Imagine it is the spring of 2019. A bottom-feeding website, perhaps tied to Russia, “surfaces” video of a sex scene starring an 18-year-old Kirsten Gillibrand. It is soon debunked as a fake, the product of a user-friendly video application that employs generative adversarial network technology to convincingly swap out one face for another. It is ...

This year, we need to start fixing American democracy. On the technical level, 2020 saw exceptionally successful elections under exceptionally difficult circumstances. People voted in unprecedented numbers despite the coronavirus pandemic. Their votes were counted with no major difficulties. In states such as Georgia, paper records and auditing procedures made it possible to verify the ...