Security Intelligence: Facial Recognition, Deepfakes and Biometric PII: Preparing for a Future of Faceless Threats

As I anxiously awaited the last season of “Game of Thrones,” I found myself thinking about my favorite character from the series: the assassin who belongs to the mysterious cult of “Faceless Men.” Specifically, I thought about his ability to change his face and appearance at will, and how this character parallels the emergence of deepfake images and videos and the science of facial recognition.

After some cursory research into the creation of deepfake videos and a few of the forensic tricks used to distinguish real videos from the ones created by generative adversarial networks (GANs) backed by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, I considered how these deepfakes would impact the field of cyberthreat intelligence and the intelligence community as a whole. Then I came up with a couple of ways artificially intelligent systems could have a positive impact on the intelligence community.