Irish Political Turkeys voting for Christmas
The “Violence or Hatred Offences Bill 2022” has serious flaws, and the biggest victims will be the politicians themselves!
Ireland is just one of the countries in the process of bringing in anti-hate speech legislation. I should note that Ireland already has existing anti-hate speech legislation in the form of the Prohibition of Incitement To Hatred Act, 1989. There is an EU directive that is driving Ireland (and other EU countries) to revise their anti-hate speech legislation: Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of 28 November 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law.
If we look compare our 1989 act with the EU directive, our existing laws go beyond the EU directive in some areas but primarily our 1989 act does not include an offence of denying the Holocaust.
Content such as The Curious case of Former Holocaust Denier Eric Hunt necessarily has to include some of the claims of Holocaust deniers in order to show how those claims can be debunked. The 1989 act does not provide a pre-canned defence for such necessary and valid usage so in revising the act to align with the EU directive it would be important to allow the use of such content for reasonable and genuine contribution to literary, artistic, political, scientific, religious or academic discourse.
The same year our current act was written, 1989, was also the year the web was born. Our legislators in 1989 can be forgiven to have only considered written material at the time they were drafting the law, so obviously when revising the law they decided to take the opportunity to widen the scope to include electronic information.
While there are a number of issues with the legislation, I would like to focus on two specific aspects resulting from the changes introduced around the preparation and possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred against others. This is a section of our law that is not required by EU Council directive 2008/913/JHA and is instead a significant widening of scope of section 4 and section 9 of the existing 1989 act. Sadly the widening of scope presents multiple ways for the act to be abused both against genuine well intentioned citizens but also the act can be trivially targetted at politicians themselves!
The first concern I have is that it will be an offence to simply possess material that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a protected group of people.
According to the act, material “means anything that is capable of being looked at, read, watched or listened to, either directly or after conversion from data stored in another form”. That could be traditional material such as a book or a flyer/pamphlet. In this modern digital age, however, it is more likely to be a digital file on your computer or phone. How many files do you have on your computer?1 Do you even know how to access the files that are stored on your phone? When you browse a web page, normally the content of that page will be stored on your disk in a cache so that the page can load faster next time you visit it. Even if you delete the cache, the files may still be there due to a concept known as wear levelling that is used to prolong the life of newer SSD disks used in your phone/tablet and most laptops.
If somebody sends you an email which is likely to incite violence or hatred against a protected group of people, even if you don’t open the email, it’s on your computer. You are in possession of the material.
Apple included a copy of the original Bitcoin white paper in every version of OS-X since 2018. There was also that time when Apple pushed a whole U2 album onto everyone’s phone.
Apps like WhatsApp and Telegram will pre-emptively pull all sorts of files shared in groups you are in on to your phone and computer so that they can display faster if you decide to open the chat group. You are in possession of the material
In this age where everyone has given the power to auto-update software on their computers and phones to probably hundreds of tech companies, it is impossible to know or control what you posses on your devices.
This brings the second concern I have, namely that you will be guilty of the offence unless you can prove you have a legitimate reason for having the content. This is an inversion of the burden of proof.
You will need to have significant resources to be able to challenge the presumption of guilt. If the offence is tried without a jury, you face up to 6 months in jail plus a class C fine. If the offence is tried with a jury, you face up to two years in jail plus a class A fine. When they offer you a plea bargain and you are looking at a down-side of potentially two years in jail and you start from the presumption of guilt, and you are not even contesting that the content was found on your computer… that’s a difficult hill to climb for an uncertain outcome, taking the plea may become exceedingly tempting.
Of course the material doesn’t even have to be on your computer. Maybe you have the content on a USB stick or even a microSD card.2
Anyone with an axe to grind could easily hide a microSD card in your jacket / garden / house / car / etc. If you were in possession of material on a microSD card that is likely to incite violence or hate, the most obvious excuse you would make is that somebody planted it on you, though that does not appear to be one of the approved defences in 10(2).
Under the existing 1989 act, if somebody left a copy of a book containing hate speech in your house you would technically be in possession, but a book is a lot easier to spot than a microSD card. Additionally under the 1989 act you could make the defence that you were unaware of the content of the book. That defence has been removed in the new act.
I have not even got into the many ways somebody could hide content in a file. The legislation is designed to tackle encrypted data because you will be obliged to provide your phone and passwords to the Gardaí (the Irish police). Failure to provide a password when requested is also an offence.
If you do not provide a password or encryption key for a file on your computer (or a microSD card found in your property) that’s subject to a Class A fine and up to 12 months in jail.
How do we differentiate between somebody who does not know the password or does not have the decryption key and somebody who only claims they do not? It is the likely defence of the guilty person to claim they do not know the password and do not have the decryption keys. A Garda will be unable to tell if a file with random data is just random data or if it actually contains hate inciting material if only the suspect would stop obstructing the execution of the warrant and provide the decryption key.
But what about the Turkey’s voting for Christmas?
With any investigation you are typically told to “follow the money”. In politics you should maybe try to “follow the power” instead.
Who gains from the possession and use of material that is likely to incite violence or hate? Historically there is one group of people who have gained the most power through the use of this type of material… politicians!
Other than sociopaths who may use such material as a match so they can watch the world burn, it is politicians who have the most to gain from the use of such material.3
If a complaint is made to the Gardaí that a given politician is using such material, they will have to investigate as politicians have the most to gain from such content.
Enter the AI technologies…
I think most people by now have see the various audio deep fakes of say Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan the technology to create audio deep fakes is getting more and more accessible.
For example there is a (two years old and already outdated) project on GitHub that can make reasonable approximations of your speech from just a 5 second sample. With that project I took this short audio clip of Leo Varadkar as a seed…
which generated this:
It’s not great… maybe 6/10… to my mind the early part sounds quite like Leo, but the end not so much. I only used one six second sample of Leo’s voice4 and this is two year old technology! The newer technology will generate almost indistinguishable audio if you give it a few hours worth of audio of the chosen target speaking just as it was used to generate the Jordan & Joe deep fakes.
ChatGPT is really good at writing text in the style of somebody that it was trained on, though it does have limitations against creating text that is hateful, but it wouldn’t be difficult to roll your own version based on existing open source models and parameters that wouldn’t have such limiters.
Politicians have all their speeches transcribed and made available online. Typically there is also videos of their speeches. If you wanted to generate content in the style of any given politician and an audio version of that content it would not be difficult.
The allegory of the regime change
Consider the following…5
If you are somebody who politically leans towards -for the sake of illustration- the extreme-centre and you have decided that you need to replace all the current political parties from power, you face an up-hill battle in convincing others to vote for you, namely that people don’t want to waste their vote on somebody who will not get elected. This is even the case with Ireland and our proportional representation system where your vote will transfer down your list of preferences. This new extreme-centre party would face a long and slow battle to gain new seats.
Much better would be if you could remove all your competition. So you get your core group of supporters to join all the political party grass-root organisations. At the same time you start training AI language and speech models for all the politicians while you bide your time.
Your supporters should be using this time to plant microSD cards on the various party activists with model generated hate material. You want to build up a wall of evidence that the Gardaí can find when they look.
About 2 months before an election would be called, you strike. Your embedded supporters now approach the Gardaí with some concern… they were just at a meeting where the politician was trying to incite hate. They secretly recorded the audio on their phone6… “sorry for the poor quality”… so the Gardaí have audio “evidence” of a speech inciting violence or hate… they have one of the microSD cards that was “handed out” at the end of the meeting… and everyone else who was at the meeting has those microSD cards plus others with previous speeches. To be clear, this would be all fake content and manufactured evidence created by the extreme-centre party that is trying to eliminate all the other parties.
Will the Gardaí dismiss the audio and the provided microSD (and by giving it to a Garda as evidence the extreme-centre supporters have demonstrated their defence for possession) and not search the politicians and their grass-roots support team? I think they would have to investigate and search… and then they will find all the planted material. Each politician will have their own unique material written in their style making it look genuine and harder to prove it’s all the actual conspiracy of the extreme-centre.
The parties attacked in this way would be decimated with both their candidates and more critically their grass-roots teams facing prosecution and each up to two years in jail. The media would refuse to allow politicians accused of hate speech on the air. And to think that the politicians voted for this too.
It need not be limited to this fictional extreme-centre party. Right now there are two largish parties occupying the slightly right of centre ground: Fine Gael and Fianna Fail. Many have long wondered if one of those parties is redundant. If one wanted to take out the other, this kind of attack could be fatal to the other party and very difficult to stop.
Perhaps more likely is that individual candidates would use this technique against their constituency opponents rather than one party going after another or even the fictional extreme-centre trying to instigate a regime change, but all it takes is sufficient motivation and access to a teenager with some simple tech skills.
Turkeys voting for Christmas at least know they’ll be centre stage at the party. But the politicians cannot even see how they are voting in the very instrument that can be used to eliminate them from being elected ever again!
I have over 3.3 million files on my computer. I do not know what is in most of them. If someone found a way to put a file on my computer, I likely would not find it or even know it was there, but I would be in possession of that file and whatever contents it has.
You can get microSD cards quite cheaply. I did a quick search on the internet and found 1GB microSD cards for $1.50 each not even including bulk quantity discounts
While journalists or anyone in the media who has income that is related to their audience/reach can also use incitement of hate to help grow their audience/reach, they actually have to publish that material to use it.
The software recommends using at least three different samples of the target’s voice as a seed. Due to a compatibility issue with the newer version of my computer’s operating system I could only get it to generate output using one sample as the seed. The newer deep-fake programs would have worked better if I had been willing to spend an hour or two reading their documentation to find out how to use them.
While this example may seem extreme, with the legislation in its current form it is only a matter of time before a group of people decide to leverage the over-reach in the legislation to grab for political power. I am highlighting this in an effort to make politicians realise the mistake they are making and give them a chance to fix it before it blows up in their faces.
What the extreme-centre would do is use a deep fake to generate the audio. Then they stage a presentation with multiple people making light background noise in a hall and play the audio over a PA system. The person who will be reporting the target can now record the audio using their phone in their pocket. Digital forensics will show that the audio recording on their phone was recorded on their phone and has not been modified. Because the phone is in a pocket and there’s light background noise and sounds the deep fake will be indistinguishable from the target.
It would be an egregious error to believe that the law was thus written in a moment of shortsightedness. This is intentional weaponisation. Wrongspeak and thought crimes are here.
Just an update. One of the Senators shared a portion of the legal analysis that was prepared for the government on Section 10 of this new bill.
The analysis is quite interesting, and I am working on a post to explain as I dig through it.
So far it looks like they completely missed this “attack vector” for misuse of the bill. I think on the basis of the analysis supplied that the general public may have *slightly* less to worry about from this bill… the problem I see is that the only way to defend against someone trying to frame you may actually be to lie and claim the information planted on you was for personal use, so to minimise risk of jail, you would have to accept reputation damage
However I believe the “attack vector” actually remains completely valid if one wanted to decimate a political party or even the whole democratic system and had a few thousand Euro, a loyal group of about 200 co-conspirators and a nerdy teenager to wire up the AI tech. This is because this “attack vector” includes a (fake) demonstration of intent to distribute thereby removing the ability to claim personal use only, given that all but one of your witnesses also have possession with (fake) intent to distribute (the fake audio recording could include something like “take three cards each to give to people you think can be recruited” and thus with everyone having 3 cards planted on them the argument goes… and anyway, why would you have more than one card with the same content *unless* you planned to distribute)