I pondered how the community had collected the funds to pay for the mass paper grinding. I figured it was partly from local taxes and a donation by the paper grinder companies and a lot of nice civic minded folks helping one another.
It was a good feeling.
It didn't last
I looked behind me
 |
| Clovis CA Police Surveillance Van |
The reasons for 2 nicely formed lines, slowly filing thru a small lane with no driveways, became apparent.
- The camera was hidden
- The truck was hidden
- The intent was hidden
- The reason was hidden
- The effect can be calculated.
There was no good reason to hide but they did. They hid because they were ashamed (in a way) of what they were doing. They did it anyway, no doubt claiming it was FOR THE GREATER GOOD. They paid for the shredding and in return got more of what they wanted.
They didn't ask. They just took.
In one of my ancient episodes of employment, I worked for company that collected trash cans. It's a big business, people produce lots of garbage and in some places it gets picked up regularly and taken ElseWhere. It's really a fascinating business.
No doubt most folks have seen a movie plot where the bad guy puts something in the trash and the good guys grab the trash can and get it. This happens. Normally the trash truck collects the targeted can and places the contents into a separate compartment and then takes it directly to a special area to hand it over. There's a set of legal reasons that allow it. Once you put the trash can on the street, the contents no longer belong to you.
Once you hand over the box of stuff to be shredded, it no longer belongs to you.
One can guess that the video and license plate reader with face recognition AI marked out some cars and the nice helpful persons unloading the boxes set them aside. There is no way to know if the items handed over really got shredded.
And then there was this...
 |
| Clovis CA Tactical Military Vehicle |
We don't look so we don't see.
TANSTAAFL - "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" 1
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TANSTAAFL
"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" The phrase was in use by the 1930s, but its first appearance is unknown. The "free lunch" in the saying refers to the nineteenth-century practice in American bars of offering a "free lunch" in order to entice drinking customers. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgery
Forgery is a white-collar crime that generally refers to the false making or material alteration of a legal instrument with the specific intent to defraud - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet. It was launched in 2001 by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California, United States. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger. Its purpose is to support the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), though its precise mission is classified. The National Security Agency (NSA) leads operations at the facility as the executive agent for the Director of National Intelligence. It is located at Camp Williams near Bluffdale, Utah, between Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake and was completed in May 2014 at a cost of $1.5 billion.
The data center is alleged to be able to process "all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Internet searches, as well as all types of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter'." In response to claims that the data center would be used to illegally monitor email of U.S. citizens, in April 2013 an NSA spokesperson said, "Many unfounded allegations have been made about the planned activities of the Utah Data Center, ... one of the biggest misconceptions about NSA is that we are unlawfully listening in on, or reading emails of, U.S. citizens. This is simply not the case." This statement was made two months prior to the document leak that revealed the existence of the PRISM program ....
In April 2009, officials at the United States Department of Justice acknowledged that the NSA had engaged in large-scale overcollection of domestic communications in excess of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's authority, but claimed that the acts were unintentional and had since been rectified. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake
Deepfake, a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake", is an artificial intelligence-based human image synthesis technique. It is used to combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos using a machine learning technique called a "generative adversarial network" (GAN). The combination of the existing and source videos results in a fake video that shows a person or persons performing an action at an event that never occurred in reality.
Such fake videos can be created to, for example, show a person performing sex acts they never took part in, or can be used to alter the words or gestures a politician uses to make it look like that person said something they never did. Because of these capabilities, deepfakes may be used to create fake celebrity pornographic videos or revenge porn. Deepfakes can also be used to create fake news and malicious hoaxes.
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