Biden Gave Peter Thiel’s Facial Recognition Software to Kiev’s Nazis

by an EIR Investigative Team

[Print version of this article]

Oct 21—On Feb. 16, one week before the conflict started in Ukraine, the Washington Post revealed that Ukraine had obtained highly sophisticated artificial intelligence applications from the New York based company Clearview AI.

Speaking about the firm’s high-performance facial recognition software, even the Post worries:

The company is pushing toward 100 billion images in its “index of faces,” even as lawmakers worry the company poses a dangerous threat to Americans’ privacy rights.

On April 15, 2022, in an article, titled “Ukraine is scanning faces of dead Russians, then contacting the mothers,” the Washington Post states that Clearview AI had offered Kiev its latest facial recognition application for free. Currently the NATO backed Ukrainian regime uses Clearview AI’s high tech, both to torment the families of Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine (who receive gruesome photos of their loved ones accompanied by texts designed to aggravate their psychological distress) and to collect the identities of “traitors” and “information terrorists” in order to present them as targets on Ukraine’s “kill lists,” including that of the Myrotvorets website. Only lunatics or criminals in office could think it is safe to ship such software to a regime that continues to praise Hitler’s collaborators as heroes!

The Washington Post reports that 582 Russian families had so far received photos of corpses, including the following:

A stranger sent a message to a Russian mother saying her son was dead, alongside a photo showing a man’s body in the dirt—his face grimacing and mouth agape. The recipient responded in disbelief, saying it wasn’t him, before the sender forwarded another photo showing a gloved hand holding the man’s military documents.

“Why are you doing this?” the recipient wrote back. “Do you want me to die? I already don’t live. You must be enjoying this.”

Showing the criminal nature of the sick minds at work, a video currently circulating on social media shows Ukrainian military talking via video chat to the mother of a Russian soldier named Ilya. The laughing soldiers tell the mother:

Ilya left. He got sick and died. He got lost. That was his first mistake. The second mistake was that he got lost in Ukraine. And his third and final mistake is that he died. The dogs will eat him. That’s all. We don’t even have time to bury them. We don’t have time to bury them. We’re killing too many, too fast.

Although the Washington Post describes the macabre and insane nature of this practice aimed at deteriorating the psychological state of the Russians, it passes it off as a legitimate military tactic, in the current logic where the end—“bringing Russia to its knees”—justifies the means. Yet this is a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions and Protocols, which stipulate that the bodies of dead soldiers must be respected and may not be subjected to ill-treatment.

Peter Thiel’s Financial Windfall

Based in New York City, Clearview AI was launched with an initial investment from right-wing American libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, major shareholder in Facebook, and creator of Palantir Technologies, the CIA’s leading AI company. Clearview AI “holds weekly, sometimes daily, training calls via Zoom with new police and military officials seeking access,” says the Post.

According to a well-researched article on WSWS,

Clearview AI’s relationship with Kiev, as well as the practice of sending photos of dead bodies to Russian families, is directed from Washington. The contact between the Ukrainian government and New York-based Clearview AI was established in early March through a member of Clearview’s advisory board, Lee Wolosky, a former U.S. ambassador who has served under four U.S. presidents in national security and counterterrorism positions and, most recently, as a special adviser to President Biden. Other former senior U.S. officials on the company’s advisory board include Richard Clarke, Owen West, and Thomas Feddo.

The highest levels of the Ukrainian state are involved in this work, WSWS explains. Three Ukrainian government agencies have confirmed the use of the technology: the national police, the Ministry of Defense, and a third agency that asked Clearview to keep its identity confidential. In addition, two other government institutions employ the software, but Clearview declined to name without providing any explication.

The Myrotvorets Blacklist

To compile its “hit list,” Myrotvorets (created by the Ukrainian government and those in the West who control it) also used Clearview’s software to develop an automatic “criminal” identification system called IDentigraF.

On August 24, 2017 (Clearview AI was created in the U.S. that year), Ukraine’s Interior Ministry advisor Anton Gerashchenko, one of the creators of Myrotvorets in 2014, wrote on Facebook,

On Independence Day in Ukraine, the automatic criminal identification system IDentigraF will be launched. The uniqueness of this system is that it is the first system in the world that will work in the public domain on the Internet to search for separatists, terrorists, and criminals.

According to an Aug. 18, 2017 posting by the Ukrainian Vchasno News Agency,

The development of IDentigraF was conducted in cooperation with one of the most famous social networks in the world and took nine months.

To implement it, about one million hryvnias (Ukrainian currency) of donations were collected from 2,000 Ukrainian citizens. However, this money did not cover the expenses of the developers, some of the work was done on credit, added Gerashchenko.

France’s CNIL Issues Stop Order to Clearview

Clearview scrapes (mass collects) selfies and other personal data from the Internet to feed its AI-powered identity-matching service, which it sells to law enforcement agencies all over the world (other than the Ukrainian freebie). On Oct. 21, 2022 it was hit with a €20 million penalty, the highest penalty allowed under the law, by the French data privacy watchdog, the CNIL (Commission Nationale Informatique & Libertés). Clearview was told to stop its unlawful processing of French citizens’ information and delete their data already collected.

The U.S.-based privacy-stripper has been issued a slew of penalties by other data protection agencies across Europe in recent months, including €20 million fines from Italy and Greece; and a smaller UK penalty. But it’s not clear if Clearview has handed over any money to any of these authorities—and they have limited resources (and legal means) to try to pursue Clearview for payment outside their own borders.

The EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) allows for penalties of up to 4 % of a firm’s worldwide annual revenue for the most serious infringements—or €20 million, whichever is higher. Whether France will see a penny of this money from Clearview remains an open question. The firm argues that “Clearview AI’s database of publicly available images is lawfully collected, just like any other search engine like Google.” Each time Clearview has been sanctioned by an international regulator, it has done the same thing: Deny it has committed any breach and assert that the foreign body has no jurisdiction over its business. Its strategy for dealing with its own data processing lawlessness appears to be simple non-cooperation with regulators outside the U.S.

Never Again

Let’s say it bluntly: the Anglo-American financial oligarchy did not only create the neo-Nazi monster whose face we are gradually seeing in Kiev: it became an even more evil monster itself in the process. And, as the LaRouche independent candidate for U.S. Senate from New York, Diane Sare, has underlined repeatedly, that is precisely where the Achilles heel of this oligarchy lies, if we help the truth to emerge.