Madi Hime is taking a deep drag on a blue vape in the video, her eyes shut, her face flushed with pleasure. The 16-year-old exhales with her head thrown back, collapsing into laughter that causes smoke to billow out of her mouth. The clip is grainy and shaky – as if shot in low light by someone who had zoomed in on Madi’s face – but it was damning. Madi was a cheerleader with the Victory Vipers, a highly competitive “all-star” squad based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Vipers had a strict code of conduct; being caught partying and vaping could have got her thrown out of the team. And in July 2020, an anonymous person sent the incriminating video directly to Madi’s coaches.
Eight months later, that footage was the subject of a police news conference. “The police reviewed the video and other photographic images and found them to be what we now know to be called deepfakes,” district attorney Matt Weintraub told the assembled journalists at the Bucks County courthouse on 15 March 2021. Someone was deploying cutting-edge technology to tarnish a teenage cheerleader’s reputation.
But a little over a year later, when Spone finally appeared in court to face the charges against her, she was told the cyberharassment element of the case had been dropped. The police were no longer alleging that she had digitally manipulated anything. Someone had been crying deepfake. A story that generated thousands of headlines around the world was based on teenage lies, after all. When the truth finally came out, it was barely reported – but the videos and images were real.
The issue here is the police having anything to do with digital forensics…this should have been outsourced to a group that knows how to detect these things and not some cop that barely knows the traffic laws in his own state.
Barely?
In my experience ops don’t know shit. It’s all about “gut feelings”. "Well “his feels illegal so I’m gonna arrest them and if I’m wrong I get to sit at my desk all day or go on a paid vacation” is how it is.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been stopped by cops for riding my bicycle on the road. Literally to the point where I have a laminated card I keep in my wallet with the relevant laws saying “this bike is illegal on a sidewalk and cars must give way on the road”
I’ve had a few threaten to arrest me “for being a piece of shit” or “for wasting my time” like I’m the one who made them stop…
I’ve been stopped because I “fit a description” multiple times, the “description” being “man on a bike” with nothing else, supposedly.
I’ve been stopped for speeding in a school zone before, and if it wouldn’t have been a waste of time, I’d have let it go to court and showed my helmet camera video that clearly shows my phone GPS as well as cycling computer (glorified speedometer) readout that clearly shows I was well under 25. Granted I’ve gone 49 in a 45 for about 3 seconds before I realized one rock and I’m dead and slowed down, there’s 0 chance of me speeding past 20 on flat ground unless I’m trying to set a personal best.
I’ve been stopped for “being a road hazard”, not having enough reflective things, having “too many lights” (one forward flasher, one steady, and one rear/one steady rear light), not signaling “and hand signals don’t count anymore” lol OK…
Pretty much whatever they feel like stopping you for, they’ll stop you and come up with a half-assed excuse later. They don’t know the laws they enforce, and if they did, they would be considered a liability to other cops and quickly be ejected.
Good gravy. Glad I live in Seattle. They are finally make a few physically separated bike lanes instead of just painting a bike symbol on the side of the road.
Hell, the supreme court codified “gut feeling” into fucking law.
I can’t remember the name of the case, but it was referenced in “Talking to Strangers” by Malcolm Gladwell. A guy was pulled over because the cop believed the lens to his taillight was cracked, which led to an arrest on drug possession charges. Turns out, the state that they were in didn’t have a law about ‘cracked lenses’, but the cop thought they did. Our fucked up SC upheld the probable cause, the resulting search and seizure, and all the rest of the fruit of the poisonous tree by saying: "that the officer thought the activity was illegal was enough basis for a probable cause stop.
We are truly fucked, ladies and gentlemen.
I’ve always thought it was nuts that cyclists are told not to use sidewalks. If a cyclist hits a pedestrian on a sidewalk, it sucks but it isn’t that big of a thing. Comparatively, if a car hits a cyclist on the road, then the damage to human health can be far worse. So why put the cyclist in that situation if a sidewalk exists?
As someone in the more rural bits, I’ve ridden my bike on 2 lane non marked roads a few times - however, the amount of social media complaining in my town is absolutely appealing when it comes to cars. People complaining about speeding, then complaining about people going 2mph under the speed limit. I do my best to stick to trails or sidewalks because if you happen to inconvenience anyone - they might make it a point for you to have a bad day. And that’s sad.
Some PDs do have their own digital forensics units. It isn’t a task handed to patrolmen
It’s incredibly rare a patrolman has access to DF tools at all.
They aren’t given to patrolmen. They have dedicated and specially trained units. Otherwise the evidence can be nullified.
Source: have worked in digital forensics.
There are several agencies that have some patrolmen doing on-scene digital forensics in the US.
Source: I currently work in digital forensics and have trained patrolmen.
On-scene stuff is a bit different. You’re not doing the actual analytics on scene if you can help it, you’re obtaining the evidence. Of course that still needs specialist training, you can’t simply copy and paste shit, but it’s very different to what goes on in the forensic lab.
Yeah absolutely. We’re on the same page. Just pointing out that they’re slowly rolling more tech out to the knuckle draggers which can be concerning if not done properly (and a lot of the time it isn’t).
Indeed. I’d say the on-site guys really need training. Beyond working directly on the master image and writing to it or reporting false findings, there isn’t as much that can be irrevocably fucked up in the analytics room.
Acquisition is a whole different story. One seemingly small fuck up and the evidence is toast.
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The BIs are usually who handle this stuff, but it sounds like this never was sent up to the state investigation units. This literally sounds like bob came off patrol and said “heard about them deepfakes must be one of them”
Either a woman with no background in digital technology had made a sophisticated deepfake on her iPhone 8, or a 16-year-old had panicked and lied to her mother about vaping, or mother and daughter had decided together to explain away behaviour they knew would get Madi in trouble, with an elaborate story about digital manipulation. The police chose to believe the first explanation.
“They never understood deepfakes, and the implications of giving a press conference scaring people into thinking someone could take an image and turn it into something else so easily,” Birch says. “I don’t think they ever thought this thing would spread like wildfire and become a worldwide phenomenon.”
A small police force made a mistake that became too big to fix. “Once it blew up, the police couldn’t extricate themselves without losing face.”
As always, ACAB.
edit to add
And then there was this …
These would be the last public comments (Officer Matthew) Reiss made about the case. On 26 May 2021 he was arrested on suspicion of possessing images of child sexual abuse. Two images had been uploaded to his Gmail account, and detectives had traced them to his IP address. When they raided his home and seized his electronic devices, they found more than 1,700 images and videos depicting children, including 84 of toddlers and infants. Reiss pleaded guilty in March 2022, and was later sentenced to 11 and a half to 23 months in jail. To use Weintraub’s language, if anyone was “preying on juveniles”, it was the police officer who led the investigation.
Only 1-2 years for possessing literally hundreds of CP images and videos? What the fuck? I mean I guess he didn’t harm anyone directly (as far as we know) but still, come on.
I could of sworn I’ve seen other CSM PDF files getting over a decade in jail. Pays off to be a criminal cop.
Nah that’s a pretty light sentence, he definitely got some leniency because he’s fuzz.
I wonder how much money the Hime family has donated to the Doylestown Police Department.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” - Orwell, 1984
I guess I can see why this is being posted, but if you are entering this era thinking that because you’ve seen a video of something that it must have happened…well, you haven’t been paying much attention and opening yourself up to being easily manipulated.
Honestly, this is what I consider to be the clear danger of generative “AI”. We’ve basically gone several steps backward toward a world where we can’t prove something happened because recording technology doesn’t exist because it can be faked well enough and easily enough to cast doubt on any recording.
Sure, experts can analyze it and deem it legit or not legit but for the average person its becoming harder and harder to tell. Word spreads fast, and it’s been demonstrated that lies spread faster than their corrections by orders of magnitude. All it takes is for something to “go viral” or someone with authority to lazily confirm or deny that something is real/fake and the public at large loses touch with reality.
This plus the insane misinformation campaigns and those that cry “fake news” whenever the news contains information they don’t like… I feel like truth and reality are becoming unfashionable.
Sure, experts can analyze it and deem it legit or not legit but for the average person its becoming harder and harder to tell.
Frankly, I think that’s exactly what will also be its downfall in such cases. At a certain amount of exposure of such material, people will stop caring, because of how common it will be. The larger issue is not how to tell what’s fake, but how to tell what’s true. Large players, such as governments or corporations, can and will abuse this tech for whatever narrative they need.
Confirmation bias just leads people to believe whatever confirms their beliefs. Now we can give anyone anything they need to confirm their beliefs.
This article took way too long to get to the fact that this was a massive police fuckup.
Fuck ups are unintentional. They did this shit on purpose
imagine caring this much about what teens do.
Jesus christ your life must be so boring. I get wanting to be a good influence and stuff but like holy shit dude.
If you don’t care about what teenagers do, you end up with a country full of twats.
If you haven’t noticed it’s not the teenagers that are giant twats it’s the fucking boomers wanting us to all be christo-fascists. They literally elected, “grab her by the pussy” guy.
You dumb?
You dumb?
yeah, which is why you care about people not teenagers
It’s harder to change the behaviour of adults, much easier to grow them right.
yeah and notoriously rebellious and anti-authority teenagers are going to respond well to an authority figure?
nope, you’ve got to give them the framework to be able to conceptualize their experience of the world properly. Which we aren’t doing when we say “no vaping”
It’s a difficult problem, it’s been studied for centuries, there doesn’t seem to be a correct answer to the problem.
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Yeah The vape’s going to fucking brain rot them right?
I think the original comment was saying nobody should give a fuck what teens do when it comes to stuff like that, because you can’t prevent it, teens do drugs (nicotine is a drug)
I will add that the only person that should care is the child’s parents, but the same principles apply. They can’t stop them, but they should educate them on the potential downsides of consuming certain things at their age.
Huh. I thought the original commenter meant Why did anyone report on teenage drama in the first place?
The laws should have never gotten involved except in the instance with the bathing suit.
Please people, handle your petty grievances about puritanical bullshit without involving the violent gang known as police officers.
Did that guy who got arrested for making deep fakes that implicated a school official in corription get out yet or will he have to languish for years before it gets overturned?
They have logs of him using the school’s network to visit ai audio generators, so that case will probably stick…
Ah yeah. I see they found evidence he was stealing money and the principle was investigating so he tried to get him canceled by fabricating racism.
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And also, extracurricular groups forcing a code of conduct akin to purity tests need to go the fuck away. If they want to exploit the talent and hard work of kids for personal monetary gain, you’d think they’d be less of a dick about it.
She apparently did send the texts she was guilty of sending. Which was a misdemeanor and for which she paid restitution. But, as was already said, the videos were on social media and that doesn’t give the pedophile cop the right to make up some deepfake bullshit, which results in a public press conference accusing her of it, and that results in things like her neighbor threatening to kill her because he thought she was a pedophile.
The poster neither said nor implied that this justified what the cops did, only pointed out that what this lady did was still still incredibly petty. It’s a story of all bad guys.
That’s not how things seemed to me at all. She wasn’t trying to get the other girl kicked off the team. The other girl was potentially putting her daughter at risk, and she was just trying to keep her daughter safe.
Whether or not some teenage partying is actually a significant risk, I don’t really have a strong view on, but I can certainly understand the thought process.
If your concern is about safety, why are you trying to mask who you’re sending it from and complaining about them posting pictures in revealing clothing?
Maybe she was worried that raising those concern’s could potentially have her daughter sidelined?
I missed that part about the revealing clothing. Maybe you’re right, and it’s just unchecked puritanism. Perhaps I’m giving this lady too much benefit of the doubt.
She didn’t take the videos. They were on social media.
I interpreted “taking” here as getting it from one place and moving it to another. Although it’s certainly not clear.
Right? She tried to ruin a young person’s life over vaping. I said that above and got downvoted.
The accusations are the punishment. It’s used all over the place.
What the fuck kind of narc sent it to her coaches.
I used to have a coworker whose daughter was in competitive cheer. It’s like any youth competition – the parents can lose their goddamn minds over it. If there was a chance somebody could DQ a competing team, or perhaps open up a spot on a team by narcing on one of the current members, somebody is gonna do it.
Great digital forensic team. Dipshits.
I dont get what the issue was with the video in the first place. And why would someone send something like this? Who gives as if kids party? Code of conduct rules for school clubs shouldnt be a thing either.
Yeah, IMO that the clip was real is only marginally better than a deep fake being used. As long as no one is pressured to do anything they don’t want to do and they aren’t using intoxication to justify actual shitty behavior, who cares?
Who gives a shit, let the teen have fun for fucks sake, cops here actually did a good thing for the girl by saying it was a deepfake.
So this lady wanted to get a cheerleaders life ruined for vaping?
Her lifes not ruined. Get out with the slippery slope shit.
Only because it didn’t stick.
Only because it’s trivial bullshit and life goes on.
