What’s groundbreaking here is not really the technology but rather the marketing: Clearview is selling a relatively cheap product to law enforcement agencies wh

What’s groundbreaking here is not really the technology but rather the marketing: Clearview is selling a relatively cheap product to law enforcement agencies who are desperate to solve cases at the lowest cost. I think we (both here at HN and in the larger society) have this perception that police departments, etc., are part of a well-organized hierarchy of well-considered processes and technology that start at the FBI/NSA/etc and works its way down, all carefully vetted for technical and ethical standards, and disclosed to the public who is ostensibly their employer. The reality that I’ve seen is quite different. As the article points out, individual police departments (and their officers!) often independently research and procure services, based on hearsay and questionable morals. Does the service help ‘get the bad guys’? Then it’s good. Does the service obviously violate copyright and ToS agreements? Not our problem. I learned this when I built a scrappy little website for a one-man company who builds training kits for first responders. As low-tech as this site was (e.g., ordering the product entailed sending a purchase order by postal mail) I was struck by the apparent success of my client’s product: he had dozens of endorsements by apparently top-level influencers in the field, and didn’t have much competition. There were some certifications that he matched, but it didn’t seem all that hard to sell a few thousand dollars of technology to small/mid-level LEOs. (This isn’t a criticism of his product, which seemed fine and certainly didn’t involve privacy or surveillance technology.) The numbers in the article about Clearview’s services are in the same range — easy to justify if it’s only a few thousand a year and apparently produces good results.