Big Brother is already here

We all know about the exten of domestic surveillance via metadata collection since Edward Snowden elightened us.  Now comes a complementary story.

Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that says it’s amassed a database of billions of photos, has a fantastic selling point it offers up to police departments nationwide: It cracked a case of alleged terrorism in a New York City subway station last August in a matter of seconds.

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It’s a compelling pitch that has helped rocket Clearview to partnerships with police departments across the country. But there’s just one problem: The New York Police Department said that Clearview played no role in the case.

As revealed to the world in a startling story in the New York Times this weekend, Clearview AI has crossed a boundary that no other tech company seemed willing to breach: building a database of what it claims to be more than 3 billion photos that can be used to identify a person in almost any situation. It’s raised fears that a much-hyped moment, when universal facial recognition could be deployed at a mass scale, is finally at hand.

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“In under a second it can find a match in our database of millions of photos,” read a now-deleted blurb about the company for a retail tech event. “It can be integrated in security cameras, iPhone/iPad apps, and with an API. Unlike other facial recognition companies, Clearview AI provides a curated database of millions (and soon billion) of faces from the open-web.”

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But the company, founded by CEO Hoan Ton-That, has drawn a veil over itself and its operations, misrepresenting its work to police departments across the nation, hiding several key facts about its origins, and downplaying its founders' previous connections to white nationalists and the far right.

  Buzzfeed

Any number of police departments also have connections to white nationalists and the far right.

“The NYPD did not use Clearview technology to identify the suspect in the August 16th rice cooker incident,” a department spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “The NYPD identified the suspect using the Department’s facial recognition practice where a still image from a surveillance video was compared to a pool of lawfully possessed arrest photos.”

Of course, the NYPD could be lying.

While Clearview has claimed associations with the country’s largest police department in at least two other cases, the spokesperson said “there is no institutional relationship” with the company. In response, Ton-That said the NYPD has been using Clearview on a demo basis for a number of months. He declined to provide any further details.

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Clearview is attempting to convince law enforcement that its facial recognition tool, which has been trained on photos scraped from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other websites, is more accurate than any other on the market. However, emails, presentations, and flyers obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal that its claims to law enforcement agencies are impossible to verify — or flat-out wrong.

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In the Times report and in documents obtained by BuzzFeed News, Clearview AI said that its facial recognition software had been used by more than 600 police departments and government groups, including the FBI. But in at least two cases, BuzzFeed News found that the company suggested it was working with a police department simply because it had submitted a lead to a tip line.

Neither of those facts make Clearview any less disturbing.

Originally known as Smartcheckr, Clearview was the result of an unlikely partnership between Ton-That, a small-time hacker turned serial app developer, and Richard Schwartz, a former adviser to then–New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.

What do you want to bet that Rudy - and all of Trump's inner circle - has stock in Clearview?

Clare Garvie, a senior associate at Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology, told BuzzFeed News it was unclear whether Clearview could do what it says it could.

“We have no idea how good it is,” Garvie said. “The idea that all information, all people's faces online are currently tagged with their own identity — it's a bit laughable.”

Garvie told BuzzFeed News that there’s also no single way to measure the so-called accuracy of facial recognition technology. Accuracy, in facial recognition, is generally measured as a combination of the correct-match rate, reject rate, non-match rate, false-match rate, and the ability to detect the face in the first instance.

“Whenever a company just lists one accuracy metric, that is necessarily an incomplete view of the accuracy of their system,” Garvie said. “Depending on what the system is designed to do, that may have little or no bearing on the actual accuracy of the system and operation.”

I'm not sure law enforcement on either the federal or local level in this country cares all that much about accuracy. Ask anyone with a Middle Eastern surname. Or black man in America, for that matter.

Ironically for a company that seeks to erode privacy, many key figures at Clearview have attempted to lower their public profiles. Some began to do so long before the attention from the press.

Since Ton-That and Schwartz started Clearview, their social media and internet presences have been scrubbed. Ton-That deleted his Twitter and Instagram accounts, while Schwartz's LinkedIn profile vanished and his past with Smartcheckr has been obscured across the web.

When asked about this, Ton-That said in an email, "Regarding myself and others at the company, some choose not to maintain social media accounts because they are time consuming."

Time consuming. Whatever.

But this isn't irony. This is understanding the risks.