Fixing Facial Recognition's Wrongs While Protecting Americans' Civil Rights
Only #AmericaFirst tech companies can help save our way of life
TLDR: I am donating $5000 to Nijeer Parks and setting up a GiveSendGo for him and his family. I invite Mr. Parks to meet with me and my attorneys to help me sue to force the government to use better facial recognition products. No one should suffer these indignities.
The problems of our times shouldn’t be a categorical ban on facial recognition but a conversation about what is and isn’t good facial recognition. The victims of a world without facial recognition deserve a champion who will do whatever it takes to protect them.
Indeed, the thousands of children rescued need facial recognition. And the murders and rapists apprehended and spies detected should rightly fear it. Law enforcement is coming for them and facial recognition is riding shotgun.
Nobody talks about the victims. Nobody writes about them. Nobody wants even to think about them. But I am haunted by them and by the notion that I did not do enough for them.
In some cases the victims are dead. In other cases the victims are too traumatized to talk. The monsters, too, who have been caught by facial recognition, are seldom mentioned in the wider public, their crimes too ghastly for the 10 o’clock news.
Few note that when facial recognition is banned, lawlessness abounds. It isn’t a coincidence. In Boston, in Los Angeles, and San Francisco—all cities I have lived in and love and where my loved ones still live—facial recognition by local law enforcement has been banned and violent crime has exploded.
With great power comes great responsibility and, I, by dint of my investing, have great power. I am an investor in facial recognition companies, among other tech companies. I have kept my involvement quiet because of my other professional commitments.
But that silence has become complicity. In city after city life saving facial recognition is rolled back just as it is extended.
The Boston ban is particularly galling to me. I grew up in Boston and every time I go visit my parents and siblings there I say a prayer for the lives lost as I walk through the terminal draped in the American flag.
If we had had Clearview would we have noticed Mohammed Atta flying through wasn’t who he said he was? I wonder.
America has managed to confront terrorism but at a cost. You can’t have liquid on planes and have to take off your shoes.
Could we have used facial recognition to catch the Boston bombers whose massacre of marathon runners is seared into memory?
I will never abandon America’s cities to the mob, nor to corrupt district attorneys, as long as there is breath in my body.
No, I’m not going to let down those too poor to flee the cities because I was once of them and I remember. I remember riding the train or the bus and being chased by hoodlums and being afraid. I remember the break ins and strong arm robberies and stabbings. It wasn’t that long ago that the Combat Zone reigned supreme.
I knew full well that if anything happened to me nothing would be done about it. I remember my father shielding me with his own body from the crazies on the subway late at night.
You think my neighbor, the corrupt state senator Brian A. Joyce, once raided by the FBI before he took his life, would care to protect us if we couldn’t pay his bribe?
Or a city that covered up the decades long systematic rape of children by the clergy would give a damn about me? And what of Whitey Bulger, whose murderous Winter Hill gang rampaged with the protection of all the bien pensant Boston Brahmin, the FBI and his brother William?
But technology has changed the game. It has made Big City life legible and livable and so I have found technology lovable.
And as cities descend into lawlessness once more facial recognition is a part of the solution to bring back our cities from the brink.
That is not to say facial is perfect. Far from it. But the question is compared to what? It’s certainly better than the police line up or eyewitness testimony, both of which are notoriously unreliable.
Having been falsely accused myself and libeled I sympathize with Mr. Nijeer Park’s ordeal. I read about it with horror even. According to the New York Times, he spent 10 days in jail and he and his went out of pocket some $5000.
I cannot serve the ten days in jail for him but I can make him whole. Five thousand dollars isn’t a lot of money but it’s a start of what I hope will be a bigger conversation about facial recognition and its uses in our society. I invite you to join me in donating to him as well. I will be setting up a GiveSendGo for him and his family.
Mr. Parks has had a rough go of life but he is doing his best to turn it around, as recounted in the New York Times. I’m rooting for him and praying for him.
Here’s how Hill describes it:
A decade ago, Mr. Parks was arrested twice and incarcerated for selling drugs. He was released in 2016. The public safety assessment score he received, which would have taken his past convictions into account, was high enough that he was not released after his first hearing. His mother and fiancée hired an attorney, who was able to get him out of jail and into a pretrial monitoring program.
His history with the criminal justice system is what made this incident so scary, he said, because this would have been his third felony, meaning he was at risk of a long sentence. When the prosecutor offered a plea deal, he almost took it even though he was innocent.
“I sat down with my family and discussed it,” Mr. Parks said. “I was afraid to go to trial. I knew I would get 10 years if I lost.”
…
“I was locked up for no reason,” Mr. Parks said. “I’ve seen it happen to other people. I’ve seen it on the news. I just never thought it would happen to me. It was a very scary ordeal.”
Mr. Parks’s experience makes it clear what we need to do.
It should be illegal to use inferior, expensive and foreign built technology. Period.
While efforts like that of super lawyer Hamish Hume of Boies Schiller have forced the government to contract with SpaceX and Palantir, more needs to be done to guarantee that the government agencies that intersect with the public have the very best technology, at the very cheapest possible price. The federal government is an ever-increasing customer of technology and it must therefore be a discerning one lest all of the civil rights struggles of our time be lost.
The customer is always right, we know, but when the customer is the federal government is the customer must also be morally upright and therefore it must
Weirdly, though, our government has been contracting with foreigners to push facial recognition.
The Japanese-owned NEC has already wrongly identified two black men in Detroit, according to Kashmir Hill of the New York Times, and yet they still remain a major federal government contractor.
NEC is even expanding their operations in the United States. (I’ve also heard through the grapevine that NEC is also responsible for Mr. Parks’s wrong conviction though I wait for responsible publications to report that.)
NEC also has a technology partnership with SenseTime, a controversial facial recognition company that is mistreating the Uighurs and banned from the United States, along with scores of other Chinese facial recognition technology. (Not without having some American ex-politicians like U.S. Senator David Vitter lobby for them though! Just listen to his call as he sells us out.)
Indeed, no foreign companies at all should be allowed to sell into the American market any technology that deprives Americans of their civil rights – be that voting software, genetics, or social media services. I haven’t yet found a tech job that an American programmer won’t do.
I go to great lengths to guarantee that the companies I invest in are American-run and American-built. Gone should be the days when we outsource to Saudi spies at Twitter or Chinese ones at Zoom. Do you really want foreigners affecting your ability to express yourself online?
Worse yet, NEC’s mistakes have led the whole industry to suffer, especially in New Jersey.
Nijeer Parks should sue Grewal personally for using inferior technology.
This fact is mighty rich as the far superior facial recognition technology of Cleaview was banned from New Jersey by its attorney general after a pressure campaign from the ACLU.
Which of the nine pedophiles Clearview helped catch would Attorney General Grewal wish released into his tony suburb?
Look at how Grewal’s suburb is described in an article that ranked it among the very best places in New Jersey!
"Glen Rock has some of the top schools in state, is on the train line to Manhattan, has excellent sports teams, virtually zero crimeand the value of your homes will just continue to rise," one reviewer said. "It's truly an amazing place to raise a family." [Emphasis mine]
So he can have an amazing place to raise his kids but you cannot.
The rest of New Jersey is suffering. There is, in fact, a huge increase in gun violence throughout New Jersey but its governor, who appointed Grewal, obsesses with locking everyone down.
Could Clearview help decrease it?
Clearview has never caused a misidentification problem for law enforcement though the company recognizes that others in the field will continue to do so. That’s why it favors a national standard of NEVER using facial recognition as the sole reason to jail a suspect.
Clearview is an American company, founded and funded by America and her allies.
We Americans rightly demand our civil liberties, even, it seems when activists like the ACLU are making a mockery of them as they prostitute themselves to foreign interests and Big Tech monopoly donors. The tech press can’t even bother to get basic facts right.
Those very same tech companies which would censor your speech or blacklist you from the market are not deserving of the protections that the American Constitution affords.
Let’s be honest for a moment about who is funding the ACLU backed lawsuits: Google.
It was bad enough that Google executives like Andy Rubin, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt slept with subordinates at Google – talk about a hostile anti-woman work environment! – but now they want their pathologies inflicted upon the rest of us.
That’s Google, the very same Google that also funds the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The EFF fought for the right to scrape publicly available content and won in HiQ v. LinkedIn. But when Clearview used that very same ruling EFF freaked out. Could Google’s backing of EFF be to blame?
The Google-backed EFF defended Backpage.com’s right to traffic in underaged children. Congress rightly acted to amend Section 230 but the damage to children was too much.
This is disgusting. This is wrong. And for the sake of our children it must be confronted. We need to be using technology to end child abuse not extend it.
I know of what I speak. When I was a child, I was also a survivor of sexual abuse. The scars of that experience—an experience I was embarrassed to even mention—I carry with me to this day and it colors all of my personal relationships.
It’s really only been thanks to the friendship of fellow tech investors like Cyan Banister that I can even talk about it.
My past is why I have dedicated myself to investing, starting, backing, supporting technology companies that help Americans first and all of the decent human family too.
I believe that everyone has a right to know if the man at the door be either foe or friend and I am committed to that future.
Anything less is the real dystopia.