Read it in a book Sci-Fi book and now we can do it.

So about 18 years ago I read Wraith Squadron (Star Wars: X-Wing Series #5) in it a group of misfit pilots capture an enemies star ship and continue to impersonate its crew (specifically its captain) Using the Captains full holo logs they were able to reproduce him using a stand-in actor for live two way video communication. And researchers at Stanford can now do the same thing.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technol ... l-puppets/

I wonder how this will affect the lives of public figures in the future when any kid with a laptop and a camera can make them say anything they want. Just look at what happened to Palin in 08 when Tina Fay said "I can see Russia from my house" and every one attributed that to Palin she actually said "You can see Russia from land here an Alaska" and I think she went on to name the actual Alaska island.(Not getting political here just using an example.)

Now think how fast information moves today and couple that with this technology Voters on both sides of the isle are going to have to sift through a lot more to find the truth than we already have to do now. Also any public figure could instantly have their lives turned upside down for something they didn't even say.

Or best yet say video calling actually becomes a common practice, your kid on the sly records several of your calls and can use a similar program to call them self in for school sick days. Or what a criminal could do with it talk about identity theft.

It's quite easy to detect manipulated images and videos in general.

The problem in identifying manipulation occurs when the material is degraded through heavy compression or if it has high signal/noise ratio, ie. bad picture quality.

To mask manipulation of good quality images/videos is very very difficult. For example, a digital camera has a specific noise profile thats dependent the optical sensor used, the image processor and the power-circuitry. With enough data you could theoretically identify which model of camera was used to take a picture/video and in extension exactly which specific camera it was (if you have access to it). This noise profile must then be re-introduced into the manipulated parts of the picture so they would appear to be taken with the camera.

You can read more about basic photo forensics in this article.

The politicians would be delighted. Gives them more publicity and plausible deniability for the things they did say or do.