Time To Face The Music: Accountability and Clearview
The Pentagon gave us the Internet. Silicon Valley gave us Facebook. Clearview is about taking back the power.
Greetings from Istanbul, Türkiye, where I am at the frontlines of the struggle. More on that when I return. And yes, we are winning. Thank you, President Biden.
I read Kashmir Hill’s Your Face Belongs to Us which is about Clearview.AI, the company I cofounded. I read it in one sitting and in a foreign country and I’ll go through it again when I have more time.
I served as a source for Kashmir’s book and provided her with extensive documentation of everything that was going on. I also introduced her to other people who also provided clarity on facial recognition’s history as well as my role cofounding the company. I am proud of having played a “pivotal role” and I believe that Clearview can be salvaged — but only if it’s in the right hands.
I have a thread on the book that somewhat fact checks the book as I was going through it. It’s always interesting to read about things which you actually participated in and how they get distorted, sometimes maliciously, sometimes innocently. Having had it happen to a number of companies I helped to start, it really makes me wonder about other origin stories I read.
But on the crucial point of my having been a cofounder Kashmir gets it exactly right.
In fact I repeatedly bailed out the company with my network and with own capital. That money from Peter Thiel? It came because he owed me money. Hoan and Richard leveraged that investment to raise money. When they failed to secure additional investment I helped them by introducing them to lots of different investors.
So who does such a thing? Clearly some kind of mad man! Or perhaps, someone more motivated by mission than by money. Somebody who wants, perhaps, to end the exploitation of children by social media companies? Someone who wants, perhaps, to make it harder to do in person espionage because he was targeted by it when he was a child? Perhaps someone who wants to save his friend, who happens to be a very quiet billionaire these days, from the moral rot of serving on the Facebook board? I naively thought I could help rescue people even from their bad decisions.
The truth is that it was obvious to me then and it is obvious to me now that the ultimate customer of Clearview.AI was the United States of America, the United Kingdom and her allies. If you look at my work, you will time and again I am willing to put myself in harm’s way to help America and her allies. No exceptions.
I chose to start a company with Hoan precisely because his family had ties to the CIA’s Colombo Program. I chose to start a company with Richard precisely because I believed that someone with the ties to the Giuliani administration would make it work in New York. (I didn’t understand how much of a criminal Giuliani was and how his rise to power involved a lot of looking the other way on the Russian and Russian Jew mafia. I’m trying to fix that, too, but the less said about that, the better. )
When Clearview was hacked by a foreign power I reported it to the FBI — only to have Hoan ignore the FBI’s calls. That agent who opened a file on the breach? Johnathan Buma, the special agent who is whistleblowing about coverups at the FBI involving Rudy Giuliani. Later that hacked material found its way to BuzzFeed, which is now bankrupt after laundering Chisraeli talking points.
Time reveals all as it always does. Hoan claims to be a genetic deterministic so it was somewhat shocking when I later learned that Hoan’s father was effectively tied into Vietnamese organized crime in Australia and that Richard had cheated other business partners — no wonder the cops had a hard time trusting them!
This reality of their sketchy behavior was precisely why I negotiated a deal to help sell Clearview to law enforcement even while reducing my equity. I know how to sell, especially to law enforcement and the military — my family serves in both — and Hoan, so very sketchy, doesn’t. Cops can smell the crook on him.
The creation of Clearview.AI was nothing less than a nationalization of all the photos on the Internet. It was a heist. It was about taking back control of our identities and putting that power where it belongs — with the state.
Kashmir’s book makes clear that I had nothing to do with the weird scams that Richard Schwartz and Hoan Ton-That were running. I didn’t hire Douglass Mackey. I didn’t support giving the technology to politicians who are too weird to be trusted. No, I didn’t want to raise money from Chinese-compromised bits of Silicon Valley or the weird quasi-Israeli, quasi-Jewish network that Hoan cultivated and that cultivated him and later defamed me so they could push me out of the way.
I was exploited. I was used and I was betrayed. This sentence says it all: "Though Ton-That and Schwartz had decided to cut Johnson out legally, they kept including him on emails about Smartcheckr's plans."
No, it’s not lost on me that as Giuliani collapses so too does the industry which brought him to power. America’s Mayor, like America First, was foreign-compromised. How far back this goes is anyone’s guess but I suspect it goes a lot further back than we want to talk about.
Former Giuliani intern Sam Waxman, now one of Clearview’s attorneys, all but admits to having committed fraud when I was cheated out of my equity.
Real estate attorney Ron Giller — who did the opposition research file (read blackmail dossier) on Giuliani for his mayoral bid — is repping Clearview in my lawsuit against them.
Isn’t it interesting that someone investigating Giuliani — Special Agent Johnathan Buma — was punished professionally for revealing Giuliani’s criminal conduct? That he brought it attention of the Southern District of New York where Charles McGonigal worked?
Was Giuliani doing that sort of criminal thing when Schwartz was effectively the deputy mayor? I think it’s worth investigating, especially after conversations I had had with Schwartz about Giuliani’s extracurricular activities. Maybe this whole thing operates a little bit like a mob where you get defamed or lied about and then canceled so they can take your stuff. There’s a string of scandals every Schwartz turns.
In the book Kashmir compares me to Syndrome, the supervillain in the Pixar film The Incredibles, because we both have red hair and because I was supposedly rejected as the sidekick to Hoan. In fact there’s another comic book metaphor about a young man whose family was targeted and who was effectively an orphan but who uses the tools he has built to solve crimes alongside some of his real friends. I’m not saying I’m Batman but at least two VCs have compared me to him and it’s easy to see why when you look at my portfolio.
In America, though, you’re either stupid or evil if you’re eccentric. You can’t be genuinely motivated by pursuing something beautiful. These are silly, cartoonist portrayals, of course, and have little place in our larger conversation of how we can use technology to make Americans have more. They are a part of a process, though, which is designed to minimize me. The denigration and smearing was designed to make me look crazy and candidly because I was so miserable in my life I was sort of hoping that the nastiness and negativity would kill me so I wouldn’t have to do it myself. It’s only when certain players tried to hasten that process along that I finally woke up.
“You are responsible for the world you live in,” I’d say to myself every time I excused cowardice with a little bit of prudence. You can always reason yourself out of doing the right thing — and then you get what you deserve. It isn’t vengeance but a reckoning. It isn’t anger that’s driving me but a deep love and a gnawing realization that it’s up to me.
I decided, instead, to bide my time. I know that this is a good country in the end and so I decided to take whatever indignity life through at me. I wanted to endure, to be an inspiration to others, to get back up, to keep going, to take it whatever the price might be, as long as I could, as hard as I could until I couldn’t. And when I failed — because let’s face it no one lives forever — that others would continue the work I had started. They already have.
We have too many fake Christians in the world going on and about and I’m no saint and certainly no preacher. I do sometimes wonder what it would actually mean to lay down your life for your friends? To sacrifice everything for your country? What does it mean to be on the Cross? To be hated and lied about and not give way to hating or lying?
The best things in life are done by teams of quiet professionals, toiling mostly in obscurity. A hero can be anyone, after all. God bless the bureaucrat. God bless my fellow researchers who patiently make sense of the world. Hoan could never understand these people because Hoan is about trying to be famous more than he’s interested in serving the public.
The truth of the matter is that I leaked the material to Kashmir Hill because I wanted to whistleblow about the lack of ethics and to reform the company so that it could be more accountable.
No, I don’t believe Clearview should be controlled by Ton-That who routinely engages in fraud. If he’s willing to commit securities fraud with investors what other frauds might be lurking?
If necessary I think the U.S. government should invoke the Defense Production Act and take control of the company. It’s too important.
If that means I lose everything I’ve built, well, it’s a small price to pay for the country I love.
I’m ready to have that conversation.
I want to talk about how brilliant Americans, of every color, are targeted and ripped off and how social media companies facilitate it on an industrial scale and how it started with Facebook and continues in all kinds of ways big and small.
I want to explore why it is that the U.S. government continues to fund fraudulent foreigners over American ingenuity. Are we afraid to let our own domestic Geniuses become all they can be? I wonder. Have we so internalized the lie that other people are more deserving, that other people are smarter, that other people are better than we are? Let’s hope not. Because it simply isn’t true.
When I introduced Hoan to the CIA — my family proudly serves in our intelligence services — he offered to remove the photos of confidential informants — but only if he was paid. Remind you of any other ungrateful people? Maybe providing satellite coverage over Ukraine?
I would have done it for free.
That’s the difference.
Oh, and maybe, just maybe, we’re entering a new world order where we can’t lie to one another’s face anymore.
And yes, Kashmir, that’s a good thing. Maybe even a beautiful thing.
You might say I’m a Dreamer.
Or maybe I’m just an evil Genius.