Hill is a fitting chronicler here. #Clearview first rose to prominence - or, rather, notoriety - with the publication of her 2020 expose on the company, which had scraped more than a billion facial images from the web, and then started secretly marketing a search engine for faces to cops, spooks, private security firms, and, eventually, repressive governments:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

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Hill's original blockbuster expose was followed by an in-depth magazine feature and then a string more articles, which revealed the company's origins in white nationalist movements, and the mercurial jourey of its founder, Hoan Ton-That:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/18/magazine/facial-recognition-clearview-ai.html

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The story of Clearview's technology is an interesting one, a story about the #MachineLearning gold-rush where modestly talented technologists who could lay hands on sufficient data could throw it together with off-the-shelf algorithms and do things that had previously been considered impossible. While Clearview has plenty of competitors today, as recently as a couple of years ago, it played like a magic trick.

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That's where the more interesting story of Clearview's founding comes in. Hill is a meticulous researcher and had the benefit of a disaffected - and excommunicated - Clearview co-founder, who provided her with masses of internal communications. She also benefited from the court documents from the flurry of lawsuits that Clearview prompted.

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What emerges from these primary sources - including multiple interviews with Ton-That - is a story about a move-fast-and-break-things company at the tail end of the forgiveness-not-permission era of technological development. Clearview's founders are violating laws and norms, they're short on cash, and they're racing across the river on the backs of alligators, hoping to reach the riches on the opposite bank without losing a leg.

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A decade ago, they might have played as heroes. Today, they're just grifters - bullshitters faking it until they make it, lying to Hill (and getting caught out), and the rest of us. The founders themselves are erratic weirdos, and not the fun kind of weirdos, either.

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Ton-That - who emigrated to Silicon Valley from Australia as a teenager, seeking a techie's fortune - comes across as a bro-addled dimbulb who threw his lot in with white nationalists, MAGA Republicans, Rudy Guiliani bagmen, Peter Theil, and assorted other tech-adjascent goblins.

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Meanwhile, biometrics generally - and facial recognition specifically - is a discipline with a long and sordid history, inextricably entwined with phrenology and eugenics, as Hill describes in a series of interstitial chapters that recount historical attempts to indentify the facial features that correspond with criminality and low intelligence.

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These interstitials are woven into a-ha moments from Clearview's history, in which various investors, employees, hangers-on, competitors and customers speculate about how a facial-recognition system could eventually not just recognize criminals, but *predict criminality*. It's a potent reminder of the AI industry's many overlaps with "race-science" and other quack beliefs.

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