KUALA LUMPUR, June 17 — Experts who analysed sex videos implicating minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Azmin Ali did not find the clips to be digitally altered, an Australian news site reported today.
SBS News reported the analysts as saying, however, that they could not confirm that Azmin, who is also PKR deputy president, was one of the men featured in the video.
Kevin Nguyen, a digital forensics expert from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, had analysed three videos for SBS News.
“At an image level, forensically it checks out. I ran a number of forensic analysis… across the three videos and at the six points I checked there was no evidence of photo or image manipulation,” Nguyen was quoted saying.
Nguyen reportedly said he could not rule out that the sex videos may have been a “deepfake” though, referring to artificial intelligence-based technology that superimposes a face on a video.
“If it’s a deepfake, it’s a very good one.”
Denby Weller from the University of Technology Sydney, who reportedly trained in video verification with the Google News Initiative, was quoted saying that other aspects of the video raised some “red flags”.
“It’s been shot in portrait mode on a phone by the looks of it, although that look can be artificially created in post-production. It has also been shot from a slightly elevated position (the height of the camera is very hard to fake), which would indicate that the phone was pointing slightly downwards at the men,” she was quoted saying.
SBS News reported Giorgo Patrini, CEO of Australian company Deeptrace, a company that works on authenticating deepfake videos, as saying that the video resolution was too low to run a conclusive analysis.
PKR member Haziq Abdullah Abdul Aziz has accused Azmin of being his sexual partner in several sex videos that were leaked last week on social messaging platform WhatsApp. Azmin has denied the allegations.