White supremacists of all stripes—fully cognizant that ordinary people are repelled by the writhing ball of hatred at the essence of their ideology—talk amongst themselves constantly about ways to infiltrate mainstream institutions incognito and wreak havoc on behalf of their agenda from there. Some even have adopted a “secret agent” strategy that aims for white-nationalist workers—particularly in the tech industry—to infiltrate the workforce.
But what if white nationalists actually had penetrated the tech industry at its highest levels, involving technology that can and will directly impact the privacy of every citizen in a modern society, potentially controlling their lives? That appalling prospect raises its head in a wide-ranging deep-dive investigation by Luke O’Brien in Huffington Post of the very alt-right-friendly overseers of Clearview AI, the facial recognition technology now being wielded as an arrest tool by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
O’Brien’s investigation makes clear that this infiltration of the software industry is not simply an outcome of a deliberate white-nationalist strategy, but also a product of the industry’s culture, one dominated by a brand of libertarianism that’s conducive to fascist ideas.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the person of Clearview AI’s CEO and founder, a former hacker from Australia named Hoan Ton-That. Not only does Ton-That have a history of close associations with a number of white nationalists and far-right operatives—including the infamous neo-Nazi hacker Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, “Pizzagate” advocate Mike Cernovich, extremist political figure Charles “Chuck” Johnson, and many others—he also clearly favors their far-right views, including an ethnic nationalism that would make the United States a white homeland.
Ton-That’s relationship with the far right entailed shared ideas, as his exchange with notorious white nationalist Richard Spencer suggested:
“He was smart,” Spencer told HuffPost of Ton-That. “He was into this esoteric reactionary sphere stuff. I remember he was talking about celibacy and the priestly order being celibate and thinking for the group and not having mundane concerns. He was into quasi-Catholic neo-trad[itional] reactionary type stuff.”
Ton-That operates in an elite circle in the tech industry, the so-called “Dark Enlightenment” or "neoreactionary" set based in Silicon Valley, much of it built around “libertarian entrepreneur” Peter Thiel, a Donald Trump adviser and one of the chief funders of the “Intellectual Dark Web.”
Ton-That obtained funding from Thiel while developing Clearview AI—with people like “Chuck” Johnson, “Weev,” a devoted white nationalist named Tyler Bass, alt-right figure Douglass “Ricky Vaughn” Mackey, and alt-right financier/Thiel operative Jeff Giesea directly involved—not just along for the ride, but making command decisions. And the software they set about creating had a specific purpose in mind: Namely, to be able to use facial recognition technology to create a database that can track illegal immigrants and enable their arrest and deportation.
Johnson boasted on Facebook that he was “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads.” In the end, that’s precisely what their project—first named SmartCheckr, then rebranded as Clearview AI—has become.
The Clearview team proved highly successful at building a clientele within law enforcement, eventually including ICE and Customs and Border Protection, both of which began using the company’s impressive database to identify and begin rounding up immigrants it had identified for investigation.
How did it build that far-reaching database? By scraping social media websites—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and others—and collecting people’s selfies and group portraits, identifying potential suspects with facial recognition software, and then providing those identifications for investigating agencies.
Jacinta González, a senior campaign director at Mijente, a Latinx advocacy group, told BuzzFeed News she is troubled by ICE’s use of Clearview, an information-gathering system for which there is no regulatory framework: “This tool goes way beyond anything that is legal, and there is literally no accountability for how they're going to use this tool,” she said. “They could walk into a supermarket, scan people, see if it matches up, and deport them immediately.”
“The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, told The New York Times. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”
One of the more chilling aspects of the Clearview app’s spread is that it is being sold to private companies as well. Moreover, while it has in fact led to a number of arrests and successful investigations, its soft underbelly is still just waiting to be exposed.
“We have no data to suggest this tool is accurate,” Clare Garvie, a researcher at Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology, told the Times. “The larger the database, the larger the risk of misidentification because of the doppelgänger effect. They’re talking about a massive database of random people they’ve found on the internet.”
As the Times story notes, this technology would “herald the end of public anonymity”:
Searching someone by face could become as easy as Googling a name. Strangers would be able to listen in on sensitive conversations, take photos of the participants and know personal secrets. Someone walking down the street would be immediately identifiable — and his or her home address would be only a few clicks away.
In many regards, Clearview AI’s success and spread is the realization of a white-nationalist dream: that is, for its followers and operatives not only to have serious roles within the industry, but that the software that they would then produce would advance a white-nationalist agenda. Movement leaders have talked about doing this for some time, advancing a “secret agent” strategy of infiltrating tech industry workplaces, which later affects who they hire.
Counter Currents publisher Greg Johnson in particular has been an ardent promoter of this strategy. Based in Seattle but with a global reach, Johnson believes white nationalists need to keep low profiles while advancing within the industry. “We need to keep building our network until we become strong enough, and the system becomes weak enough, for open struggle to have a chance of success,” Johnson told an audience in Oslo, Norway. “Until then, most of us will have to remain publicly silent, sharing our views with only small circles of trusted friends.”
“Basically, white nationalists meet in secret at conventions like Northwest Forum while paying ‘lip service to diversity’ at their day jobs,” a reporter who infiltrated one of their Seattle-area gatherings, David Lewis, explained. “They move into positions of power where they can hire other racists and keep non-whites from getting into the company. Two years ago, this method would have seemed like a total joke, but these guys really do mostly work in tech, and they were doing a lot of networking.”
As Lewis noted, Johnson has written that the ranks of his “secret agents” include “college professors, writers, artists, designers, publishers, creative people working in the film industry, businessmen, and professionals, some of them quite prominent in their fields.”