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A Clear View of Clearview AI [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-10
Apologies for the picture, but I wanted to lead with some comedy, considering this Mother Jones article (The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI).
It focuses on an up-and coming AI facial recognition company, Clearview AI, headed by Hoan Ton-That, a programmer from Australia who came up in the Silicon Valley techbro lifestyle and threw his allegiance in with the right-winger crew.
His contacts have included such fine figures as:
Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich Andrew “weev” Auernheimer (longtime owner of The Daily Stormer, neo-nazi media publication) Curtis Yarvin (described as a “muse” for people like Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance) Douglass Mackey (convicted of federal election interference for trying to dupe women and people of color into voting by text) Emil Kirkegaard, a Danish eugenicist who infamously advocated to legalize child porn and lower the age of consent to 13 or the onset of puberty.
and many more, to be sure.
Clearview AI was, from the get-go, marketed to investors as a tool for not only law and order, but to also give the right a way to deal with those pesky liberals always getting in the way of everything.
As per the article:
Paranoia about the “radical left” seemed to infuse their business decisions. As part of their plan to use facial recognition in apartment lobbies, they intended to scan the faces of tenants and compare them to mugshots. But Ton-That noted in an email that he also wanted to run them through “any criminal database we have (antifa)” or to see if they were “friends with criminals.” He assumed a link between leftist politics and criminality. “I think every real estate firm will sign up,” he told his co-founders. “Especially ones in diverse areas.” Schwartz, a 67-year-old New Yorker who ran Giuliani’s welfare reform program, which invasively profiled needy people and deprived them of assistance, loved the idea. “Quite Brilliant!” he replied. After Rudin Management, one of New York City’s largest real estate companies, signed on, the team reportedly collected about 70,000 videos from a lobby surveillance camera. “We beta tested their product for a brief period at one of our buildings nearly a decade ago,” a Rudin spokesperson said. “We chose not to deploy their software at the conclusion of that pilot.” During Trump’s first term, Clearview made little distinction between bad actors and people exercising their First Amendment rights. Pitch decks the company sent to potential investors and customers, including scores of local law enforcement agencies, touted Clearview’s ability to surveil protesters and target people involved in “radical political or religious activities.” A pitch deck from April 2019 showed how Clearview grouped photos in its faceprint database, including a category it called “Protesters & Agitators.” In July 2019, Johnson reached out to right-wing attorney Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump lawyer and Republican National Committee official. Dhillon was also representing Andy Ngo, a social media commentator who has made a career out of stoking fear about the “radical left” and who was preparing to sue several people who he alleged assaulted him at protests in Portland, Oregon. Ngo claimed they were antifascists. Dhillon, an election truther and anti-transgender activist whom Trump tapped to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, wanted to hunt them down. “Richard and Hoan can give you a copy of ClearView to help identify antifa,” Johnson told her.
So, what does all this have to do with things going on today?
Well, guess what company ICE and Border Patrol officers (along with many police forces across the entire US) are contracted with?
Clearview AI.
So what exactly is this program, and what does it do? As quoted by one ICE officer:
It was a fancy toy that promised a low-cost investigative shortcut. “This can find faces in a crowd and/or it can show a photo in a crowd if you want to ID people he/she may associate with. It was amazing!”
By 2022 Clearview AI was used the most out of any other facial recognition software that was available to the US government. Clearview states the results it returns are “not intended nor permitted to be used as admissible evidence in a court of law or any court filing.”, however, cops have been known to use the results even as a means to OBTAIN warrants to START investigations with.
This is a tool that “...It creates a really disturbingly powerful tool for police that can identify nearly every person at a protest or a reproductive health facility or a house of worship with just photos of those people’s faces...”.
Legal records have shown corporations like Macy’s allegedly used Clearview on shoppers, police use it against activists and protesters, and government investigations have found federal agencies’ use of the product failed to comply with privacy requirements. Law enforcement agencies now rely on Clearview as a tool in policing, with almost no transparency about how they use the tech.
Some email header subjects that were uncovered during research for the article apparently include:
A revealing sampling of internal email subject lines: “Gayface predictor is 80 accurate”
“There is no association between wider faces and the rate of convictions for violent offenses”
“Tenant screening product”
“Smartcheckr proposal/specs for Hungary”
“Send this to thiel”
“Faces and criminality”
“Face & IQ” (edited)
“Smartcheckr for security + Pokemon Go”
“Fwd: Using Smartcheckr on voter fraud in New Hampshire”
Just be aware of this kind of technology becoming more and more prevalent when out and about!
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