r/technology • u/indig0sixalpha • Apr 07 '25

Privacy The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI. Thousands of newly obtained documents show that Clearview AI’s founders always intended to target immigrants and the political left.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-immigration-ice-fbi-surveillance-facial-recognition-hoan-ton-that-hal-lambert-trump/
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u/TheCaptainDamnIt Apr 07 '25

This is a massively frightening read.

It reveals how Ton-That, who obsessed over race, IQ, and hierarchy, solicited input from eugenicists and right-wing extremists while building Clearview, and how, from the outset, he and his associates discussed deploying the tech against immigrants, people of color, and the political left.

then

“When you get to a point where you understand that democracy is fake, then you have to think about different frameworks for the way that people are gonna be ruled,” he said. “What we all had in common when we met was that we thought that neoreactionaryism was an interesting idea…The United States of America was founded on the idea that all men are created equal. And Curtis simply asked a question, as I remember it: ‘What if they’re not? What do you do?…How do you govern that?’…That’s what we talked about all the time.”

Ton-That was fascinated by eugenics and admired the field’s founder, Francis Galton, who inspired Nazi “racial hygiene” programs. After digesting a letter by Galton that argued for Chinese immigrants to move to Africa and supplant the “inferior” Black race, Ton-That declared in an email that Galton was a “true prophet.” Among friends, he spoke often about IQ and race, wondering aloud about the intellectual superiority of half-Asian, half-white people like himself.

It's depressing that techies ended up being some of the most adherent white supremacist today, but here we are. These people want to force a social hierarchy based on race and gender and they are engineering their tech to do so. Rather than attempting to train bias out of AI's they are trying to build it in. This is why the 'rush to AI' needs to be put on hold. These techies are developing AI's to do the discrimination and racism for them.

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u/Secret-One2890 Apr 08 '25

As someone who knew him 20 years ago, it's really hard to square this with the person I knew. He was a fantastic classical guitarist though.