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tenor of the presidential campaign. Similarly, President Bush took a hit in 2002 when a photo of him holding a book upside down during a visit to the George Sanchez Charter School reinforced his reputation with some as a dunce, until the photo was proved a fake.
Plummer and Kenney, however, warn that this is just the start. Fake documents and images will begin to creep into court cases. Entire fake personal histories could emerge. On average, a person will get photographed 10 times in a five-block walk in a major city center, Plummer pointed out. Altering the data could put you where you weren't.
"We have no mechanism to do authentication of images, to tell us it has not changed," Plummer said. "There will be manipulation where you can't tell what happened."
Identity theft--which claimed 9.4 million victims in the U.S. last year--will only spread. Legal protection and enforcement on all of these issues remains hazy. Terrorists could even employ counterfeiting techniques to simulate a beheading and achieve the same result without the hassle of getting a hostage.
The bright side, of course, is that there's money to be made out of this. Gartner call this a "magic quadrant" opportunity: a $10 billion a year business by 2015, according to Kenney's estimates. Research institutes are beginning to calve off companies, such as Imaging Forensics, that specialize in authentication. Other scientists will use these techniques to filter through clues and red herrings at murder sites.
The technology and concepts are also likely to find their way into the entertainment field. In the future, amusement parks may offer to create a virtual baby for customers, Plummer said. Attendants will take a saliva swab of two adults, feed the genetic data into a computer, and then spit out a 3D image of what a child from the couple might look like. The special effects machine in Hollywood will gobble up any advances in counterfeiting.
Still, kinks will need to be worked out. Artificial intelligence--one of the principal technologies for creating simulated reality--remains an evolving art. In the final episode of the "Lord of the Rings" movie trilogy, soldiers march among the elephant-looking beasts. In the first run-through, the soldiers contained an artificial intelligence algorithm for self-preservation.
"When they released the elephants, the soldiers ran away," Plummer said.
Biography
Michael Kanellos is editor at large at CNET News.com, where he covers hardware, research and development, start-ups and the tech industry overseas. He has worked as an attorney, travel writer and sidewalk hawker for a time share resort, among other occupations.
