"The Ukrainians Are Obsessed With Clearview": Time Magazine Correspondent on the Facial Recognition Company Battlefield Deployment
Slava Ukraine! How facial recognition is helping Ukraine win the war!
I recently listened to an interview with Time Magazine’s Senior Correspondent Vera Bergengruen discussing Clearview.AI, the facial recognition company I cofounded.
Have a listen here. (The Clearview bit starts around 33 minutes in.) Bergengruen wrote a rather great November piece titled, “Ukraine’s ‘Secret Weapon’ Against Russia Is a Controversial U.S. Tech Company.”
As Clearview’s cofounder I was subject to a hate filled defamation campaign waged by the Israeli Defense Forces to help steal Clearview’s technology from me. (They had a competitor product Anyvision now Oosto, which they hoped to embed in America.)
Unfortunately my cofounders — Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz — were apparently encouraged to steal my equity after I whistleblew on their mismanagement of Clearview to the New York Times. That fraud was then used to steal my equity and shore up Hoan’s board.
Clearview has struggled financially due to its poor management — one of things I was supposed to do is help sell the product — but one thing it got exactly right is its commitment to helping Ukraine win the war of Russian aggression. This is to CEO Hoan Ton-That’s credit. Despite his ethical (and I fear criminal) behavior in the past, he showed real courage going to Ukraine. This speaks well of him.
This past week marks the one-year anniversary of me filing a federal lawsuit. I await Judge Katherine Polk Failla’s decision. You sometimes find yourself waiting a long time for justice. I hope our lawsuit gets settled soon and that Clearview.AI can focus on the important mission rather than the personal aggrandizement of its CEO.
Maybe fellow pro-Ukraine player, Palantir, will buy Clearview.AI and help resolve the internal conflict?
Incidentally I’m also suing Hal Lambert, a Clearview.AI board member, in a separate lawsuit over him cheating me over a special purpose vehicle into Umbra. Lambert, too, has ethical lapses, which have become all too clear as he parties in his late 40s. Fortunately lawsuits can help clarify all of this sort of thing. Thank God for discovery.
Since I backed Umbra — a synthetic aperture radar satellite company —in 2020 the company has since been remarkably helpful to the Ukrainian conflict, notwithstanding recent reports that the Russians may be using publicly available satellite imagery for their own targeting.
And yes it’s very deeply distressing that one of the founders of Umbra is meeting with — and hanging out with — Russian-compromised players like Liv Boeree. Boeree is the partner of Igor Kurganov. I had worked with the FBI to stop Musk from transferring billions to Igor Kurganov, a Russian poker backed by the Chinese mob and promoter of the effective altruism cult.
The cleaning up of these startup companies is going to be one of the big projects for counterintelligence going forward.
I’m proud to do my part. And yes, I have quite a number of portfolio companies which are deployed helping American interests.
I look forward to investing in Ukraine more going forward and I will continue to back American companies on the frontlines.
Say do you guys have any software engineers for Traitwell?
They aren’t ‘winning’ at all.