By Benjamin Ang and Muhammad Faizal

AI-generated disinformation in the form of deepfakes, comprising digitally manipulated video, audio, or images, has hit the headlines in Singapore. Cases from around the world demonstrate that AI-generated deepfakes combined with cyberattacks are not only a threat to the integrity of elections and scam victims but are also a threat to national security and defence. COMMENTARY Deepfake videos of Singapore’s political leaders have been circulating since at least last year, when manipulated video and audio impersonating Senior Minister (then Prime Minister) Lee Hsien Loong circulated online, appearing to promote a cryptocurrency scheme in a TV news interview. Similar videos impersonating Prime Minister (then Deputy Prime Minister) Lawrence Wong were also circulated. This year, more deepfake videos of Senior Minister (SM) Lee have been circulating online, this time showing him commenting on international relations. SM Lee described them as having “malicious intent” and was “dangerous and potentially harmful to our national interests”. To deal with this problem of deepfake videos, the Minister for Digital Development and Information, Ms Josephine Teo, is considering ways to regulate it by proposing a labelling scheme for tools and contents and even discussing a temporary ban to counter such videos, which are anticipated ahead of future Singapore general elections. The earlier cases were commercially motivated scams, but the recent ones have severe national security and defence implications. In SM Lee’s case, the deepfake made it look as if he was commenting on foreign policy, and foreigners unfamiliar with him could be misled, thereby sowing distrust. There is evidence that hostile information campaigns are used to weaken national cohesion or disrupt society in the lead-up to hostilities or as part of geopolitical contestation. 

S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, NTU Singapore , 2024. 4p.

By Michael T. Light , Julia T. Thomas

Unauthorized immigration, already a divisive and controversial subject in American society, was reframed as a grave national security threat after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Yet, despite substantial public, political and policy attention to the issue of undocumented immigration and terrorism, there has been relatively little empirical assessment of the relationship between unauthorized immigration flows and terrorist activity. We attempt to fill this gap by combining newly developed estimates of the unauthorized population, a novel use of sentencing and prosecutorial data to measure terrorism-related activity, and multiple data sources on the criminological, socioeconomic, and demographic context from all 50 states from 1990 to 2014. We then leverage this unique dataset to examine the longitudinal, macro-level relationship between undocumented immigration and various measures of terrorism. Results from fixed effects negative binomial models suggest that increased undocumented immigration over this period is not associated with terrorist attacks, radicalization, or terrorism prosecutions.

Soc Sci Res. 2021 February ; 94: 102512. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2020.102512.