Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the government' s contracting record (as first identified by the non-profit, tech accountancy Tech Inquiry) signed this week with Clearview AI, a facial recognition company. The $224,000 purchase order lists the "clearview licenses" and the contracting office "ICE support mission dallas."
In the last month, it reported, the Washington Post and the FBI had access to state driver license databases, a genuine facial gold mine, the post said, but without the drivers' knowledge or consent. ICE is known to use face recognition technology.
The agency was criticised for its practices at the southern frontier with the separation of immigrant children from their families and the indefinite detention of refugees.
A study by The New York Times has shown that their face recognition technology was widely used by law enforcement agencies and private companies since January. Clearview AI is the focus of attention. The technology could identify someone from a photo and place names on their faces by collecting 3 billion images taken from social media sites, often contrary to the rules of the platform.
In December 2019 Clearview also entered into a $50,000 contract with the US Air Force in response to the open call for innovative defense technology / solutions with clear need for air force stakeholders.
As reported in May by BuzzFeed News, thousands of companies, including NBA, Bank of America, Macy's, and Walmart, had been found to use the Clearview technology. Clearview said it would stop selling its app to private companies and avoid transactions with non-governmental customers wherever it may be. Nevertheless, the ICE contract seems to meet Clearview 's previous commitment.
Several technical companies have ordered the removal of data collected from social media posts to Clearview by stopping and withdrawing orders. And in May, in breach of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), the American Civil Liberties Union filed an action against Clearview. The ACLU alleged that the company collected information illegally without the consent of Illinois citizens and later sold access to information to law enforcement companies and private enterprises.
