Hollywood interest in PSYWAR holography
When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing
By William M. Arkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, Feb. 1, 1999
"Gentlemen! We have called you together to
inform you that we are going to overthrow the
United States government." So begins a
statement being delivered by Gen. Carl W. Steiner, former
Commander-in-chief, U.S. Special Operations Command.
At least the voice sounds amazingly like him.
But it is not Steiner. It is the result of voice "morphing" technology
developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
By taking just a 10-minute digital recording of Steiner's voice, scientist
George Papcun is able, in near real time, to clone speech patterns and
develop an accurate facsimile. Steiner was so impressed, he asked for a
copy of the tape.
Steiner was hardly the first or last victim to be spoofed by Papcun's team
members. To refine their method, they took various high quality recordings
of generals and experimented with creating fake statements. One of the
most memorable is Colin Powell stating "I am being treated well by my
captors."
"They chose to have him say something he would never otherwise have
said," chuckled one of Papcun's colleagues.
A Box of Chocolates is Like War
Most Americans were introduced to the tricks of the digital age in the
movie Forrest Gump, when the character played by Tom Hanks appeared
to shake hands with President Kennedy.
For Hollywood, it is special effects. For covert operators in the U.S.
military and intelligence agencies, it is a weapon of the future.
"Once you can take any kind of information and reduce it into ones and
zeros, you can do some pretty interesting things," says Daniel T. Kuehl,
chairman of the Information Operations department of the National
Defense University in Washington, the military's school for information
warfare.
Digital morphing — voice, video, and photo
— has come of age, available for use in
psychological operations. PSYOPS, as the
military calls it, seek to exploit human
vulnerabilities in enemy governments,
militaries and populations to pursue national
and battlefield objectives.
To some, PSYOPS is a backwater military discipline of leaflet dropping
and radio propaganda. To a growing group of information war
technologists, it is the nexus of fantasy and reality. Being able to
manufacture convincing audio or video, they say, might be the difference in
a successful military operation or coup.
Allah on the Holodeck
Pentagon planners started to discuss digital morphing after Iraq's invasion
of Kuwait in 1990. Covert operators kicked around the idea of creating a
computer-faked videotape of Saddam Hussein crying or showing other
such manly weaknesses, or in some sexually compromising situation. The
nascent plan was for the tapes to be flooded into Iraq and the Arab
world.
The tape war never proceeded, killed, participants say, by bureaucratic
fights over jurisdiction, skepticism over the technology, and concerns
raised by Arab coalition partners.
But the "strategic" PSYOPS scheming
didn't die. What if the U.S. projected a
holographic image of Allah floating over
Baghdad urging the Iraqi people and Army
to rise up against Saddam, a senior Air
Force officer asked in 1990?
According to a military physicist given the task of looking into the
hologram idea, the feasibility had been established of projecting large,
three-dimensional objects that appeared to float in the air.
But doing so over the skies of Iraq? To project such a hologram over
Baghdad on the order of several hundred feet, they calculated, would take
a mirror more than a mile square in space, as well as huge projectors and
power sources.
And besides, investigators came back, what does Allah look like?
The Gulf War hologram story might be dismissed were it not the case that
washingtonpost.com has learned that a super secret program was
established in 1994 to pursue the very technology for PSYOPS
application. The "Holographic Projector" is described in a classified Air
Force document as a system to "project information power from space ...
for special operations deception missions."
War is Like a Box of Chocolates
Voice-morphing? Fake video? Holographic projection? They sound more
like Mission Impossible and Star Trek gimmicks than weapons. Yet for
each, there are corresponding and growing research efforts as the
technologies improve and offensive information warfare expands.
Whereas early voice morphing required cutting and pasting speech to put
letters or words together to make a composite, Papcun's software
developed at Los Alamos can far more accurately replicate the way one
actually speaks. Eliminated are the robotic intonations.
The irony is that after Papcun finished his speech cloning research, there
were no takers in the military. Luckily for him, Hollywood is interested:
The promise of creating a virtual Clark Gable is mightier than the sword.
Video and photo manipulation has already raised profound questions of
authenticity for the journalistic world. With audio joining the mix, it is not
only journalists but also privacy advocates and the conspiracy-minded
who will no doubt ponder the worrisome mischief that lurks in the not too
distant future.
"We already know that seeing isn't necessarily believing," says Dan Kuehl,
"now I guess hearing isn't either." |
