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That's why it doesn't make sense to ban governments from doing things while still allowing private companies. Either it is illegal to surveil the public for everyone, or the government can always do it indirectly with the same effect.

I don't think the deal described here is even that egregious. It's basically a labeled data scrape. Any entity capable of training these LLMs are able to do this.

Just like when Verizon sold its customers' precise location history to data brokers who then sold it to law enforcement agencies.[^1] Laundered.

[^1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/court-rejects-ve...

That's not how the law works in the US. The government cannot have a third party take action on its behalf to do something that would be illegal for the government to do itself. This is why the Biden administration had a restraining order filed against it, on account of them pressuring social media companies to ban content it didn't like. This violated the First Amendment, despite the fact that it was a third party that was doing the actual banning at the behest of the government.

The government could legally create its own facial recognition technology if it wanted to. They're not avoiding the law, facial recognition isn't illegal.

This is why we should shun the people that build this stuff. If you take a paycheck to enable fascism, you're a bad person and should be unwelcome in polite society.

Not sure if you're joking but Clearview's primary customers are local or metro police departments.

"This cannot happen here" should be classified as a logical fallacy.

> average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets.

What do you mean by this? If a government conscripts "average citizens" into its military then they become valid military targets, sure.

I'm not why you think this implies that developers working for Palantir or Clearview would become military targets. Palantir builds software for the military. But the people actually using that software are military personnel, not Palantir employees.

>There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets.

Yeah we typically call those people terrorists or war criminals.

I never worked at a company that could broadly be considered unethical, I don't think. But it was always a bit disheartening how many little obviously unethical decisions (e.g., advertised monthly plans with a small print "annual contract" and cancellation fee) almost every other employee would just go along with implementing, no pushback whatsoever. I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do.

I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...

That will be wildly unpopular with both parties and most importantly their constituents. I doubt even the libertarian party should they get the president, house and senate could pull it off

Maybe. Anonymity is where bad actors play. Better to have better disclosure and de-anonymization in some cases. If some live in fear (e.g. of cartels), go after the cartels harder than they go after you.

I think the facial rec systems you're thinking of will recognize faces, but not ID them. They need you to label a face, and then it recognizes that face with a name from there on. Clearview is different in that you can provide it an unknown face and it returns a name. Whether it's just some ML based AI vs an LLM, it's still under the AI umbrella technically.

After the literal first one which just measured distance between nose and mouth and stuff like that from the 1960s, everything else has been based on AI.

If my memory serves me, we had a PCA and LDA based one in the 90s and then the 2000s we had a lot of hand-woven adaboosts and (non AI)SIFTs. This is where 3D sensors proved useful, and is the basis for all scifi potrayals of facial recognition(a surface depth map drawn on the face).

In the 2010s, when deep learning became feasible, facial recognition as well as all other AI started using an end to end neural network. This is what is used to this day. It is the first iteration pretty much to work flawlessly regardless of lighting, angle and what not. [1]

Note about the terms AI, ML, Signal processing:

In any given era:

- whatever data-fitting/function approximation method is the latest one is typically called AI.

- the previous generation one is called ML

- the really old now boring ones are called signal processing

Sometimes the calling-it-ML stage is skipped.

[1] All data fitting methods are only as good as the data. Most of these were trained on caucasian people initially so many of them were not as good for other people. These days the ones deployed by Google photos and stuff of course works for other races as well, but many models don't.

I think anything short of fully obscuring your face (a-la ICE-agent/stormtrooper) will be merely a mitigation and not 100% successful. I recall articles talking about face recognition being used "successfully" on people wearing surgical masks in China. In the US they ask you to remove face masks in places where face recognition is used (at the border, TSA checkpoints), but would be unsurprised if that isn't strictly needed in most cases (but asking people to remove it preemptively ends up being faster for throughput).

Your gait I think is more useful than your face is anyways and my understanding is it's my difficult to disguise. So you'll need a wheel chair/scooter and a mask in public.

Aren't we back to where this is illegal again, unless you're an ICE agent.

If you have not yet heard of it, look into gait recognition. Any battle for anonymity is a losing one, it appears.