Faking video footage :

Technology makes everything possible

By Mihindukulasuriya Susantha Fernando

Britain, has renewed calls for Sri Lanka to investigate allegations of war crimes after a video footage on Channel 4 of the UK showed summary execution of naked and bound prisoners. The film reportedly shows “trophy videos” taken on mobile phones allegedly by Sri Lankan soldiers taking part in the military operation in 2009 to crush the Tiger insurgency and end a 30-year conflict.

The video footage shown by Channel 4 has been cleverly faked by a pro-LTTE supporter in the UK, who had access to a cell phone with camera, computer and video editing software. The digital video “revolution” of the 1990s has given wide access to sophisticated editing and control technology, allowing many amateur artistes to work with video and to create interactive installations based on video.

Some examples of recent trends in video art include entirely digitally rendered environments created with no camera. Characters in a video scene can now be superimposed or removed altogether by new digital technology.

New video editing software lets you rearrange and even mix or combine different video clips. With timeline editing you can drag and drop video clips or files right where you want them. When you have all the clips you want together, you can add titles, menus and text. Many applications come with numerous menu and title templates and also let you add text effects.

For an even more stunning creation you can add music, narration or sound effects. Beginners can make use of a variety of free video editing software to edit their videos. Professional video editing software is a pricey purchase.

As video editing software becomes more advanced and prevalent, there have been concerns about the true reliability of video evidence. The latest video editing software, as available in the market today, can make a tampered video footage appear ‘perfectly real’.

Inadmissible in a court of law

Whether the disputed video footage is real or faked, it would be inadmissible in a court of law or war crimes tribunal, without the testimony of a qualified video technologist or a police officer present at the scene of the purported crime.

Even with such corroborative evidence, how does a court of law know that the tape is real? How do they know that it has not been edited or tampered with? How do they know that the people in the tape are the alleged Sri Lankan soldiers, or LTTE terrorists dressed as ‘Sri Lankan soldiers’? The LTTE made several incursions into Sinhala villages, disguised as Sri Lankan soldiers and sometimes as civilians.

As seen by the spurious allegations of war crimes based on the video footage shown on Channel 4, faked video footage can brainwash individuals to believe that what is shown therein is ‘absolutely true’. A study conducted in 2009 by Warwick University found that exposure to fabricated footage can “dramatically alter” individuals’ version of events, even convincing them to testify as an eyewitness to an event that never happened.

The study also found that almost 50 percent of people who were shown false footage of an event they witnessed first hand were prepared to believe the video version rather than what they actually saw.

Lead researcher Dr Kimberley Wade, Associate Professor of Psychology at Warwick University, said the results were “scary” and showed just how easily an eyewitnesses’ account of an event would be distorted.

Dr. Wade and her team filmed 60 subjects as they took part in a computerised gambling task. Each subject was unknowingly seated next to a member of the research team as they both separately answered a series of multiple-choice general knowledge questions. All the subjects were given a pile of fake money to gamble with and they shared a pile of money that represented the bank. Their task was to earn as much money as possible by typing in an amount of money to gamble on the chances of them answering each question correctly. They were told the person who made the highest profit would win a prize.

When the participants answered each question, they saw either a green tick on their computer monitor to show their answer was correct, or a red cross to show it was incorrect. If the answer was wrong, they would be told to return the money to the bank.

After the session, the video footage was doctored to make it look as if the member of the research team who sat next to the subject was cheating by not putting money back in the bank.

One third of the subjects were told that the person who sat next to them was suspected of cheating. Another third were told that that person had been caught on camera cheating, and the remaining group were actually shown the fake video footage. All subjects were then asked to sign a statement only if they had seen the cheating taking place.

Nearly 40 percent of the participants who had seen the doctored video complied. Another 10 percent of the group signed when asked a second time by the researchers.

Only 10 percent of those who were told the incident had been caught on film but were not shown the video agreed to sign, and about five percent of the control group who were just told about the cheating signed the statement.

Study implications

It is easy to doctor video footage with new technology, Dr Wade said: “The implications of this study mean we have to be more aware about new technology and about how easy it is to doctor video footage.

“You can’t believe everything you read or see and this is the first study of memory distortion that involved people actually accusing another person of doing something wrong, by evidence of doctored video footage.

“The results are quite powerful because the subjects who thought they saw the cheating also signed a statement saying they would be prepared to testify.

“So if this was a crime and they were witnesses, the person accused could actually end up in prison.”

Dr Wade also said that the subjects of the experiment had no idea they were involved in a memory distortion study and that they were really surprised when they found out that what they thought they had seen hadn’t actually taken place. She said: “The subjects were really intrigued when we told them the truth and most took it really well when they found out they had accused someone of doing something they hadn’t done”. “Over the previous decade we have seen rapid advances in digital-manipulation technology, among others, things such as airbrushing.

“As a result, almost anyone can create convincing, yet fake, images or video footage. Again our research shows that if fake footage is extremely compelling, it can induce people to testify about something they never witnessed.”

(The writer is a veteran video photographer, graphic artist, author and journalist.)