Ricky Vaughn's SmartCheckr rebranded as Clearview AI - 'the secretive company that might end privacy as we know it'
>When Paul Nehlen dropped Ricky Vaughn’s dox a couple years ago in retaliation for Vaughn’s targeted harassment (which was retaliation for Nehlen not hiring SmartCheckr, the company Vaughn was contracting for), we were told by CREDIBLE SOURCES on the right that SmartCheckr’s facial recognition database didn’t exist and that anyone who said otherwise (like Nehlen, Chris Cantwell, and myself) is a LIAR.
>Fast forward a couple years and it turns out the allegations Nehlen made about Smartcheckr are probably true after all. They’re now rebranded as a new company — Clearview AI — and they’ve moved on from campaign strategy to marketing their dox database as a law enforcement tool.
https://archive.is/KcAZE
>A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says.
>[. . .]
>His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
>Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.
>Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion of privacy. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.
>But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.
>And it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.
>[. . .]
>One of the odder pitches, in late 2017, was to Paul Nehlen — an anti-Semite and self-described “pro-white” Republican running for Congress in Wisconsin — to use “unconventional databases” for “extreme opposition research,” according to a document provided to Mr. Nehlen and later posted online. Mr. Ton-That said the company never actually offered such services.
>The company soon changed its name to Clearview AI and began marketing to law enforcement. That was when the company got its first round of funding from outside investors: Mr. Thiel and Kirenaga Partners. Among other things, Mr. Thiel was famous for secretly financing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that bankrupted the popular website Gawker. Both Mr. Thiel and Mr. Ton-That had been the subject of negative articles by Gawker.
https://archive.is/hHj9b
