Latest S2 Update on Ukraine

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Psychological warfare hits another level of darkness...

Ukraine is scanning faces of dead Russians, then contacting the mothers (WaPo story)

Ukrainian officials have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers in the 50 days since Moscow’s invasion began, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of their families in what may be one of the most gruesome applications of the technology to date.

The country’s IT Army, a volunteer force of hackers and activists that takes its direction from the Ukrainian government, says it has used those identifications to inform the families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including by sending them photos of the abandoned corpses.

The Ukrainians champion the use of face-scanning software from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a brutal but effective way to stir up dissent inside Russia, discourage other fighters and hasten an end to a devastating war.

But some military and technology analysts worry that the strategy could backfire, inflaming anger over a shock campaign directed at mothers who may be thousands of miles from the drivers of the Kremlin’s war machine.

The West’s solidarity with Ukraine makes it tempting to support such a radical act designed to capitalize on family grief, said Stephanie Hare, a surveillance researcher in London. But contacting soldiers’ parents, she said, is “classic psychological warfare” and could set a dangerous new standard for future conflicts.

“If it were Russian soldiers doing this with Ukrainian mothers, we might say, ‘Oh, my God, that’s barbaric,’ ” she said. “And is it actually working? Or is it making them say: ‘Look at these lawless, cruel Ukrainians, doing this to our boys?’ ”

Clearview AI’s chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, told The Washington Post that more than 340 officials across five Ukrainian government agencies now can use its tool to run facial recognition searches whenever they want, free of charge.

Clearview employees now hold weekly, sometimes daily, training calls over Zoom with new police and military officials looking to gain access. Ton-That recounted several “‘oh, wow’ moments” as the Ukrainians witnessed how much data — including family photos, social media posts and relationship details — they could gather from a single cadaver scan.

Some of them are using Clearview’s mobile app to scan faces while on the battlefield, he said. Others have logged in for training while stationed at a checkpoint or out on patrol, the night sky visible behind their faces.

“They’re so enthusiastic,” Ton-That said. “Their energy is really high. They say they’re going to win, every call.”

The company, Ton-That said, first offered its services last month to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense after he saw Russian propaganda claiming that soldiers captured there were actors or frauds.

The system had primarily been used by police officers and federal investigators in the United States to see whether a photo of a suspect or witness matched any others in their database of 20 billion images taken from social media and the public Internet.

But about 10 percent of the database has come from Russia’s biggest social network, VKontakte, known as VK, making it a potentially useful tool for battlefield scans, Ton-That said.

...
Ton-That said the company’s sole ambition is to help defend a besieged country. But he also acknowledged the war has helped provide a “good example for other parts of the U.S. government to see how these use cases work.”

“This is a new war,” he said. And the Ukrainians are “very creative with what they’ve been able to do.”

Irrespective of the ethics of sending mothers pictures of their dead sons, this appears to be a data harvesting scheme by Clearview.

Clearview AI is used in Indiana Department of Corrections photos sent to prisons via snail mail or through prison tablets. The photos are then cross-referenced against social media/dataset sites like classmates, etc. The new datasets and connections are then sold to LEO.

If you send a picture to a prisoner, and someone you are connected with via facebook sends a photo to a separate prisoner, any shared contacts on social media between you & four people are now flagged by CVAI (and thus law enforcement).

"The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It" (18 January 2020)

Clearview AI aims to put almost every human in facial recognition database (Feb 2022)

The controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI reportedly told investors that it aims to collect 100 billion photos—supposedly enough to ensure that almost every human will be in its database.

"Clearview AI is telling investors it is on track to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year, enough to ensure 'almost everyone in the world will be identifiable,' according to a financial presentation from December obtained by The Washington Post," the Post reported today. There are an estimated 7.9 billion people on the planet.

As the Post noted, "Clearview has built its database by taking images from social networks and other online sources without the consent of the websites or the people who were photographed. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube have demanded the company stop taking photos from their sites and delete any that were previously taken. Clearview has argued its data collection is protected by the First Amendment."

The increase in photos could be paired with an expanded business model. Clearview "wants to expand beyond scanning faces for the police, saying in the presentation that it could monitor 'gig economy' workers and is researching a number of new technologies that could identify someone based on how they walk, detect their location from a photo or scan their fingerprints from afar," the Post wrote.

Clearview is facing various privacy lawsuits and lost an important ruling Monday in a case over whether the company violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act by collecting and using facial images without people's consent. A federal judge "rejected Clearview's First Amendment defense, denied the company's motion to dismiss, and allowed the lawsuits to move forward," the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote yesterday. "This is an important victory for our privacy over Clearview's profits."

A long list of dystopian movies come to mind.