Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracted Clearview AI for $9.2 million to expand facial recognition surveillance capabilities, ostensibly for child exploitation investigations and officer ‘assault’ cases. ICE has already spent $3.7 million of the contract. Clearview AI’s …
Social Security Administration Chief Data Officer Charles Borges filed a whistleblower complaint revealing that members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uploaded a live copy of the entire Social Security database to a vulnerable Amazon-hosted cloud server in June 2025. …
Hoan Ton-That, co-founder and CEO of controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI, resigned from his position, stating “it is time for the next chapter in my life.” Ton-That said he would remain on as a board member but declined to comment on what specifically sparked his …
In a landmark decision, Congress reauthorized and expanded Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), dramatically increasing domestic surveillance capabilities. The legislation allows warrantless access to Americans’ communications and compels a wide range of businesses …
By mid-2024, U.S. defense contractors and surveillance technology companies began systematically marketing their systems as “battle-tested in Ukraine,” transforming the ongoing war into a real-world demonstration and validation platform for AI-powered surveillance, autonomous weapons, …
On April 26, 2023, the Ukrainian government launched Brave1, a state-backed coordination platform designed to accelerate development of dual-use military and surveillance technologies. Founded by a coalition including the Ministry of Digital Transformation, Ministry of Defence, General Staff of the …
On April 22, 2023, Palantir Technologies announced a partnership with Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office to process massive volumes of war crimes evidence using artificial intelligence and data analytics. At the time of the announcement, Ukraine had registered more than 78,000 alleged …
France’s data protection authority (CNIL) imposed a €20 million fine on Clearview AI - the maximum penalty allowed under GDPR Article 83 - for unlawful processing of biometric data through its facial recognition technology. The CNIL found that Clearview had collected over 20 billion images …
On June 1, 2022, Palantir CEO Alex Karp crossed the border from Poland into Ukraine and met President Volodymyr Zelensky in the presidential palace bunker, becoming the first major Western tech CEO to visit since Russia’s February invasion. Karp told Zelensky they could work together “in …
The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) fined Clearview AI £7.5 million for breaching UK data protection rules by creating an online database of over 20 billion images of people’s faces collected from publicly available sources on the internet and social media without …
Ukraine’s defense ministry began using Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology in early March 2022, just weeks after Russia’s invasion, after CEO Hoan Ton-That offered free access to the company’s database of over 10 billion photos. Ton-That first demonstrated the tool …
Clearview AI closed a $30 million Series B funding round led by Kirenaga Partners, valuing the controversial facial recognition company at $130 million. The investment came despite ongoing privacy investigations in multiple countries and widespread regulatory findings that the company’s …
A joint investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and provincial counterparts from Quebec, British Columbia, and Alberta concluded that Clearview AI’s scraping of billions of images of people from across the Internet represented “mass surveillance” and was a …
New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill published a groundbreaking exposé titled “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy As We Know It,” revealing that Clearview AI had scraped 3 billion faces from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and millions of other websites without anyone’s …
The New York Police Department signed a nondisclosure agreement with Clearview AI on December 6, 2018, beginning a secret trial period that would run through March 6, 2019. The trial marked one of the first major law enforcement deployments of Clearview’s controversial facial recognition …
Northrop Grumman received a contract as part of a potential $217 million five-year U.S. military cyber warfare program called Unified Platform, which aims to develop a coordinated cyber weapons infrastructure enabling U.S. Cyber Command to conduct offensive and defensive cyber operations independent …
Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Australian tech entrepreneur Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, a former aide to Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York. The company was created after transferring the assets of another company, SmartCheckr, which the pair originally founded alongside …
Northrop Grumman’s RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drone program experienced massive cost escalation, with per-unit costs exploding from an initial $60.9 million in 2001 to $222.7 million per aircraft (including development costs) by 2013—a nearly four-fold increase that forced the Air Force to …
Northrop Grumman Corporation and its predecessor TRW Inc. agreed to pay $325 million to settle False Claims Act allegations that they provided and billed the National Reconnaissance Office for defective microelectronic parts used in classified spy satellites over a decade-long period from 1992 to …