[liberationtech] Far-Right Extremists Helped Create The World's Most Powerful Facial Recognition Technology

[Yosem Companys]

EXCERPTS:
What hasn’t been reported, however, is even scarier:
Exclusive documents obtained by HuffPost reveal that Ton-That, as well as
several people who have done work for the company, have deep, longstanding ties
to far-right extremists. Some members of this alt-right cabal went on to work
for Ton-That.
Clearview stated that it had immediately parted ways with some of these people
when HuffPost reached out for comment for this story, but the pervasive links
between the company and the alt-right can’t be simply dismissed as a few bad
apples.
Big Brother, it turned out, was wearing a MAGA cap.
A Mysterious HackerLittle is known about Ton-That, a 31-year-old Australian
hacker who moved to San Francisco in 2007. He made a name for himself two years
later by unleashing a computer worm that phished the login credentials of Gmail
users. Ton-That showed no remorse after journalists traced the worm to him— he
simply set up another phishing site. 
By 2015, he had joined forces with far-right subversives working to install
Trump as president. They included Mike Cernovich, a Trump-affiliated
propagandist who spearheaded the near-deadly Pizzagate disinformation campaign;
Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, a neo-Nazi hacker and the webmaster for The Daily
Stormer; and Pax Dickinson, the racist former chief technology officer of
Business Insider who went on to march with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville,
Virginia.
In this far-right clique, two of Ton-That’s associates loomed larger than most
thanks to their close connection to billionaire Peter Thiel, a Facebook board
member and Trump adviser: Jeff Giesea, a Thiel protégé and secret funder  of
alt-right causes, and Charles “Chuck” Johnson, a former Breitbart writer and
far-right extremist who reportedly coordinated lawfare against media
organizations with Thiel. And according to new documents obtained by HuffPost,
Johnson appears to have received funding from Thiel for a startup that the
Southern Poverty Law Center would label a “white nationalist hate group.”
(Johnson has filed suit against HuffPost in Texas over a January 2019 article
about his visits to members of Congress to discuss “DNA sequencing.”)
People involved with Clearview appear to have gone to great lengths to conceal
their links to the company and each other.
Far-Right Extremists Helped Create The World's Most Powerful Facial
Recognition Technology Clearview AI, which has alarmed privacy experts, hired
several far-right employees, a HuffPost investigation found. huffpost.com
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