The US Army has a contract with Clearview AI, according to documents that reveal the controversial facial-recognition startup making bold claims to the military about capabilities such as "criminal network discovery" and "force protection and area security."
The contract, obtained with other documents by Insider via public-records request, shows the US military awarding a discounted contract for Clearview to work with the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, which investigates serious crimes that could involve active service members or civilian workers for the Army.
The documents detail how Clearview AI, which uses billions of images downloaded from social media to identify people using facial recognition, is capable of wooing high-level customers within the US government, including the US Defense Department.
Clearview is a facial-recognition company with one main function: taking a searched face and matching it to other faces using pictures from sites like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. It claims to have scraped 3 billion photos from the internet and has given free trials of its service to thousands of police officers, and previously to private companies like Macy's and the NBA. In July, Clearview raised $30 million in a Series B funding round; the investors were not identified in the funding announcement.
The company has been publicly accused by Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social-media companies of violating their terms of services by scraping images and videos. Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and Mijente have filed lawsuits against Clearview, accusing it of violating Illinois and California state law by downloading people's photos and putting them in its database.
The contract, signed in September 2020, shows that the Army gets a discounted rate of Clearview's services for five years at $15,000 — meaning it can pay $1,000 per license that normally costs $2,000. The Army paid for 15 Clearview licenses in total. Although the discount lasts five years, the contract has to be renewed each year, and this one is set to expire next month.
Nate Wessler — a staff attorney for the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project at the ACLU, which is suing Clearview AI for violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act — told Insider that he's concerned about the Army's Clearview use flying under the radar.
"To the extent that this federal agency is using Clearview and then making referrals to state and local law-enforcement agencies for arrests and prosecutions, that also raises serious questions about what those defendants are told," Wessler said. "If they're arrested and prosecuted, are they learning that Clearview's technology was used to identify them?"
This is not an unwarranted concern. One Gainesville, Florida, police officer advised another officer to keep Clearview use out of official police case reports, as reported by BuzzFeed News.
The specific Army unit that purchased Clearview is the 502nd Military Police Battalion Criminal Intelligence Section, stationed at the Fort Campbell military base, which is on the border between Clarksville, Tennessee, and Hopkinsville, Kentucky.
The criminal command, commonly referred to as the CID, generally deals with felony offenses, which could include"deaths, sexual assault, armed robbery, procurement fraud, computer crimes, counter-drug operations and war crimes." For the CID to investigate a crime, it would need to involve a member of the military, or a military-affiliated civilian or contractor, as a victim or as a perpetrator under probable cause.
CID necessarily keeps in touch with nonmilitary authorities, like police departments, because the CID can't charge people with crimes. After finishing an investigation, it turns over its findings to the appropriate legal authority.
According to a CID website, the 502nd Military Police Battalion's jurisdiction is "within a 15 state geographical area of responsibility, ranging from northern Alabama and Mississippi, as well as portions of New York, to the Canadian border."
Jeffrey Castro, a spokesperson for the Army CID, confirmed that the command had used Clearview AI's technology for investigations but declined to respond to a list of questions about how it used the technology or whether it planned to renew the contract this September. "As a matter of policy, we do not discuss our investigative techniques and procedures publicly," Castro said.
Clearview AI did not acknowledge the majority of a detailed list of questions from Insider, which also included questions about whether the contract will be renewed in September and how Clearview is used by the Army, as well as claims made on marketing materials given to the Army.
CEO Hoan Ton-That told Insider in an email that Clearview is "proud to represent the US Army."
"We have done a tremendous and effective job for them, as we have done for the many other agencies we assist in after-the-crime investigations," Ton-That said.
One document obtained by Insider, dated July 16, 2020, included the efforts of an Army CID lead analyst to justify the purchase of Clearview.
"The 502d MP BN (CID) has been using this tool on a trial basis and has seen an increase of 15-25% success in positively identifying potential subject, victims, and witnesses in possible crimes under Army CID jurisdiction," the person wrote.
The Army CID declined to provide evidence of the 15-25% increase in its success rate. It also declined to tell Insider when this free trial began or how it learned about Clearview. BuzzFeed News has reported that the Army CID ran "more than 1,300 searches" on Clearview as of February 2020.
The documents obtained by Insider also included a company flyer introducing Clearview and its services. But the flyer made several bold claims about the company's capabilities, some of which were questioned by experts.
The marketing document says Clearview can help with a variety of applications, including "force protection and area security," the study of a suspect's associations or whereabouts, and "criminal network discovery."
Unless a criminal posted and tagged their conspirators in an Instagram post, for example, discovering criminal networks would involve a person doing their own investigating and using other tools.
When asked what was meant by services like "criminal network discovery," listed in the flyer, Ton-That said, "Our company and its marketing materials have evolved over the years. They are professional and reflect the services we provide."
The flyer also says Clearview AI is a "revolutionary facial recognition system created specifically for law enforcement and intelligence applications."
Clearview was originally called Smartcheckr. In late 2017, the company pitched itself to Paul Nehlen, a white nationalist who was running for Congress in Wisconsin at the time, as a service that could provide "extreme opposition research" on political figures.
Later in the flyer, Clearview says that it's been "rated 99.6% accurate" per an accuracy benchmark created by the University of Washington's MegaFace image dataset. This claim hasn't been independently verified by any third party.
"We don't know how they tested their software, and we haven't evaluated their algorithms," Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, former head of the MegaFace challenge, told Insider. "The MegaFace challenge has been closed for a while now, and no one on our teams is working with it."
The Clearview flyer also said, "The system has been reviewed for bias by an independent panel of experts and was found to outperform other commercially available technologies," which possibly refers to a report from October 2019 in which a Clearview-appointed "Independent Review Panel" found that Clearview was "100% accurate." Clearview claimed the test used the "same basic methodology" the ACLU used to test Amazon's Rekognition system in 2018. At one point, Clearview mentioned the results of the report on its public website, but it has since removed all references.
"There's a reason that they took down those claims from their public website because they were wildly overstated and not based on any sound methodology," Wessler said. "The methodology that they purported to copy was in no way set up to prove the thing they said they were proving."
"This technology, if it was perfect," Wessler added, "would pose an incredibly chilling threat to people's ability to go about their lives without being pervasively identified by the government."
View all the documents below:
Do you work at Clearview AI, or know something about its contracts or activities? Contact this reporter at chaskins@insider.com or caroline.haskins@protonmail.com, or via secure messaging app Signal at (718) 813-1084. Reach out using a non-work device
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