The stakes are larger than biography: Clearview has since told reporters it has scraped tens of billions of images without consent and run nearly a million searches for US police, so who built it and under what ideology speaks directly to whether law enforcement keeps buying.
First-order effects
If Charles Johnson's co-founder claim is credited, it ties the company's founding more tightly to the far-right network already documented in its hiring and investor circles, giving plaintiffs in the pending lawsuits and the open investigations a new line of inquiry into who controlled the product from the start.
The DHS agent's discovery of scraped images — including a Yahoo account belonging to a Syrian user — shows the app had already penetrated federal channels before any procurement or consent review.
Second-order effects
Police departments that ran nearly a million searches through Clearview face procurement and legitimacy pressure as the vendor's governance story darkens, forcing agencies to defend or unwind contracts.
If the pattern holds, surveillance vendors built on scraped public images will be forced toward permission-based data or state-controlled procurement, with the lawsuits and investigations functioning as the mechanism that converts the public-data permission boundary from an ethical argument into a legal requirement.
Law-enforcement AI purchasing may restructure around vendor vetting — ideology, data provenance, and governance history becoming diligence items alongside accuracy claims.
The trend: Facial recognition built on non-consensual scraping is moving from unchecked startup growth to a legal and regulatory reckoning over consent, provenance, and who is allowed to sell identification to police.
Among the wild revelations in this @kashhill piece: Clearview AI was born out of a meeting with Peter Thiel and Chuck Johnson during the 2016 RNC, after a drunken discussion of physiognomy. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
This is terrifying ... and illustrates that Clearview AI is a threat to civil liberties, national security, and personal autonomy. @kashhill is a national treasure. https://www.nytimes.com/...
The lack of any federal law regulating facial recognition meant that after Clearview AI had its enormous, legally dubious photo scraping operation exposed, its government business only grew. Big story from @kashhill https://www.nytimes.com/...
rarely does anything good come out of ‘drunken discussions of physiognomy.’ And that's before you factor in... all the other things. https://twitter.com/...
Tech is not, nor has it ever been neutral or apolitical AND there're those with IMMENSE power & privileged who've DEMONSTRATED their willingness to leverage tech's unethical & immoral functionality THIS HAS NEVER BEEN ABOUT “THE DEMOCRACY” IT'S ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY h…
“A US federal agency called the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) periodically tests the accuracy of facial-recognition algorithms voluntarily submitted by vendors; Clearview hasn't participated.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
Brilliant reporting by Kash on the origins of Clearview, which until now had not been public AFAIK. The motion to dismiss (including the First Amendment issue) in the ACLU case will be argued in early April. https://twitter.com/...
I pointed out years ago that Chuck C. Johnson was meeting with Clearview AI hacker Ton-That. Nobody cared then. Here's a photo of them having dinner, throwing white power signs. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Guess what the founders of Smartcheckr and then Clearview were discussing in the run up to founding the company? Physiognomy. You can find out more about what it is and it's concerning history by listening to our podcast with @Dr_C_Thompson -> https://privacyinternational.org/ ..…
The tech investor Peter Thiel and Charles Johnson, a conservative provocateur, both played pivotal roles in the early days of Clearview AI, the facial-recognition software. In @NYTMag, @kashhill investigates the origins of the secretive start-up. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Gee, great to know that Holocaust-denier Chuck C. Johnson is a part of creating one of the most intrusive, privacy-killing companies ever created. https://twitter.com/...
In this epic New York Times investigation of Clearview AI, @kashhill looks into the company's murky origins and finds far right provocateur Charles Johnson and Peter Thiel played significant roles, along with other conservative figures. https://www.nytimes.com/...
I've also continued to investigate Clearview AI and how its facial recognition app is being used, such as one of the first times ICE used it to solve a crime, eventually leading to the agency's $224,000 contract with the company. https://twitter.com/...
After I reported the existence of Clearview AI in January 2020, the company's world exploded: lawsuits, international investigations, letters from senators. I've been talking to company CEO Hoan Ton-That through it all for this @nytmag cover story: https://www.nytimes.com/...