A Few Israeli Interesting Observations On the Passing Scene... Only Facial Recognition Can Help on Immigration
How status-seeking is weaponized...
Oh it’s amazing what a title will do for a man’s soul. We are status-seeking primates, after all, and it’s fascinating what we will do to be on the right side.
The recent news that Foreign Minister David Cameron — now Lord Cameron — is committing the United Kingdom to a Palestinian state is all too fascinating. Cameron, long ago counted out after the disaster of Brexit, has returned once more. I hope he serves his country as well as he can. That is, until Starmer becomes Prime Minister.
British politics is choppy. I liked Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, who was a fan of facial recognition, but she was sacked. Oh well. The dreams of facial recognition in the United Kingdom were dashed. My heart was too soon made glad.
My British friends reach out to me every so often and poke around Clearview.AI. Most recently it was the Centre for Information Resilience which is doing a bang up job in the Russo-Ukraine war. You guys know where to find me. I hope it’s not too late when you do finally get around to it.
Closer to home the Mad Right is trying to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas of Homeland Security. I’m not terribly supportive of Mayorkas — he’s been far too slow to integrate proven technology into the solution — but I do oppose efforts to impeach him.
The reason we’re seeing a wave of illegal immigration has a lot to do with organized crime realizing that the days in which they could import people with impunity are drawing to a close. They’ve got to get a new hustle so they’re trying to get everyone here as fast as they can. And given that the American economy is one of the few that’s doing well worldwide
That the Republican Party is a mob party is pretty self-evident. When you understand that the Republican Party needs slave labor for its ownership class to make money — and donate to the Republican Party — a lot of the immigration restrictionist politics feels hollow.
Jared Kushner's and Steve Miller's families are slumlords. Do you honestly think that they want less immigration? Obviously not. They want lots of immigration -- just none of it legal. If we’re honest they want slaves. Legal immigrants demand their rights and unions might even unionize them!
The world isn’t standing still. Indeed I am very reliably informed that Turkish intelligence reverse engineered Clearview’s facial recognition technology to apprehend the Israeli spies it recently caught in Türkiye. I am both proud & grateful for this use. Were I running Clearview things would be better for NATO and her allies. Unlike the current management I’d actually fight to bring facial recognition to our European allies as they tackle Russian subversion.
But time and again, so-called immigration restrictionists fought me tooth-and-nail over facial recognition and internal enforcement in much the same way that supposedly law and order conservatives oppose DNA testing over "muh privacy" objections.
You could readily imagine a world of ubiquitous facial recognition and reduced cash. Such a world would drastically reduce labor trafficking and make Bidenomics — with its concerns of a living wage — more realistic for the whole world. You could even imagine the dollar— and the American corporate form — going truly global.
Coupled with genomic sequencing on the border and in the areas of massive population increase — subsaharan Africa, for example — you could imagine an America that helped the rest of the world get healthier while also identifying would be threats.You could imagine a well ordered world of immigrants coming to America and making it better, safer, and more secure.
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Speaking of immigrants, let’s talk about Hoan Ton-That, who cofounded Clearview.AI with me several years ago. Ton-That and Richard Schwartz conspired to defraud me and kick me out of Clearview.Ai. Whoops.
Rather hilariously they believed that if they got rid of me — an outspoken anti-Zionist and critic of Netanyahu — that there would be gobs of money for them from the Chinese-Israeli factions so predominant in Silicon Valley and then they promptly failed to raise money. Hoan even tried to solicit Sequoia which had no patience for him. Likud front, Founders Fund, similarly complained about the company. Texas human trafficker and venture capitalist of Chisraeli DCVC and compromised Passport Capital Matt Michelsen badmouthed Clearview to the Chisraeli press, BuzzFeed News (RIP).
Time and again, the Israelis and their agents within Silicon Valley made a fuss about Clearview. This was probably because Microsoft — the largest Chisraeli company in the market today — was launching Oosto (now AnyVision) and hoped to integrate it into the tech stack. Alas, that effort failed in the 2020 George Floyd riots when the major companies, many of them Chinese compromised, abandoned their responsibilities to public safety.
I bailed out Clearview.AI — hey it was my baby too — with my connections provided I could sell the product. I had the connections with law enforcement— I was a federal informant, goodness gracious — and Hoan didn’t.
By his own admission Hoan recently checked with all of his cousins and found that not one of them worked with law enforcement. Worse yet, Hoan’s own father had issues with organized crime. The law enforcement officers — who are Clearview’s customers — can almost smell it on him. Hoan had been investigated by the FBI, too.
I asked often about Ton-That whenever an investor is doing due diligence.
Clearview.AI is, unfortunately, led by a deeply insecure man. “Great product, terrible management,” I always say. In a word, “weak.”
It didn’t have to be this way — but it is. And Hoan doesn’t keep people long.
Hoan’s ego doesn’t allow him to settle with me in my federal lawsuit though he had no problem settling with the shyster lawyers behind the BIPPA lawsuit. I would have fought them in every court, all day, everyday. I would have made my fighting them in court a selling point with potential customers who have their own complaints with the ACLU.
I would have pointed out — rightly — that there’s a law enforcement exemption to the Biometric Information Privacy Act. I would have raised the quite right issues surrounding opposing counsel, which has been involved in other shakedowns against law enforcement.
Apparently Hoan’s trying to raise some money on a down round. Did all that PR not help, Hoan? Or did you merely put yourself first?
When you sit for photoshoots rather than with customers this is what you get.
Put aside the ego and start being mission-focused. Look in the mirror if you must but look to your conscience. Are you really mission focused? Or is something else going on?
We’ve seen that with other CEOs — Illumina comes to mind. Why not the CEO of a controversial facial recognition company? I just hope that isn’t true. There’s still time to do the right thing, Hoan, even if you are frightened. Read David Brin’s piece on political blackmail and then read it again. Your ego shouldn’t be used against the mission.
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My colleague in commentary Arthur Bloom has a few must read pieces which I commend to your attention, especially the one he did on the role of IDF intelligence asset Yaacov Apelbaum in the Hunter Biden laptop case.
Apelbaum gave the game away, per Bloom:.
Apelbaum appears to have had contact with Garrett Ziegler, Ron Johnson, Matt Gaetz, and James O’Keefe, and appears to have had a fairly close relationship with the Gateway Pundit. XRVision has provided sourcing to a bunch of conservative publications, including the Washington Times. So this is an Israeli spy who’s deeply involved in shaping the Hunter Biden story.
Here’s what AZ Central has reported:
Apelbaum said he was from Israel and immigrated to the United States in his late 20s. His Social Security number was issued in Massachusetts in 1988, records show.
Some of Apelbaum's close business associates have ties to foreign intelligence and military agencies, including the Israeli Defense Forces.
XRVision was founded in Singapore in 2015. It bills itself as a specialist in artificial intelligence technology and markets facial recognition software to governments worldwide.
In 2019, the company entered a seven-year contract with the Department of Homeland Security to provide the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency "software for wearable devices ... for matching human face images."
This is very funny:
There's no evidence to suggest Apelbaum, 60, is a spy. He has acknowledged contracting with government intelligence and defense agencies, but he's tight-lipped about much of his background.
"I used to operate in that world," he said, declining to elaborate.
Yeah, alright.
What the case of Apelbaum actually represents is how badly the conservative movement has been penetrated by Israeli intelligence, at the level of human intelligence and technology contracting.
It’s an open question how well XRVision works, it doesn’t appear to be as good as Clearview, for instance. More or less what we have to go on is the green boxes drawn around faces, which is a slightly more sophisticated version of what we in the biz call the “Boomer circle”—Boomers on the Internet will click on something more often if you draw a red circle around what they’re supposed to be looking at, it’s the visual media version of holding an old person’s hand.
Apelbaum has been written about by others, including Matt Binder, but this is the sort of story, if you’re a conservative person raising questions about the Israeli stuff, mainstream journalists will usually consider it anti-Semitic. And Binder knows not to.
Bloom’s piece on James Bamford’s excellent book, Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America's Counterintelligence, is also essential reading.
You should subscribe to his Substack.
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In times of crisis the people who show up are never quite who you expect. First two photos:
The illiterate among us have become weaponized by the Israelis who want to drum Ilan Omar out of Congress.
Might it be useful to have a Somali Muslim woman in Congress? Might it be especially useful to have the daughter of CIA informant in a position of power? Absolutely it is.
But it is not useful for Israeli right which fears the mainstreaming of Muslims in political life and which hopes that Somaliland — a breakaway region with ties to Israel — can be used to control the Red Sea.
Omar probably* married her half brother to get into the country — who among us hasn’t had a little strange in their personal life? — but at least she hasn’t fucked America.
Speaking of screwing, Rep. Cori Bush of St. Louis is in trouble with the Department of Justice. Naturally Bush is totally innocent of the charges arraigned against her but she has spoken out about Israel so she’s got to go and the DOJ, which is filled with lawyers who went to the right schools, will try their best to punish her.
The process is the punishment, after all, and it’s reaching a point where nearly every congressman who speaks out against Israel (or doesn’t do what Israel demands) gets attacked. It’s not lost on me that nearly all the members of the Squad have been standing up to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Of course Ilhan Omar has a great opportunity to sing some Taylor Swift after donning a Chiefs hat. Cori Bush can offer a rap rebuttal to Chisraeli asset Ben Shapiro. Jamaal Bowman can pull the fire alarm if it gets too hot.
The first Republican to be Israeli skeptical might well become like David Cameron — truly great.
Who will seize the opportunity? Or are the Gaetzes not well manned? I wonder…
You should look into this, it seems like a big ol' scam:
https://twitter.com/enhanced_games/status/1752257208354586820