I've been pointing out to my computer science students this very issue for several years. The very nature of what constitutes legal evidence may come into question before long. The technology to manipulate images, video, and audio is readily available to just about anyone. How much longer will we accept these things as evidence in court?

I used to work with a really talented graphics artist a few years ago. There wasn't much that he couldn't do with Adobe Photoshop for stills and SoftImage for video. He could do things like produce fake UFO photos in his sleep. SoftImage cost about $10,000 per seat but it is capable of Hollywood quality animation, such as the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. All it takes is someone with the talent, some good software, and a reasonably powerful computer.

The same can be done with audio files if someone is patient enough. All you'd need to do is sample someone speaking, digitize the words, rearrange them, and then perform some smoothing and you can have them saying just about anything you want. A talented manipulator could fool all but the most expert analysts.