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CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

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Re: CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

#121

Post by text0404 »

Manuel_D wrote: post #117
text0404 wrote: post #90

[flagged]

None of your links allege that Hoan Ton-That or Richard Schwartz is a white supremacist. What the Huffington Post piece does allege, is that for 3 weeks Smartcheckr (a different LLC that would later have its assets transferred to Clearview AI) hired one Douglass Mackey. Douglass Mackey had an online alias "Richard Vaughn" that was used to post white supremacist content. Ton-That states that he was unaware that Mackey…

SmartCheckr was founded/owned by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz. So they transferred the assets of a company they already founded/owned to another company that they founded/owned: "Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz after transferring the assets of another company, SmartCheckr, which the pair originally founded in 2017 alongside Charles C. Johnson" [0].

Other notable white supremacists with material ties in the article:

Chuck Johnson [1] collaborated with Ton-That and "in contact about scraping social media platforms for the facial recognition business." Ran a white supremacist site (GotNews) and white supremacist crowd funding sites.

Douglass Mackey [2] a white supremacist who consulted for the company.

Tyler Bass [3] an employee and member of multiple white supremacist groups and Unite the Right attendee.

Marko Jukic [4], employee and syndicated author in a publication by white supremacist Richard Spencer.

The article also goes into the much larger ecosystem of AI and facial recognition tech and its ties to white supremacists and the far-right. So there are not just direct ties to Clearview AI itself, but a network of surveillance companies who are ideologically and financially tied to the founders and associates.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Johnson

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglass_Mackey

[3] https://gizmodo.com/creepy-face-recognition-firm-clearview-a...

[4] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-im...

Re: CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

#122

Post by johnnyanmac »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #25
comrade1234 wrote: post #4

[flagged]

I subscribe to keep the reporting going. Journalism costs money. Most Americans don’t pay for news and don’t think they need to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982633 - February 2026 (ProPublica, 404media, APM Marketplace, Associated Press, Vox, Block Club Chicago, Climate Town, Tampa Bay Times, etc get my journalism dollars as well)

>Journalism costs money.

They've sold out for years already, maybe decades. Why fund them now when the corruption is out in the open?

AP is really one of the few places I'd even consider donating to at this point.

Re: CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

#123

Post by dimitrios1 »

bjt wrote: post #112
unethical_ban wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a distinction. Private companies are partnering with the government to take away personal liberty. We should ban the government from accessing data gathered by private companies by default, perhaps. I need to mull on it.

The point is that "who gathers it" should be irrelevant. The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves. On the other hand if a company is just aggregating something benign like weather data, there's no need to bar the government from buying that instead of building it themselves.

> The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves.

Now that sounds like a good argument to make in court! How do we do it?

Re: CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

#124

Post by Manuel_D »

text0404 wrote: post #121
Manuel_D wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of your links allege that Hoan Ton-That or Richard Schwartz is a white supremacist. What the Huffington Post piece does allege, is that for 3 weeks Smartcheckr (a different LLC that would later have its assets transferred to Clearview AI) hired one Douglass Mackey. Douglass Mackey had an online alias "Richard Vaughn" that was used to post white supremacist content. Ton-That states that he was unaware that Mackey…

SmartCheckr was founded/owned by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz. So they transferred the assets of a company they already founded/owned to another company that they founded/owned: "Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz after transferring the assets of another company, SmartCheckr, which the pair originally founded in 2017 alongside Charles C. Johnson" [0]. Other notable white supr…

Again, if you want to allege that these other people are white supremacists go right ahead.

But you wrote that "Clearview AI was founded by white supremacists". Even after your new set of links, this remains unsubstantiated. None of your links allege that the Clearview founders are white supremacists, they make an attempt at guilt by association.

Re: CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

#125

Post by text0404 »

Manuel_D wrote: post #124
text0404 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SmartCheckr was founded/owned by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz. So they transferred the assets of a company they already founded/owned to another company that they founded/owned: "Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz after transferring the assets of another company, SmartCheckr, which the pair originally founded in 2017 alongside Charles C. Johnson" [0]. Other notable white supr…

Again, if you want to allege that these other people are white supremacists go right ahead. But you wrote that "Clearview AI was founded by white supremacists". Even after your new set of links, this remains unsubstantiated. None of your links allege that the Clearview founders are white supremacists, they make an attempt at guilt by association.

You're right, my apologies. I've edited the original from "Clearview AI was founded by white supremacists" to "Clearview AI was founded by people with close ties to white supremacy and even employed some." Thanks for the correction!

Re: CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

#126

Post by mrguyorama »

asveikau wrote: post #57
digiown wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why it doesn't make sense to ban governments from doing things while still allowing private companies. Either it is illegal to surveil the public for everyone, or the government can always do it indirectly with the same effect. I don't think the deal described here is even that egregious. It's basically a labeled data scrape. Any entity capable of training these LLMs are able to do this.

The difference is that a government can take personal liberty away from people in the most direct way. A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row. (Hopefully anyway.) So we put a higher standard on government. That said, I do believe there ought to be more restrictions on private use of these technologies.

Cops are legally forbidden from surveilling everyone at all times using machines. Explicitly so. Yet, if a company starts up and surveils everyone at all times, and their only customer is Cops, it's all Okay somehow. The cops don't even need a warrant anymore.

What's worse, is that third party doctrine kills your rights worse than direct police surveillance.

Imagine if you will, back in the day of film cameras: The company developing your film will tell the police if you give them literal child porn but otherwise they don't. But imagine if they kept a copy of every picture you ever took, just stuffed it into a room in the back, and your receipt included a TOS about you giving them a license to own a copy "for necessary processing". Now, a year after you stopped using film cameras, the cops ask the company for your photos.

The company hands it over. You don't get to say no. The cops don't need a warrant, even though they 100% need a warrant to walk into your home and grab your stash of photos.

Why is this at all okay? How did the supreme court not recognize how outright stupid this is?

We made an explicit rule for video rental stores to not be able to do this! Congress at one time recognized the stupidity and illegal nature of this! Except they only did that because a politician's video rental history was published during his attempt at confirmation.

That law is direct and clear precedent that service providers should not be able to give your data to the cops without your consent, but this is America so precedent is only allowed to help businesses and cops.

Re: CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

#127

Post by some_random »

mikkupikku wrote: post #120
some_random wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets. Yeah we typically call those people terrorists or war criminals.

Or heroes, if they win.

No, I will continue to call them terrorists or war criminals. You can feel free to lick their boots though.

Re: CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

#128

Post by mrguyorama »

ajcp wrote: post #110
nullocator wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your gait I think is more useful than your face is anyways and my understanding is it's my difficult to disguise. So you'll need a wheel chair/scooter and a mask in public.

Putting a rock in your shoe instantly changes your gait signature.

Thank you Corey Doctorow and "Little Brother". That book was prescient. And free.

Frankly, I never imagined when I read that decades ago, that it could be underselling the horror.

Re: CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

#129

Post by digiown »

asveikau wrote: post #111
digiown wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is an expectation of privacy for things you literally post to the public, like social media. Even the government doing the scraping directly I believe would not violate the 4th amendment. The third party doctrine also basically legalizes most types of search through people's "cloud data". To have an expectation of privacy, the data needs to not be shared in the first place. I don't think tying the…

> I don't think there is an expectation of privacy for things you literally post to the public, like social media Neither is there an expectation that automation would slurp it up and build a database on you and everyone else. Maybe the HN crowd is one thing, but most normies would probably say it shouldn't be allowed. > Even the government doing the scraping directly I believe would not violate the 4th amendment. Ev…

I think we clearly both agree that mass surveillance is problematic regardless of whether it is done by the government or corporations. With that said

> normies would probably say it shouldn't be allowed

Despite knowing about this, most continue supporting the various companies doing exactly that, like Facebook and Google.

> Neither is there an expectation [...]

Expectation is not law, and it cuts both ways. The authors of the 4th and 5th amendments likely did not anticipate the existence of encryption - in their view, the flip side of the 4th amendment is that with a warrant, the government could search anything except your mind, which can't store that much information. We now get to enjoy an almost absolute right to privacy due to the letter of the law. You might feel that we should have that right anyway, but many other governments with a more recent/flexible constitution do not guarantee that, and in fact require key disclosure.

Re: CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

#130

Post by Manuel_D »

sailfast wrote: post #3

Always easier when you can avoid the law and just buy it off the shelf. It’s fine to do this, we say, because it’s not being done by the government - but if they’re allowed to turn around and buy it we’re much worse off.

That's not how the law works in the US. The government cannot have a third party take action on its behalf to do something that would be illegal for the government to do itself. This is why the Biden administration had a restraining order filed against it, on account of them pressuring social media companies to ban content it didn't like. This violated the First Amendment, despite the fact that it was a third party that was doing the actual banning at the behest of the government.

The government could legally create its own facial recognition technology if it wanted to. They're not avoiding the law, facial recognition isn't illegal.

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