Israeli Ex-Spies Building Massive Facial Recognition Database

This is the private sector:

…over the last five years a secretive surveillance company founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer has been quietly building a massive facial recognition database consisting of faces acquired from the giant social network, YouTube and countless other websites. Privacy activists are suitably alarmed.

That database forms the core of a facial recognition service called Face-Int, now owned by Israeli vendor Verint after it snapped up the product’s creator, little-known surveillance company Terrogence, in 2017. Both Verint and Terrogence have long been vendors for the U.S. government, providing bleeding-edge spy tech to the NSA, the U.S. Navy and countless other intelligence and security agencies.

Three thoughts. A giant database of essentially face-pictures is of no use, unless it connects those pictures to names. And those names are of no use unless it connects those names to data regarding who you are. And to find out who you are, they need personal data, of the sort you would not want strangers accessing behind your back. And once that whole system is there, people will look through it, and some of the data will be of the sort you don’t want people looking through.

The second thought is this is the private sector, so whatever government has will make this look positively quaint. And all of that is on the slippery slope, heading to a point where nobody will have anything private. I do not see anyway to stop it, but I also accept that it will one day find its way into the public sphere, and the public blowback will be harsh.

Finally, these types of systems make one type of person stand out, namely the person who somehow avoids being in the system. I suspect that as this reaches maturity (and it probably ahs already), those who somehow avoid the database will probably get special treatment, and files which make those in the system look almost anonymous. And who among those who will really get the analysis?

One ex-staffer, in describing her role as a Terrogence analyst, said she’d “conducted public perception management operations on behalf of foreign and domestic governmental clients,” and used “open source intelligence practices and social media engineering methods to investigate political and social groups.” She was not reachable at the time of publication.

That sounds an awful lot like private sector groups managing chatter online by exploiting a private sector intelligence database that covers members of political and social groups. And that sounds an awful lot like Cabal, Inc.

And what use is a record of the faces of such people, if you are running an intelligence operation targeting them for purposes of control? I will leave it to your imagination where that would fit in a briefing, and what part of the team would be given it.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because A Brave New World is here, and nobody even knows yet.