Some creators/distributors of ‘deepfake’ pornography, Nina Jankowicz writes at The Atlantic, “seem to believe that they have a right to distribute these images — that because they fed a publicly available photo of a woman into an application engineered to make pornography, they have created art or a legitimate work of parody.”

Jankowicz, who served as Executive Director of the federal government’s now-defunct “Disinformation Governance Board,” has good reason to be upset with the phenomenon of deepfake porn. She recently discovered that she’s been a subject of it. That’s presumptively both discomfiting and disgusting. I don’t blame her for not liking it one bit.

But creepy as deepfake porn — essentially using software to e.g. put a recognizable facsimile of a person’s head “on” the body of an actor in a pornographic video — may be,  it’s inescapably fiction and expression, and entitled to the same protection as other fiction and expression.

The title of Jankowicz’s piece is “I Shouldn’t Have to Accept Being in Deepfake Porn.” She DOESN’T have to. It doesn’t matter whether she does or not, because she isn’t in the porn. A photo of her — in fact,  an official US government portrait that’s in the public domain — is.

Jankowicz supports legislation that would “provide victims with somewhat easier recourse when they find themselves unwittingly starring in nonconsensual porn.”

But “nonconsensual porn” would involve abducting people and forcing them to engage in sexual acts on camera.  Jankowicz willingly sat for a photo that belongs to “the public” to do with as we wish.

Not everything disgusting violates rights, and only things which violate rights should be treated as crimes, or even actionable torts.

A 1996 Joe Klein novel and 1998 film, Primary Colors, featured  characters who were, recognizably, Bill and Hillary Clinton and members of the Clinton inner circle.  They’re portrayed as engaging in actions which may or may not have actually happened in real life, some of which arguably, to grab a Supreme Court ruling expression, “appeal to a prurient interest.”

Librarian Daria Carter-Clark, who had good reason to believe that one of the characters portrayed as having engaged in a sexual fling with the Bill Clinton character was based on her, sued for libel. She lost. Romans-a-clef — works in which real-life people and events are given fictional treatment — enjoy the same constitutional protections as other fiction.

And that’s exactly how it should be.

There are certainly some sick puppies out there, doing some sick things. We don’t have to like that, and it’s completely understandable when those targeted by such things feel wronged and damaged. But until and unless those sick puppies cross the actual line of coercion or violence, the only legitimate tool for changing their behavior is persuasion.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences,” reads the opening lines of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski’s notorious manifesto, “have been a disaster for the human race.”  Kaczynski, who recently died in prison, blamed that period of history not just for “severe damage to the natural world,” but for destabilizing society, making life unfulfilling and inflicting indignity and psychological suffering on humankind.

Perhaps not entirely in fairness, I fancy I detect a similar tone in Peter Bach’s recent “Letter from London” in CounterPunch. UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, Bach tells us, “genuinely reckons AI and its associated technology is capable of leading this country to an economic transformation that could ‘surpass the Industrial Revolution in speed and breadth.’ Bach finds it “difficult to be entirely enthusiastic about what in essence is a constant identification of AI as first and foremost a money-making machine.”

Personally, I’m a fan of the Industrial Revolution.

That revolution was far from flawless or harmless. For example, in England it was initially powered by the “Enclosure Movement,” which dispossessed farmers of their in-common land holdings, forcing them into the cities and to factory employment, while in America, Eli Whitney’s “gin” processed cotton so quickly that plantation owners turned to large-scale slave labor to feed it.

On the other hand, I’m the grandson of a sharecropper who got his own dirt farm during the Great Depression,  his first tractor and his first truck well into his career … and his first indoor toilet in the 1970s, a celebrated event in my family.

I’m unsurprised that my mother, who was born in a log cabin and hauled the household’s water half a mile from the nearest stream until the family could afford a well, married a mechanically inclined 8th-grade dropout who moved the two of them to the city and went into factory work (as two of their three sons, including me, later did also).

Monetary profit motive was the EFFICIENT cause of the Industrial Revolution, but its FINAL cause was making lives better.  The profit (at least when political games weren’t afoot, as they often were) lay in offering consumers cheaper, higher-quality, and more plentiful food, clothing, etc.

One offsetting factor for any perceived indignity, psychological suffering, or lack of fulfillment is that we each have more time to search for solutions to those problems. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, average life expectancy was about 35 years. Now it’s about 80 years.

While exploding population and its attendant demand created by the Industrial Revolution did indeed inflict damage on the natural world — deforestation, air pollution from burning wood and fossil fuels, etc. — continued industrial advances already point us toward ways of halting and undoing that damage, and our rapidly evolving AIs will no doubt have suggestions to offer on that front.

I can appreciate the down sides of the Industrial Revolution, but also realize that my life is better than that of a medieval peasant who owns one shirt and mostly drinks weak beer because the water is full of disease.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The case, many say, is long closed.

It’s been 70 years since the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of spying for the Soviet Union.

It’s been 28 years since the public release of decrypted Soviet cables revealing that Julius Rosenberg was indeed guilty, and at least strongly implying that Ethel Rosenberg knowingly participated in his espionage work — not just typing documents to hand over to his handlers, but even actively recruiting her own brother into the operation.

But we still don’t know the whole truth, and not everyone who’s interested in the truth has forever to wait around for it.

Michael and Robert Meeropol are, respectively, 80 and 76 years old.

They were, respectively, ten and six years old when their parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, went to their graves as convicted spies.

“Though we grew up believing in our parents’ innocence,” the brothers say in a June 16 statement, “as adults we adjusted our views as we learned more about the case. … the truth was more important than our beliefs.” The Soviet decrypts convinced them of their father’s guilt. But “we would like to know the full truth about our mother’s case before we die.”

The National Archives informs the Meeropol brothers that it possesses half a million pages of still-classified information that could be relevant to a Freedom of Information Act request they filed in pursuit of that truth. The NSA admits to  possessing still more such information. “We were told that it will take years just to review the documents, let alone declassify them and make them public.”

It’s already BEEN years. Seventy years since the Rosenbergs’ executions, 72 years since their convictions, 73 years since their arrests, and for that matter more than 30 years since the Soviet Union disappeared into history’s dustbin.

The kind of information involved — on, per Wikipedia, “American radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines, and nuclear weapon designs” — has all almost certainly long since become widely known, or obsolete, or both.

Similarly, any information pertaining to US intelligence “sources and methods” has been superseded by new sources and new methods.

Why does the US government continue to keep these particular secrets?

The only answer that fits is “because they can.”

And not just in this case. The US government has continued to hide information on the JFK assassination case,  “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” aka UFOs,  and heaven only knows what other things, for decades on end, without penalty and absent any accountability, throwing out the phrase “national security” as a trump card any time they’re pushed on such matters.

We really need to fix that. All of it. ASAP.

And we should start by getting two old men some answers about their mom before they follow her into eternity.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY