Before leaving office, Barack Obama was instrumental in bolstering the media's "misinformation" narrative with the phrase "digital fingerprints."

To combat the proliferation of deepfakes, the former Democratic president wants digital information such as photographs and videos to have traceable origins.

“That technology’s here now,” said Obama in a discussion with his former advisor David Axelrod on the latter’s CNN podcast.

“So, most immediately we’re going to have all the problems we had with misinformation before, [but] this next election cycle will be worse.

“And the need for us, for the general public, I think to be more discriminating consumers of news and information, the need for us to over time develop technologies to create watermarks or digital fingerprints so we know what is true and what is not true.”

Fake News Phenomenon

The concept of combating so-called "misinformation" by determining the source of digital information is not a novel one.

There is already an effort under way to make this technology the industry standard, and Microsoft is leading one of the coalitions of IT and media businesses making this effort. Another group with same aims is led by Adobe.

The media frenzy about "fake news" — which was subsequently renamed as "misinformation" — that was accepted by the media, NGOs, and internet firms as a pretext to block conservative material was helped to begin by former President Obama before he left office.

A few hours before the day of the election in 2016, the Democratic president was giving interviews to the media about the dangers of "fake news," and in the weeks following the victory of Donald Trump, the Democratic president used public appearances to preach about the problem of "misinformation."

Prior to this, there was a paucity of coverage on this issue in the media. After then, it was there in every single place.

And by the year 2020, it had become an essential component of the efforts that the digital and media industries were making to intervene in the election.

FBI Buying Data

The issue of safe data has been in the headlines since news broke that the FBI was able to buy the data of American people to use for survalience, or, spying purposes.

A recently released report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) describes how the intelligence community purchases large quantities of data about you from data brokers who monitor nearly everything people do on their smartphones and computers.

This is information that the government could not otherwise obtain en masse or without a court order. However, because it is available for purchase, the government takes advantage of a legal gray area. It also uses your money to do so.

A lack of laws prohibiting the government from purchasing this data or preventing companies from acquiring and selling it in the first place has created an extensive surveillance state, as illustrated by this report.