One of the more singular aspects of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was the role photography, and even moreso, video. It’s difficult to fathom such a defining moment in American history so vividly and fulsomely recorded by so many at the same time; the attacks of 9/11, for example, were widely photographed, but a live visual record of the attacks themselves was relatively limited due to both the suddenness of the event, and that video technology wasn’t within reach of every witness.
Of course, that is entirely due to the widespread use of smartphone video technology which has since turned everyone into an amateur videographer. Video has proved itself an enormous force for social change, evidenced most vividly by the racial justice protests this past summer, which were galvanized by video of a Black man, George Floyd, being murdered by a white police officer. In that context, video has become a uniquely useful means of preserving and disseminating actions by police which typically went unseen by the majority of the population.
The sheer speed by which this ubiquity of video recording provided the country an unmistakably clear picture of what exactly occurred on Jan. 6 is itself stunning, but perhaps even more stunning was the relative indifference of the participants to its implications. In video after video, we saw people engaged in indefensible acts of criminality and violence, seemingly oblivious or indifferent to the fact that their actions were being recorded for all to see. Whether that indifference was due to feelings of personal entitlement by the persons involved, a belief that their actions would not be seen as criminal, or for some other reason is a fruitful subject for discussion. For now, the reasons why so many people willingly allowed themselves to be recorded while committing violent and seditious acts are less important than the consequences.
As reported by Andy Greenberg in Wired, some enterprising technophiles have isolated still images of every single person seen in videos of the Jan. 6 insurrection that were posted to Parler—and subsequently posted those images on social media, complete with corresponding video clips.
As Greenberg writes:
When hackers exploited a bug in Parler to download all of the right-wing social media platform's contents last week, they were surprised to find that many of the pictures and videos contained geolocation metadata revealing exactly how many of the site's users had taken part in the invasion of the US Capitol building just days before. But the videos uploaded to Parler also contain an equally sensitive bounty of data sitting in plain sight: thousands of images of unmasked faces, many of whom participated in the Capitol riot. Now one website has done the work of cataloging and publishing every one of those faces in a single, easy-to-browse lineup.
The impulse by these Parler users to to publish their individual “records” of the violent attacks on the U.S. Capitol doubtlessly stemmed from a feeling of triumph and achievement at what they had wrought. Unfortunately for many of their compatriots, it also provided law enforcement with an unprecedented tool to ensure the prosecution of the most violent offenders.
Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared. The site's creator tells WIRED that he used simple open source machine learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot that resulted in five people's deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled from those videos to identify someone they may know or recognize who took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot someone.
As Greenberg explains, the originator of Faces of the Riot—described only as a “college student in the greater D.C. area”—appears to recognize the privacy implications of their project and its implications on freedom of expression. The site remains a work in progress, specifically aiming to “differentiate between bystanders, peaceful protesters, and violent insurrectionists” by including hyperlinks to videos which put the participants’ activities into context, as well as eliminating photos of press and police who may have been present as onlookers to the event.
Beyond that, Greenberg points out that the easy creation of such a site has broader and considerably more worrisome implications.
Despite its disclaimers and limitations, Faces of the Riot represents the serious privacy dangers of pervasive facial recognition technology, says Evan Greer, the campaign director for digital civil liberties nonprofit Fight for the Future. "Whether it's used by an individual or by the government, this technology has profound implications for human rights and freedom of expression," says Greer, whose organization has fought for a legislative ban on facial recognition technologies. "I think it would be an enormous mistake if we come out of this moment by glorifying or lionizing a technology that, broadly speaking, disproportionately harms communities of color, low-income communities, immigrant communities, Muslim communities, activists ... the very same people that the faces on this website stormed the Capitol for the purpose of silencing and disenfranchising."
The site’s creator notes that the while the site did employ “facial recognition” technology (Dlib software), what they have done is more akin to “facial detection.” This was achieved by “clustering” faces from 11 hours of video posted on Parler during and after the event, an effort—which ultimately yielded approximately 6,000 unique facial views from 200,000 screened images. Faces of the Riot also makes no attempt to link names to the faces, although it encourages others to do so, and to report possible offenders to law enforcement.
Still, while the fact that so many of these insurrectionists chose to reveal themselves may be gratifying to those of us who view the Jan. 6 events with horror, we should keep in mind that there is often a fine line between legitimate free expression and illegal, criminal activity, and that line is always going to be dependent on who is drawing it.
NOTE: The site has varied in its accessibility since publication. It appears its availability continues to be in flux. CNET discusses that here.
Posts on Twitter suggest that the Faces of the Riot has faced repeated denial-of-service attacks.