The
US Air Force is looking into keeping its airfields
safer with help from facial recognition startup Clearview AI.
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The Air Force Research Laboratory awarded
Clearview $49,847 to research augmented reality glasses that could scan
people’s faces to help with security on bases.
Bryan Ripple, a spokesperson for the lab,
described the work as a three-month study to figure out the “scientific and
technical merit and feasibility” of using such glasses for face recognition.
“No glasses or units are being delivered
under this contract,” Ripple said Thursday.
In other words, the lab is paying for the
glasses to be developed, but it isn’t buying them yet. Ripple provided “a
one-page overview from the company,” titled “
Clearview AI: Augmented Reality
Glasses to Secure Bases and Flightlines.” The flier said the product “saves
lives,” “saves time” and “improves health” by increasing social distancing and
keeping officers’ hands free to grab their weapons.
New York-based Clearview AI has been the
target of international investigations and lawsuits because it scraped billions
of photos from the public internet to build a facial recognition tool used by
law enforcement. Hundreds of federal agencies and local police departments have
employed Clearview’s technology.
The company describes its software as ideal
for investigations that take place after a crime has been committed and not for
surveillance, but it has experimented with real-time facial recognition.
In January 2020, a technologist at The New
York Times found code in the company’s app that showed it could be paired with
augmented reality glasses. At the time, Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That
acknowledged designing a prototype but said the company had no plans to release
it.
“We continually research and develop new
technologies, processes and platforms to meet current and future security
challenges, and look forward to any opportunities that would bring us together
with the Air Force in that realm,” Ton-That said in a statement after the
contract became public. “Once realized, we believe this technology will be an
excellent fit for numerous security situations.”
Last month, Ton-That said in a public letter
that his company would not use its technology “in a real-time way,” but
outfitting glasses with the technology to recognize faces seems to fit that
bill.
In a phone call, Ton-That said Clearview’s
database of 10 billion photos “won’t be used for any real-time surveillance”
and that any augmented reality glasses would rely instead on “limited data sets
— for example, outstanding warrants, missing children or persons of interest.”
The Air Force contract was signed in November
but only became public Thursday. It was first highlighted on Twitter by
Jack Poulson, executive director of Tech Inquiry, a nonprofit that monitors
government procurement of surveillance technology.
The Air Force previously awarded Clearview AI $50,000 in
December 2019 for research and development. BuzzFeed News previously reported
that the Air Force was one of many divisions within federal agencies that had
performed trials with the company’s facial recognition software.
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