The latest uptick in GPS Spoofing has commercial pilots alarmed. The basic challenge here is that nefarious individuals and/or countries are trying to disrupt those who rely on the GPS signal for navigation. Here is a link to an excellent article from the WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/electronic-warfare-spooks-airlines-pilots-and-air-safety-officials-60959bbd?st=d2Ja3q&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Spoofing has such an innocent sound to it … implying something akin to poking fun at a topic. Perhaps the best example of this in modern media is the Babylon Bee which makes no claim to be anything more than an almost endless stream of thought-provoking fun:
https://babylonbee.com/news/kamala-safe-and-in-stable-condition-after-attempted-interview
But, where is the line between thought-provoking and malicious? I was always taught that making fun of someone was wrong, and spreading misinformation was also wrong. Isn’t this a direct violation of one of the ten commandments: do not bear false witness?
The Babylon Bee article introduces creative writing and humor to soften the tone, and does offer a chilling reminder of the name calling so prevalent in today’s news cycle:
The FBI arrived at the scene shortly thereafter and discovered that the would-be interviewer was in possession of several notepads, pens, a cellphone, and a camera authorities believed was intended to capture the event for a livestream or video. “Isn’t that sick?” said a campaign insider. “This nutjob had this all planned out. He was coming out here for the specific purpose of interviewing Kamala Harris — and he was trying to record himself doing it. This is the type of America we can expect under Donald Trump.”
I don’t have space in a blog to fully describe the range of spoofing but consider two extremes for illustration: parody where the intent is clearly to poke fun and offer insight, and cybercrime where we are being baited to lower our guard so someone can steal our critical security information.
Compounding all this is AI which is being used to tailor the messaging methods to further lower your guard by offering deep fakes of individuals you normally do trust. A major bank was bilked out of millions by one of these deep fake videos of an officer requesting a funds transfer that virtually no one detected as illegitimate.
We all seem to be in a password and two factor authentication phases right now thinking that we can defeat these criminals, but if anyone stole our phones they probably could easily get past all this.
The AI genie is out of the bottle. We are in a form of spoof prevention escalation that will eventually drive us all to trust someone or something to protect us. Who will offer that, and can we trust them?
This all points to future dystopian madness. The ability to and cost effectiveness of manipulating the masses is rising exponentially. Perhaps we caught TikTok today, but that just taught nefarious players to be more covert. Is YouTube next? I don’t think so.
I remember first reading the book 1984 thinking we would all be on drugs but did not even consider this would be digital drug addiction. Is there a safe level for digital addiction? And, if not, what are we going to do about all this? Just say “no” as in the famous drug reduction efforts in the 1980s and 1990s? This is going to take a lot of personal discipline and conviction.
In my opinion, it is just too easy to keep saying “yes” until we are hooked.