#infraredsensors — Public Fediverse posts

Some Notes on the Latest Boat Strike Video

This morning, I downloaded the latest of the boat strike videos that the Secretary of Defense is posting on Twitter. (That sentence alone is kind of mind blowing, but let’s leave that discussion for another day.) After watching it a few times, I am starting to put together some notes and seeing if I can have some conversations about the boat strike videos the administration has put out. I don’t know if there’s a larger project here. There might be.

From the outset I want to make it clear that I am not embarking on an exercise in conspiracy theory. I do not think these videos are “deepfakes or AI generated,” as Freddy Ñáñez, Venezuela’s Minister of Communication and Information, said back in September. These are official records of what the administration calls “lethal kinetic strikes”, and what experts in military and international law have repeatedly and correctly described as extrajudicial killing, i.e., murder. (I am partial to Gabor Rona’s framing of the question.)

Two things, however, can be true at the same time. This video can be authentic (as I believe it is) and the story it tells can be carefully controlled. It is. A significant amount of work has been done on this video in between the moment of the boat strike and the video’s release on Twitter.

The September 2nd boat strike video that Ñañez called a fake (due to motion artifacts and “lack of realistic detail”) is of much higher quality than the video put out by Hegseth last night. If anything, the September 2nd film suggests that the Pentagon has much higher quality video of these strikes than what the public is seeing with this latest video. (Same goes for this October 3rd video posted by the White House on X. Indeed, some of the earlier videos were 1080p. ) That point may be obvious, or come as no surprise, but it’s worth exploring a little.

Even allowing for the fact that this tenth boat strike video was shot at night, the low resolution of the video Hegseth posted is notable. The video is standard definition, 640X360, and only about 380KB. I am unsure whether the government deliberately reduced the sharpness of the picture, or if the dullness of the image is simply a consequence of its low resolution. It amounts to the same thing, and my attempts to increase the sharpness of the image were unsuccessful. We can have a conversation about whether generative AI could help or create more confusion here, but the larger point should not be lost. These videos are not just records of a military strike. They are also records of choices made by the administration before exporting and posting the video (itself a choice).

Those choices leave many important details obscured. Look, for instance, at the stern of the boat in this frame I exported. This is the frame just before the explosion. Where we expect to see a motor is a pixelated blur; the missile just above the deck is jagged and distorted. It also doesn’t help that the infrared sensors, at least as they are rendered in this low-res video, blow out all detail of who or what is on board.

The unclassified stamp was also created (in all caps, because part of the story here is about the administration’s social-media-driven ideas of transparency) and positioned at the top of the frame. Other elements of the picture have been redacted, using two gray rectangular blocks. A Project Ploughshares report on the sensor technology used in these attacks suggests that the slimmer rectangle just above the boat is most likely concealing

a light-blue scale bar used to measure the size and distance of visible objects, a trademark element of WESCAM’s MX-Series sensor interface. Its presence provided the first major clue linking Canadian-made technology to the…airstrikes.

The larger, square block on the left of the frame, port side, may be another redaction of the optical interface. It’s not entirely clear we are looking at a WESCAM interface here, and these redactions may be concealing features of another system.

The crosshairs over the target are hardly a feature unique to WESCAM. The [6M] marker next to the boat (indicating a Circular Error Probable of six meters?) is not a WESCAM feature called out in the Ploughshares report. The North [N] marker that appears around 00:15, after the explosion, indicating the direction north relative to the sensor’s position, is not a feature associated with WESCAM’s MX-Series, according to the Ploughshares report. It appears to be a feature of the optical system used in the “narcoterrorist” boat strike video the White House posted on 14 October.

The report concludes that the US military is using “more than one type of EO/IR [electro-optical/infrared] system,” and it’s not apparent which system is in play here, in this video of the tenth boat strike. Be that as it may, it’s in the use of these EO/IR systems where AI (sensing, modeling, targeting) comes into play.

Finally, consider the shape of the story this video tells. I will give Ñañez this much: it is cartoonish, deliberately so. (Nanez called the September 2nd video an “animación simplificada.”) The story begins with the target already in focus, the unsuspecting (or fleeing? or trapped?) boat below leaving a shadowy wake on the vignetted water. Three frames show the missile in its descent, then everything goes black. From the blackness emerge oily clouds of black smoke and debris. Only then does the redaction fall away and the [N] marker allows us briefly to orient ourselves. (The boat appears to have been traveling roughly east.) Most telling, in my view, is that the video ends before we see the real aftermath of the explosion — wreckage, or survivors (improbable as that may seem, it’s already happened!). We don’t know what happens once the smoke clears. Nor are we meant to care, I’ll venture.

Obviously, Congress should be demanding to know the full story, and should be asking for all raw footage of these attacks, unredacted and at original resolution. But unless and until Congress acts, we are left to rely on the story the administration is telling.* These notes are a first pass at understanding how the published boat strike videos tell that story, and I hope I’ve managed to set out a few markers for further discussion. More material will be forthcoming, no doubt. I would appreciate tips, suggestions, technical insights, and corrections.

*Update, 11 Nov 2025: Maybe not. The New York Times is now suing for these videos under the Freedom of Information Act.

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#AI #AIEthics #artificialIntelligence #boatStrikes #Colombia #humanRights #infraredSensors #ProjectPloughshares #storytelling #Venezuela #videoEditing #westernHemisphere