Text | Popov
If "Game of Thrones" outlines the cruelty of war in the age of cold weapons, then the British drama "The Capture" (The Capture) personally pushes the audience into another high-tech abyss.
Soldier Sean Emer returned from the war in Afghanistan, that is, he was caught in the charges of two cases, and the key evidence for the prosecution came mainly from surveillance video in public places. Focusing on the authenticity of the video as court evidence, the director slowly laid out the confrontation between the three forces of the police station, intelligence department, and rights protection organization.
Director Ben Chenan is a good storyteller: the anti-terrorist background and tense rhythm remind people of "Homeland" released eight years ago, and build a good halo effect by light; between criminal suspects and lawyers The ambiguity of the story, the extramarital affair between the female police officer and the boss, so that the fast-paced plot will not break the audience's attention; the grayscale treatment of the positions of all parties also forces the audience to eagerly want to see the final truth.
The six-hour blood-blooded plot made people want to finish it in one go. When the final episode of "Captivity" was broadcast on the BBC, it attracted 14 million British viewers, and its popularity was comparable to that of the BBC's popular action thriller "Bodyguard" last fall. This is not only due to the success of the director, but also to the current British Projection of reality - ubiquitous mass surveillance and the profound challenges to freedom posed by fake videos.
London, where the story takes place, is said to have the highest density of cameras in the Western world. As early as 2007, the Royal Society of Engineering disclosed in a survey report that there were 4.2 million CCTV surveillance cameras in the UK at that time, ranking fifth in the world, with an average of one for every 14 people. The average London resident is filmed and monitored by 300 cameras a day. According to a survey conducted by British professional consumer website Comparitech in September 2019, London remains the most camera-surveilled city in Europe.
Compared with Sean, the camera is more like the No. 1 character of the show. It appears repeatedly and almost becomes a symbol of fear and anxiety, and the fate of the male protagonist is only played by the manipulator behind the camera.
The British "Guardian" gave a high evaluation of the recently launched series, saying "if there is justice, everyone should be talking about 'Captivity' now." The film review also mentioned, "Britain is the world The country with the most spies, we are constantly being captured on CCTV, body cameras and drones."
Even more frightening than the cobwebcam is the abuse of deepfake technology and the consequent collapse of social traditional trust.
In reality, the male protagonist Sean watched the female lawyer get on the bus and then turned and left, but in the court, the camera video as important evidence showed the opposite fact: when a bus or two passed the camera, Sean and the female There was a physical altercation between the lawyers. Soon, the body of the female lawyer appeared in the trunk of a car Sean was driving.
An rights organization used deepfake technology to create this fake video, and hacked into the public camera system to release it, covering the original surveillance, with the intention of releasing the real video after the court convicted Sean to expose the loopholes in the judicial system. However, the intelligence department knew that this video was fake, but they could only use the trick to make Sean wronged and to maintain the justice image of the judiciary, rather than continue to handle the case through the fake video.
The road to hell is often paved with good intentions. Like human rights groups, the intelligence services are also producing fake videos as court evidence in the name of justice, in order to bring terrorists to justice. The intelligence department monitors the information obtained through the telephone network, but these methods are illegal and cannot be used as evidence in court. In the play, people from the intelligence department brainwashed the female police officer Rachel, who was bent on finding the truth: "The correction of the video is not false evidence, it is real, it is a reenactment."
Sean's Callum Turner is particularly impressed by the Netflix documentary "The Great Hack," which tells the story of how Cambridge Data Corporation used Facebook users' personal data to help Trump win the election. Deep, he told the outlet, "We've had the internet boom, but it's unbelievable how your data is being used and things like facial recognition are being used properly. Where is this data going? We don't know. This is an important moment in history for us, and we have to start to understand what our cyber power really is."
As writer Joe Quinn poignantly quipped: "No one in a modern movie would try to kill someone with a phone line, like Hitchcock's classic crime movie Dial M for Murder. As embodied, the phone, the keys, the curtains, all become the props of this conspiracy. But in the 21st century today, very few people under the age of 70 still use landlines.”
In "Captivity", it is no longer swords, guns and iron fists that kill, but cameras and Deepfake technology.
The challenge of weaponizing AI technology is looming. An article published in the recent issue of the American "War Dilemma" magazine stated that "artificial intelligence, machine learning and face swapping and other related technologies may be used by terrorist organizations and other countries' militaries and intelligence agencies, posing major challenges to American security issues. Intelligence agencies of other countries often use fraud, extortion and other methods to recruit personnel, and the use of face swapping technology will make such operations easier to achieve.”
Deepfake is just one of many face-changing technologies, and the recognition rate of human beings has exceeded 70%. For another technology, Face2Face, we use other real faces to replace the original faces, which do not involve human faces. Generate, for the face it makes, the recognition rate of humans is only 41%
Tech giants such as Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. have taken a series of measures to resist the proliferation of Deepfake fake videos: In September of this year, Facebook announced that it would spend $10 million to launch a joint venture with Microsoft, Partnership on AI and many universities. A deepfake detection challenge; in October, Google announced the open source of a large deepfake video dataset to support community research on deepfake detection. The face-swap identification algorithm recently disclosed by Microsoft Research Asia stated that the recognition rate for DeepFake reached 99.87%, the recognition rate for FaceSwap was 99.66%, and the recognition rate for Face2Face was 99.67%.
But people's ancient beliefs have been shaken: seeing is not necessarily believing. When people stop believing their eyes, Imprisonment is the scariest crime movie of the digital age.
(Author: Popov, technology business columnist, concerned about the world changed by technology; WeChat account: Popov)
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