“Privacy isn’t just about what people know about you” – “it’s about how that knowledge gives them control over you.” – Allesandro Acquisti
“Concerns about facial recognition had been building for decades. And now the nebulous bogeyman had finally found its form; a small company with mysterious founders and an unfathomably large database. And none of the millions of people that made up the database had given their consent.
Clearview AI represents our worst fears, but it also offers, at long last, the opportunity to confront them.”
Give thanks. For the insistent journalist – Kashmir Hill – has penned a vital & detailed investigation into one of the most disturbing & perversely secretive tech companies; nightmare facial recognition plunderer Clearview AI.
“the real job is to sell it to the public, and get people comfortable with it.” – Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That
“One thing I like about technology is that when technology’s unregulated you can change the world without getting approval from other people. At its best, it is not subject to democratic control, and not subject to the majority, which I think is often hostile to change.” – Peter Thiel, Clearview AI investor & founder of Palantir
that’s only after you have been rumbled with the secret development & deployment of the technology, without consent nor declaration, resulting in fantastic scandal & acrimony.
These fuckers are not in the business of “consent”.
The author had ‘never seen such an audacious attack on anonymity before’ – Kashmir Hill
“I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” [there is privacy, but your company is destroying it specifically] – “You can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.” – David Scalzo, Clearview AI founder & investor, & founder of Kirenaga Partners
“That an unknown startup heralded this new reality, rather than a technology giant such as Google or Facebook, did not surprise the experts with whom I spoke. “The small companies are able to, under the radar, achieve terrible things,” one said. Once they do, it’s hard to turn back.”
that’s the idea of course.
Clearview AI was created by “techbro” Vietnamese-Australian-immigrant-cum-USA-immigrant – Hoan Ton-That (it matters because he would later become “anti-immigrant” in the US).
Basically another confused, self-hating weirdo, intent on taking his own distortions & disabilities out on the rest of society & the world via the curse of tech.
After relocating to California & developing various apps, he found himself in a hate-storm for creating a controversial worm, virus, or super-spreader phishing scam called “ViddyHo”.
“One Tuesday in February 2009, Ton-That released ViddyHo, a YouTube imitator that required visitors wanting to watch a video to log in using their credentials for Google’s chat service. But when they did, ViddyHo used the credentials they provided to send messages as them to all their friends, saying, “hey, check out this video,” with a shortened link to ViddyHo that would start the cycle anew. This was similar to a growth hacking trick that was pioneered by Facebook and Linkedin – who rummaged through the contact books handed over by their users to email people who hadn’t joined yet – but ViddyHo’s technique was far more invasive, potentially illegal, and the vaguely porny name didn’t help matters.”
the opprobrium was immense, & he found himself on the receiving end of Gawker’s ire & other tech/Silicon Valley centric publications, as well as social media pile-ons.
Disgraced & ridiculed, he would slink off to the shadows.
Years later, after moving to New York, he would resurface in the burgeoning alt-right & MAGA spectrum, eventually devising the SmartCheckr APP, a “background screening tool” that could be used to discriminate against individuals for their political affiliations & views (scraped from aggregated social media etc), thus precipitating preventative or prejudiced responses without the target knowing they had been exposed.
It seems to have been deployed mostly to refuse applicants from right-wing events that they may have tried to disrupt or heckle (Peter Thiel, Gavin McInnes, Erik Prince & the like all swirling in the shit-slew, which included the TheDeploraBall).
I guess Ton-That “found his people”?, & fell in with a new crowd, wearing a MAGA hat, espousing alt-right, libertarianism, white nationalism, & making anti-immigrant remarks & retweets (even though he was a triple immigrant himself), & other insalubrious online excreting on race & IQ “Look at the Ashkenazi Jews”.
He then meets & becomes business partners with Charles Carlisle Johnson (more commonly known as Chuck Johnson on the internet).
Johnson was a bottom-feeding alt-right provocateur & lower-level political landscaper, ala Milo Yiannopoulos etc, known for his Holocaust denial, promotion of racial segregation, violence against journalists unfavourable to the far-right, & pro-authoritarian wank. he would be identified most commonly as a prolific “troll” & was a ring-piece-right grift merchant.
Hence he ends up introducing Ton-That to none-other-than the execrable Peter Thiel.
Thiel & the metrosexual Ton-That got on well, bonding also over their shared enmity for Gawker (Thiel having notoriously conspired a clandestinely funded a lawsuit to bankrupt Gawker (for outing him as homosexual) through retired wrestler Hulk Hogan (Terry Bollea) over a sex tape) –
“According to Johnson, Ton-That became emotional talking with Thiel about how much the blow to Gawker meant to him, given the way the company had damaged his own reputation. Johnson, too, had joyful tears in his eyes. He had sued Gawker a few years earlier for defamation, and while the company was winding down, it would settle his lawsuit for, according to Johnson, more than a million dollars.”
“I do believe in genetic determinism”, “so if criminality or other traits are heritable it should show up in the face.” – Ton-That, CEO of Clearview AI & creator of ViddyHo
Just like his malignant seed-investor Thiel, & his malign spy company Palantir, it was the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks that heralded the “opportunity” to introduce & flog new controversial technology under the shroud of an “emergency” & national security.
“Immediately there was a huge current, and we were all carried into it,” – “People wanted technology. People wanted more security. People couldn’t care less about privacy.”
speak for yourself motherfucker.
The USA PATRIOT Act is passed, shredding protections & incentivising mass surveillance of citizens & increased military & ”security” spending.
The unpopular corpse of facial recognition technology is again disinterred.
But failings, scandal, ineptitude & controversy prevent its wholesale adoption.
“We have had a zero percent increase in the number of bad guys caught,” an ACLU lawyer said at a biometric conference in New York City at the end of 2001. “Not a single arrest. That’s amazing. What are we doing here? Why should we even debate the privacy issue if there is no security benefit?”
going on to describe the application of the new technology in crowds as “virtually useless”, he goes on to warn “What we fear is that not only will it not identify people in the database, eventually it will be used to harass someone innocent”.
Enter Palantir, & it’s new effort – already approved by the Trump administration – to summarily apply a surveillance database/spying dragnet on all Americans, or “pagans” as psychotic CEO Alex “Kapo” Karp has stated.
Ton-That starts secretly scraping billions of peoples faces from photographs all over the internet (including the dark web, where he paid anonymous “face scrapers” in Bitcoin & the cryptocurrency Ethereum).
He then pitches the prototype to fellow sick sociopathic freak Peter Thiel.
Of course, Thiel is in –
“Rich beyond measure, Thiel could invest in promising companies the way a normal person splurges on an afternoon latte. Thiel was on Facebook’s board of directors, and so might have found the development troubling with its implications for the privacy of the social network’s users. But it must not have occurred to him, or he didn’t care [he had presided over the same mass scraping of Facebook accounts via his involvement in the criminal Cambridge Analytica scandal along with Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer, Mark Zuckerbeg & Dominic Cummings], because the next month, July 2017, one of Thiel’s lieutenants emailed Ton-That to say that Thiel was interested in investing $200,000. SmartCheckr had it’s first financial backer.”
Smartcheckr also appears to have offered a remarkably similar technological criminal advantage as the infamous Cambridge Analytica “covert commercial election rigging” operations –
“Engage each voter in a unique customer experience that results in a committed supporter who turns out on Election Day,” – “1. Enriched voter profiles,” “2. Hyper-polling,” “3. Micro-targeted voter outreach,” “4. Extreme opposition research.””
fuck these wretches to ends of the Earth.
“Through proprietary social media search technology and our ability to access unconventional databases, Smartcheckr and its corps of professional researchers can generate oppositional research that can fundamentally alter the alter the dynamic of a political race.”
firing squad.
It’s worth noting, with some greyness, Google developed, or discovered, this same frighteningly nightmarish power of “searchable” facial recognition technology early on.
But, & to their credit, they considered it too extreme/dystopian/controversial to implement/introduce.
“He [Eric Schmidt] referred vaguely to an earlier comment he had made in the interview about an “evil dictator” who might use it to identify citizens in a crowd.
“People could use this stuff in a very, very bad way” – Eric Schmidt
It took a uniquely unprincipled degenerate like Ton-That, with the financial backing & aegis of an even worse one – Peter Thiel – to curse the world with this unacceptable extremity & destabiliser.
Thiel, wielding the power of a cutting edge spy behemoth/technology (Palantir), & intimately enmeshed & conniving with some of the worst elements of the CIA, FBI, IDF & the Mossad, is pressurising, intimidating &, quite possibly, even extorting Google to adopt his extremist, radical ideology & fascist & fundamentalist philosophy (earlier this year, Google/Alphabet dropped it’s pledge to not use AI for weapons or surveillance).
we’re running out of air here.
Thiel was Facebook’s first & crucial investor, a controversial member of it’s board until he was finally forced out in 2022, & a “mentor” to the already shifty & starkly unprincipled young Zuckerberg. Facebook made it’s own attempts on mass-marketed facial recognition –
“Facebook had just acquired the company that helped build its facial recognition-based tagging system – Israel based Face.com – and moved most of the startups employers from Tel Aviv to Menlo Park.”
“Everything new is scary. My wife is also scared I will leave her for some robot.” If you’re a scientist and an innovator, you shouldn’t care about it. – Yaniv Taigman, Facebook/ex-Face.com chief technologist
Facebook would eventually be exposed & scandalised resulting in it being forced to abandone the “controversial” technology (it has actually just put everything on pause).
“What Clearview had done was astounding, but not for technological reasons. Companies like Google and Facebook where capable of building the technology that Clearview had built, but they had regarded it as too taboo to release to the world. The significance of what Clearview had done was not a scientific breakthrough, it was ethical arbitrage. Ton-That and his colleagues had been willing to cross a line that other technology companies feared, for good reason.”
no doubt at all, urged on by the transgressive & sick Peter Thiel, who’s full investment in Clearview AI has not been clearly disclosed, Ton-That’s company continued to furtively harvest billions of peoples scraped faces from others online platforms.
Then he started surreptitiously & secretly lending & selling the new software to police forces in the US to test on US citizens, the stated majority target being “criminals” (not the tech bro ones eh?), but it definitely did not end up with that demographic only.
This is wicked & twisted stuff.
A travesty of law, political will, & misrule ensues, with the bizarre zombie company refusing to expire, & the America government, once again, completely failing its citizens & the greater world by not passing definitive legislation to make this dystopian insanity an impossibility.
“The tiny, unknown company had hired one of the most famous – and expensive – lawyers in the country to explain why this particular version of face recognition technology was not illegal.”
“What that little unknown company claimed it could do would mean the end of privacy as we know it.”
“Clearview AI had crossed the Rubicon of facial recognition technology and was selling it to law enforcement agencies, and no one else knew it existed.”
“Could this lead to universal facial recognition, where anyone could be identified by face at any time, no matter how sensitive the situation?”
fuck fines! Draconian criminal prosecution, seizure of assets, liquidation of companies, & lifelong directorship bans (& massive fines).
“Disaster Capitalism”.
9/11 was the ruse/”opportunity”, for both Clearview AI & Palantir.
Then it was saved by the Pandemic (distraction, relaunch, “technological assistance” during a “state of emergency”).
Finally, it was after the Jan 6th Capital riots, where the company was able to supply it’s facial recognition technology to authorities & investigators to identify rioters/insurrectionists in Trump’s mutinous mob, & launder the it’s own image in the process.
MAGA/Trump mega donor, collaborator & supporter Peter Thiel was of course partially to blame for Jan 6th, & despite a mendacious & deceptive attempt to “publicly” distance himself from it afterwards, actually “doubled-down” on his commitment to the movement, throwing even more of his dirty money at the process (JD Vance, Blake Masters, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ivan Raiklin, David Sacks, etc etc).
“He has not reverted back to Republicanism”, – “He’s full MAGA.” – Steve Bannon (after the Jan 6th Capital incident).
“Peter’s idea of disrupting government is out there [violent insurrection/mutinous coups & direct & murderous mob sieges on Capital Hill]. They had no earthly idea what was being pitched“ [by Thiel whilst he was part of Trump’s first transition team as “shadow government”] – Steve Bannon
This is stuff horrific. Unimaginable. Sickening. Perverse. Unforgivable. Pro-dystopic & anti-life.
All these insane criminal shits are free to fester under Trump/Krasnov & LaDy Vance …. free reign, with them openly vandalising from the inside (DOGE, Musk, etc)
time to deal with these arseholes, harsh, punitive, austere, definitive.
Tremendously important investigative investigation from Kashmir Hill.
Fuck Clearview AI.
Kashmir Hill, 2023, Simon & Schuster, 251 pages