An Iraqi technical team confirms the authenticity of the audio recordings of the owners
Shafaq News / An Iraqi technical team confirmed on Thursday the authenticity of the leaked audio recordings of the head of the State of Law coalition, Nuri al-Maliki, noting that it did not find applications specialized in deep forgery (Vic Deep) that have the ability to falsify sounds in the Arabic language.
The Technology for Peace team stated in a statement received by Shafak News Agency; “We have worked since the first moments of the blogger (Ali Fadel) publishing the first audio clip on July 13, 2022, which he claimed to be part of a leaked recording of the former Iraqi Prime Minister and head of the State of Law coalition (Nuri al-Maliki) to verify this and to publish other recordings after that. We continue to take notes on these recordings to find out what they are.”
The statement added; Despite Al-Maliki’s repeated denials of these recordings and his claim that they were fabricated by quoting excerpts from his voice and installing them to appear in this way, the observations we made about the video prove the opposite, as follows:
1- After the blogger (Ali Fadel) published five audio recordings with a total length of 16:41 minutes, he claimed that they were part of an audio recording that lasted for about an hour. Also, in all the circulating recordings, the transition between the sentences was very consistent and natural, and there were no different and inconsistent transitions or the presence of pieces as an indication of the merging of different audio clips.
2- When listening to the five audio recordings that were published, it is noted that the tone of the voice that was claimed to be al-Maliki’s speech was in one layer, accompanied by an echo, free of any difference and without any distortion.
3- By comparing the voice in the circulated audio recordings with that of Al-Maliki in several interviews that were conducted with him, the last of which was broadcast by Al-Ahed satellite channel yesterday, Wednesday, July 20, 2022, a great similarity was observed in the pronunciation of words mentioned in the current recordings and in the meetings with Al-Maliki, Especially the words (Sunnis, Muqtada al-Sadr, Shiites, Shiism).
4- The presence of different voices of people speaking at a different volume with the presence of sounds of a chair movement and the sound of friction are additional indications that the circulating recordings were not fabricated by voice-fabrication programs.
5- Extensive research was conducted to identify the tools and devices available for voice spoofing and a number of programs and tools were found that news websites have articles about, such as SV2TTS and AutoVC, which have been tested to conduct experiments to fake voices and deceive both the WeChat application that allows users to log in with their voice, And the Amazon Alexa app, which allowed users to use voice commands to make online purchases and payments via third-party apps like Uber, the fake apps managed to trick WeChat and Alexa, but deepfakes were more successful at mimicking the voices of women and the voices of foreign-born English speakers. We did not find any applications to falsify the voice in Arabic, especially since the conversation in the recordings included the pronunciation of vocabulary in the colloquial dialect.
The statement indicated that “the above points were written down after reviewing the recordings, and we shared them to clarify the truth of the allegations circulating about this, pending the competent government authorities and the Iraqi judiciary, which announced that fundamental investigations were conducted regarding the audio leaks attributed to the owners in accordance with the law after receiving a request in this regard from the Public Prosecution.”
Shafaq.com