During the past decade, the DNA technology used to solve crimes and settle paternity suits has become a big business. The federal government alone spent $232 million this past fiscal year promoting the use of a technology that barely existed 20 years ago. Now two information-technology experts with Florida ties are predicting the use of digital forensics to police – what they call “counterfeit reality” – will soon join DNA science as a growth industry.
A coming explosion of counterfeit reality – the use of computers and digitally based media to produce fake images, video, documents or sounds – will drive a multibillion-dollar business of detecting what is real and what is not, say Daryl Plummer and Frank Kenney, analysts with Gartner Inc., a market-research firm based in Stamford, Conn.