In the early, optimistic days of the internet, we thought it would be a repository of high-quality information. Instead, it's starting to feel like a bottomless ocean of lies that rewards attention-grabbing disinformation and pollutes the political process. That's the note of alarm that three members of Congress sounded in a letter this week to Daniel Coats, the U.S. director of national intelligence. In it, the lawmakers warned specifically about the technology called deepfake, which lets computer users with little tech savvy create convincing footage of people doing and saying things that they never actually did. "Hyper-realistic digital forgeries -- popularly referred to as'deep fakes' [sic] -- use sophisticated machine learning techniques to produce convincing depictions of individuals doing or saying things they never did, without their consent or knowledge," read the letter.