The Cyber Defense eMagazine March Edition for 2024

Lord of the Flies scenario when politicians are being deepfaked, gamers are sending very real SWAT
teams to raid each other, and people are purchasing tokens backed by absolutely nothing with their actual
money?
This isn’t some theory, it isn’t remote, and it isn’t in the future. It’s happening today, and it’s affecting
every one of us, our businesses, our environment, causes we believe in, our government, and even our
friends and family. The Reality War is bending everything into a distortion field where the mechanisms
for society fail.
Take, for example, the recent October 7 th attacks in Israel, and the military response in Gaza. There is a
huge (dis)information component to this battle, and one of the biggest causes of some truly catastrophic
fractures in our society is that people can’t even seem to agree on basic facts. When Pearl Harbor was
attacked, there was no debate as to who struck America. Today, there are already a dozen versions of
what happened at the music festival on October 7 th circulating at scale in the information sphere.
This is about to be very real for people: you might once have worried about a hacker getting your debit
card number or freezing you out of your Facebook page, but now a nefarious actor might steel your very
face, voice, and speech patterns. The risk is so much higher and the threat so much deeper today than
in any moment in the digital revolution.
By the way, don’t think for a moment that this only applies to Boomers on Facebook and Gen Z on TikTok.
These memes are incredibly contagious. They leap from doomscrolling to network media to the dinner
table in minutes. No segment of society is left out of the Reality War.
Of course, I am neither the first nor the deepest-thinking person to call attention to this issue. A few
excellent examples include Jon Askonas’ series in The New Atlantis, “Reality: A Post-Mortem” and Renee
DiResta’s excellent piece “Mediating Consent”, along with the book LikeWar: The Weaponization of
Social Media, by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking. But I do think the framing as a full-on war against
Reality is important.
So what are we to do? We need to raise awareness that the Reality War is happening. We need citizens
to make an extra effort to be informed from credible sources, to develop the ability to trust expertise and
parse information effectively.
This isn’t easy, because Reality War attacks the immune system of the body politic: information, media,
and credentials.
So, we must go further. Technologies like deepfakes, bots, and AIs must be regulated like the weapons
of mass reality distortion that they really are. Deepfaking someone should be a federal offense with a
hefty sentence. There have been efforts on Capitol Hill, in the White House, and other nations as well to
start to do this, but it has to be taken seriously. A realization that our political class is not immune from
the Realty War is needed. It will require political leadership that is willing to cast aside the short term
political advantages available by using the Reality War to implement necessary regulation. The cost of
nefarious Reality Warfare must be steep, and punishment relentless and swift. I do not take a call for
regulation lightly, but these technologies are just as dangerous as other things we readily regulate, and
they will move much more quickly.
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