ICE has powerful Clearview AI facial recognition app that Illinois cops are barred from using
The Trump administration has wiped a facial recognition policy from its website while further embracing the controversial technology and securing a $9 million contract with a company barred from selling to Illinois law enforcement agencies.
The ban was the result of a lawsuit filed in Cook County that alleged Clearview AI’s massive database of photographs pulled from across the internet violated a landmark state law protecting people’s personal information.
But a settlement of the case didn’t apply to federal law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and its immigration agents. ICE has long been monitoring immigrants in Chicago using facial recognition technology.
Clearview — described by an attorney who sued the company as “one of the largest threats to personal privacy” — can be used in Chicago by federal authorities carrying out President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign.
The FBI, Army, US. Marshals Service and Department of Homeland Security currently hold nearly $10 million in contracts with Clearview, whose chief executive reportedly has close ties to Trump allies.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using the largest contract — worth up to $9.2 million — to identify victims and perpetrators of child sex crimes, as well as people suspected of “assaults against law enforcement officers,” records show.
The contract began Sept. 5, days before ICE launched its aggressive immigration enforcement operation in the Chicago area known as “Midway Blitz.” As agents fan out across the city and suburbs, there’s no federal law governing the use of facial recognition technology and apparently little to no restrictions. [Continue reading…]
In April, Mother Jones reported:
One evening in March 2017, Hoan Ton-That, an Australian coder building a powerful facial recognition system, emailed his American business partners with a plan to deploy their fledgling technology. “Border patrol pitch,” the subject line read. He hoped to persuade the federal government to integrate their product with border surveillance cameras so that their newly formed company, later named Clearview AI, could use “face detection” on immigrants entering the United States.
An immigrant to the United States himself, Ton-That grew up in Melbourne and Canberra and claimed to be descended from Vietnamese royalty. At 19, he dropped out of college and, in 2007, moved to San Francisco to pursue a tech career. He later fell in with Silicon Valley neoreactionaries who embraced a far-right, technocratic vision of society. Now Ton-That and his partners wanted to use facial recognition to keep people out of the country. Certain people. Their technology would put that ideology into action.
Clearview had compiled a massive biometric database that would eventually contain billions of images the company scraped off the internet and social media without the knowledge of the platforms or their users. Its AI analyzed these images, creating a “faceprint” for every individual. The company let users run a “probe photo” against its database, and if it generated a hit, it displayed the matching images and links to the websites where they originated. This made it easy for Clearview users to further profile their targets with other information found on those webpages: religious or political affiliation, family and friends, romantic partners, sexuality. All without a search warrant or probable cause.
A diehard Donald Trump supporter, Ton-That envisioned using facial recognition to compare images of migrants crossing the border to mugshots to see if the arrivals had been previously arrested in the United States. His Border Patrol pitch also included a proposal to screen any arrival for “sentiment about the USA.” Here, Ton-That appeared to conflate support for the Republican leader with American identity, proposing to scan migrants’ social media for “posts saying ‘I hate Trump’ or ‘Trump is a puta’” and targeting anyone with an “affinity for far-left groups.” The lone example he offered was the National Council of La Raza, now called UnidosUS, one of the country’s largest Hispanic civil rights organizations. [Continue reading…]