An Age of Fraud Like No Other

I keep saying that the real warfare these days is information. That is precisely the nature of the gospel itself. We can pray that people will be guided to the truth of God in their hearts, and that will happen to some degree, but the Savior commissioned us to spread the message to ensure people have some kind of conscious context for the wordless yearnings in their hearts.

This is not a question of going to Heaven or Hell. Election works 100% regardless of human factors. What matters is the issue of God receiving His due glory from His own Elect while they serve time in this prison existence. We are the proof of His contention against the rebellious Elohim Council.

Starting with the Garden of Eden and the Fall, the true issue of conflict has always been the truth of God. And in our current fallen condition, that means information versus misinformation. Not as humans define such things, but it’s a matter of information consistent with God’s revelation. There are no precise rational boundaries; divine truth transcends such things. True information means saying what is consistent with the Person of God and His divine moral character within the context.

And for the time being, the primary field of action is online. Everything we say and do through other media, and even in our private interactions, is constrained by the shape of things available online. So, I’ve often written about computers and networking technology because it is germane to the gospel message. When the Net goes away (and it will), then it’s a different game entirely. As long as it’s here, we have to account for the Internet and its affects on our gospel witness.

And I’ve noted in the past that computer security is a subset of information security. The real issue is the information; the computer is simply the means, not an end in itself. And for a long time it could be boiled down to (1) protecting computer storage of information from loss, (2) ensuring transmission of the information (getting it through), and (3) protecting the content from corruption.

The first two items have been an issue since the beginning of networking. It continues today as an arms race. The whole point of networking is propagating information, and there will always be warfare over how to protect information from loss or blockage.

The third item was a big enough problem for the longest time. How many times have you been duped by false quotes that were massively copied via emails and social media? There’s a whole industry of “fact checking” that was valid for a long time, never mind how the term has been recently hijacked as the means to censorship. Most people have no concept of checking to see if some message is accurate.

For example, we had that early Internet conspiracy called “Rex84”. Now, there was the real thing, but there was also considerable nonsense being spread long after the particular military exercise to which it refers. The wild and unfounded assertions were raging for two decades after. The most egregious claims were that certain sites were already fully prepared as prison camps for confining people. Folks who lived near those sites checked it out; virtually none of them were fitted out for such a thing.

To this day people on the Net still insist that a site near me (withing easy bicycle distance) is ready to receive prisoners. As someone with considerable military training in running a prison camp, I can tell you that site is not ready, and the necessary materials are not even anywhere around. It’s not even properly secured from casual incursions; you can find hobos living part time there. It’s heavily wooded, with only a few tiny clearings. There are similar reports from people living near other alleged sites.

False information is a separate issue that isn’t really a part of networking security. The problem is the gullibility of humans, all too willing to believe lies that match their biases.

But the real issue with protecting the gospel message from corruption is verifying the source of something. The current means of electronic verification that a message actually came from the source alleged is rather cumbersome, and has always been a matter of security by obscurity. Good technicians can always fake communications; the system is pretty fragile.

And it’s now almost completely wiped out by AI. Do you realize that, having already dabbled in just a tiny few videos of myself talking and singing on YouTube some years ago, some AI could now produce a video of me saying anything you can imagine, and in languages I don’t even know. The courts are about to test some of the aspects of this threat, but they won’t be able to put that genie back in the bottle.

People who know me well could recognize when something was out of character. That’s not very many people. Fortunately, I’m not famous enough to make it worthwhile to try. I’ve made it a point to make most of my output about the message, and very little about me. But the strongest factor is that I always encourage folks to evaluate whether something I say is useful. You should have an internal filter in your convictions that prevent you receiving a message that God didn’t intend for you, never mind whether some AI might have ginned up a false message in writing or in video.

If the Internet gets too loaded down with crap like that, I pray Christians recognize it and stop relying on it. But for the rest of the world? Don’t be surprised when videos and other media pop up promoting the most outlandish frauds about public figures.