CALL IT TREND: Clearview.AI, Othram Bust Crime South of The Border...
Why is that so many of the privacy fans have connections to child endangerment?
“And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me…” (Matthew 25:40)
Looking far back, the circumference of the enlightened world was very small. Its light existed, but it was everywhere surrounded by the darkness of ignorance, of superstition, and of savagery. There is no nation existing to-day which does not trace its ancestry back to a primitive people, yet each has come up through all the intermediate gradations to the present state, which it is scarcely too much to designate as world enlightenment. There are still dark places. There are yet remnants of the lower order, but even the Dark Continent is yielding to the light. There have been times when peoples have lapsed, when the march of a certain limited progress which they appeared to represent has ceased, but the cause has never lapsed. — President Calvin Coolidge, June 7, 1922
Careful observers of my writings have noted that I don’t talk often about Latin America and rightly asked me why.
Well, I have family that lives there and South of the Border is decidedly light on laws. I don’t want those I care about to suffer.
We’ve often remarked upon how lawless big parts of the United States are and how that trend has been reversing itself rather markedly thanks to the advent of new technology and the policies of Joe Biden.
While it’s seemingly a mystery to sociologists why crime is going down, it’s not a surprise to criminals who have noted how quickly they’ve been busted with the latest in detection technology. What has happened to violent crime may also be happening to white collar crime too. Alleged tax cheat Peter Thiel says as much about how hard it is to dodge the Uncle Sam’s tax man. A President from Delaware has a way of making the world more orderly. Thanks Joe.
That Latin lawlessness may beginning to change too, in large measure because of Clearview.AI, the facial recognition company I cofounded which is systematically breaking up child trafficking cells South of the Border.
Now I’ve had my disagreements with the current management of Clearview.AI — I’m currently successfully suing them in federal court — but I confess to being emotionally affected by what I was reading in Time magazine the other day.
I’ve written elsewhere about how I endured child abuse as a boy so the successes of Clearview.AI at combatting this sort of thing stirs my otherwise blackened heart. People can and do say a lot of things about Clearview.AI but they can’t take away how important Clearview has been in the real life outcomes to victims of crime increasingly around the world.
The reporter Vera Bergengruen has written about Clearview.AI’s successes in Ukraine. She continues her important work in this discussion about Clearview in Time magazine:
For the past three months, a small encrypted group chat of Latin American officials who investigate online child-exploitation cases has been lighting up with reports of raids, arrests, and rescued minors in half a dozen countries.
The successes are the result of a recent trial of a facial-recognition tool given to a group of Latin American law-enforcement officials, investigators, and prosecutors by the American company Clearview AI. During a five-day operation in Ecuador in early March, participants from 10 countries including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Peru were given access to Clearview’s technology, which allows them to upload images and run them through a database of billions of public photos scraped from the Internet.
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"Normally it takes at least several days for a child to be identified, and sometimes there are victims that have not been identified for years," says Guillermo Galarza Abizaid, the vice president in charge of partnerships and law enforcement at the Virginia-based nonprofit International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC), which organized the event. "Using Clearview, it's within seconds."
The group used the facial-recognition tool to analyze a total of 2,198 images and 995 videos, hundreds of them from cold cases. In just three days, they identified 29 offenders and 110 victims, ranging from newborns to 17-year-olds, which investigators then worked to confirm. As of June 13, at least 51 victims had been rescued as a result of the effort, according to ICMEC and government officials interviewed by TIME. "Clearview was a vital resource because of its ability to search and compare faces in its vast database of images pulled from social networks," says Captain Diego Rafael Calispa of the Directorate of Children, Adolescence and Family of the Ecuadorian Police.
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In the five countries in Latin America and the Caribbean where Clearview confirms it is operating, officials have used facial-recognition technology to quickly identify the people behind a broad range of crimes, from credit-card fraud to bomb threats and homicides, as well as to locate kidnapped or missing persons. After a death threat was made against the leader of an unnamed Caribbean country, the facial-recognition tech identified the person behind it in less than 24 hours, the company tells TIME. On some small Caribbean islands with limited resources, Clearview has shortened the process of identifying suspected criminals from a month to an hour, according to local officials.
These results speak for themselves but I have to say how much they have affected me. Even now a day or so after reading the article my eyes are welling up just thinking about it. I still remember seeing child prostitutes when I visited a family member in Latin America. It’s the sort of ghastly thing which lives on in you and stirs in your soul. Truth be told it’s a major reason I do as little traveling in the Third World as I do. I find it very hard not to intervene.
The world is filled with little girls and little boys who have too little. If a grown-up really wants to find out what it is like to live in a young person’s world, let him or her get down on hands and knees and go about like that for a week,” once said Roald Dahl. A lot of our tech friends have their heads in the cloud. They can’t see how their love of themselves — what is social media but narcissism? — comes at the expense of the children they’ve abandoned to the worst of sorts of ghouls.
In much the same way that Lincoln wished to see slavery practiced on those who advocated for it, I, too, have a strong desire to see to it that those who oppose Clearview.AI have to live next to the pedophiles that Clearview.AI has taken off the street. Let’s hear them bleat about “muh privacy” then as they sit behind their gated walls, equipped with their Ring cameras.
And yes, that includes these self-declared privacy hawks who are only too happy to take heaps of money from Clearview’s Big Tech critics. To be fair I can understand all too well why the tech companies fear Clearview. When I helped cofound Clearview it was very much an attack on the evil embedded within the tech companies I came to break the machine before it breaks America. I have not been idle though the fight has been costly.
Whereas I once believed that these foes were misguided I’ve now become more or less convinced that they are bad people and that it’s incumbent upon me, one of the founders of Clearview.AI, to do all that I can to help my wayward child in its important mission of keeping the world safe.
I’ve been a little too generous to the New York Times’s reporter Kashmir Hill whose reporting has real gaps in it that becomes more and more clear.
Hill’s husband, Trevor, for example, has worked for EFF which defended the supposed right of Backpage to traffic in children. EFF is funded by Google. The Backpage founders were later charged for facilitating child trafficking.
Kashmir also didn’t discuss how her source is Freddy Martinez — the very source who tipped her off to Clearview — had been arrested for a violent assault and having a weapon.
These are things that the reader ought to know.
She’s only too happy to profile Mike Masnick — he has “Mark Zuckerberg’s ear,” she gushes.
What’s not discussed is how Masnick gets paid by Facebook and Google, which have historically been engaged in victimizing children. Masnick himself defends Backpage too.
Just this past week Masnick defended the way the social media companies mistreat children in the pages of the Daily Beast. The Daily Beast’s proprietor Barry Diller, backed of Tinder and other “dating” sites, continues to prey on the lonely when he isn’t running his casino or advising Sam Altman.
Break the machine.
As far as I know I am the only tech investor who has backed not one, but two companies which work alongside the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
In addition to Clearview another portfolio company of mine — Othram — just busted an MS-13 cartel member who had committed an assault in Los Angeles before going to Maryland where he murdered a mother of five. He was apprehended in Tulsa, which is where my grandfather is from and which has become I understand a hotbed of gang activity.
Othram has solved thousands of cold cases around the world. Now the FBI & local police are starting to use Othram to solve active "hot" cases.
One day, genomic genealogy may be used to solve all crimes for which there is DNA.
Ah, progress.
Why is it so hard to get the rest of the tech industry to see it this way?
Could the reason so many tech players refuse to deal with criminality be because they are engaged in their own?
In any event…