The 2021 Canadian Federal Election remains shrouded in the shadow of Chinese interference, with numerous reports and accusations pointing towards a deliberate attempt to influence the outcome in favor of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. Leaked intelligence documents suggested Chinese diplomats directed funds to 11 candidates, actively campaigned for specific individuals, and even attempted to sway Chinese-Canadian voters through targeted disinformation campaigns. Canadians aren’t unaware that China’s interference significantly influenced Trudeau’s win. This episode obviously left a dark stain on the legitimacy of the Canadian elections.
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The winds of change are gusting through Canadian politics, carrying with them a palpable fear in the halls of the Liberal Party. This fact is not lost on Trudeau that the tide of public opinion is shifting towards the Conservative Party under Poilievre’s rising star. Recent polls solidify this shift, with a staggering 42% of committed voters expressing preference for the Conservatives compared to only 23% for the Liberals. This dramatic 19-point gap, the largest since the Liberals’ 2015 victory, paints a grim picture for Trudeau’s future. Driven by desperation, rumors swirl of Trudeau resorting to his old playbook, this time seeking the sinister assistance of his Chinese masters and harnessing the power of AI as a weapon to sway the upcoming elections.
Now the Canadian cyber espionage agency has a stark warning that bad actors are planning to use artificial intelligence tools to sway the next federal election — and it won’t be able to identify every deceptive deepfake video deployed.
The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) issued the alert in a new cyber threat report released Wednesday morning.
The foreign signals intelligence agency said “it’s very likely” that foreign adversaries or “hacktivists” will use AI to influence voters ahead of Canada’s next federal election.
“We assess that foreign adversaries and hacktivists are likely to weaponize generative AI within the next two years to create deepfake videos and images depicting politicians and government officials,” says the report.
Deepfakes are fake videos manipulated digitally to appear real.
The agency — Canada’s primary authority on cyber security — cautioned it probably won’t be able to stay on top of the sheer volume of deepfake videos it anticipates.
“We assess it very likely that the capacity to generate deepfakes exceeds our ability to detect them. Current publicly available detection models struggle to reliably distinguish between deepfakes and real content,” the CSE says in its report. There are thousands of deepfakes in circulation already that manipulate video clips of politicians, said CSE.
Not to mention, recently there emerged reports which revealed that China has launched a “spamouflage” campaign. The campaign is all about using waves of online posts to discredit Canadian MPs. Global Affairs Canada said that its Rapid Response Mechanism, which was set up to monitor foreign state-sponsored disinformation efforts, detected in August a “spamouflage” campaign that is connected to Beijing.
According to Global Affairs Canada, “The Spamouflage campaign included the use of likely ‘deep fake’ videos, which are digitally modified by artificial intelligence, targeting the individual.” The campaign also featured a bot network that “left thousands of comments” in Canada’s two official languages – English and French – on the social media accounts of several Canadian politicians.
The campaign targeted Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre and several other members.
So, is all this a part of Trudeau’s game plan?
Is he desperately trying to cling to power by any means necessary, even if it means embracing the dark arts of foreign interference and weaponizing AI tools? The whispers of his desperation are growing louder, fueled by the rising popularity of the opposition and the polls that paint a bleak picture for his future. One thing is certain: the upcoming elections will be a pivotal moment for Canadian democracy.
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