A few days ago, podcaster Candace Owens made an allegation that to many viewers who are unfamiliar with technological advancements in the field of voice reproduction must have sounded startling.

The subject of her exposé was an alleged statement made by the assassinated American political activistCharlie Kirk.

A few days before his death, Kirk supposedly stated in Colorado Springs at a meeting of his organisation, Turning Point USA, that should anything happen to him he appoints his wife Erica as his successor as TP USA chief executive officer. Many of those who attended the meeting claimed not to recall Charlie Kirk saying the words subsequently attributed to him. Yet an audio recording was soon produced of an utterance apparently in Charlie Kirk’s voice where he is heard to have said exactly that. In her comment, Owens points toties between the new management of TP USA and a Hollywood company specialising in the production of deep fakes, including voice cloning. She has suggested that the disputedrealistic sounding statement by Charlie Kirkmay have been a concoction of that company’s audio engineers.

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We take no position in this controversy, havingcommented on Kirk’s tragic assassinationseveral months ago, shortly after it occurred. But it should be stated that just by raising the issue Candace Owens has performed a public service. Our focus is on the remarkable capabilities of voice cloning technology in another context.

Those capabilities and the time frame when they became operational are pertinent to the operation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia [ICTY] and may affect many of the verdicts it has handed down, in particular in relation to Srebrenica. Many of those verdicts were based on forensically unauthenticated but highly incriminating voice recordings.

In light of Owens’ allegations and the technical information she shared, it may safely be concluded that authentic-sounding voice fabrication is entirely possible. Critical questions must therefore be raised about the nature and reliability of audio evidence admitted by the Hague Tribunal because such evidence has demonstrably influenced many of its judgements. Was such technology available roughly a quarter of a century ago, at the time that ICTY trials were taking place? If so, was evidence that could have been tainted by the use of such technology properly scrutinised for authenticity before being admitted by the court?

The answer to the first question is definitively affirmative. The answer to the second question is unambiguously negative. For inexplicable reasons, defence lawyers at ICTY never demanded forensic authentication of the numerous audio recordings submitted by the Prosecution although they clearly ran counter to the interests of their clients. This issue was dealt with extensively in our volume“The Hague Tribunal, Srebrenica, and the Miscarriage of Justice”[2019], pp. 96 – 116.

Defense attorneys at the Hague were perhaps inadequately informed of the current state of scientific progress in this area, but it so happens that technological advancements have had a striking impact on the integrity of audio evidence. Just asit is now possible to create authentic-looking but completely false DNA readings, it is also possible to generate an authentic-sounding voice that does not belong to the purported speaker.The technology is known as “voice conversion” or “voice morphing.”It is defined as “modifying the speech signal of one speaker (the source speaker) so that it sounds as if it had been spoken by a different speaker (the target speaker).” This is how a group of researchers in this field describes it:

Source: Global Research