These Ex-Spies Are Harvesting Facebook Photos For A Massive Facial Recognition Database
April 17th, 2018Via: Fortune:
When Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, he tried to describe the difference between “surveillance and what we do.” “The difference is extremely clear,” a nervous-looking Zuckerberg said. “On Facebook, you have control over your information… the information we collect you can choose to have us not collect.”
But not a single member of the committee pushed the billionaire CEO about surveillance companies who exploit the data on Facebook for profit. Forbes has uncovered one case that might shock them: 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.
Zuck’s crimes against humanity in the area of privacy violations and facial recognition exploits are sickening, but the CIA is working on the next stage. At In-Q-Tel’s website, read up on one of their “Featured Investments” in their portfolio link — SnapDNA:
“Semiconductor-based DNA analysis tools: SnapDNA, formerly known as Bio-NEMS, is an emerging technology company that has proprietary, interdisciplinary innovations to enable DNA to be directly analyzed on the surface of a high-speed, custom semiconductor device. The DNA sequencing market achieved a 1000-fold decrease in cost and analysis time by replacing electrophoresis-based analysis with semiconductor-based analysis. SnapDNA is expected to be the first company to use semiconductor-based analysis to drive DNA testing into the portable realm.”
That last sentence, in all honesty, should read: ” … to drive clandestine DNA testing into the portable realm”.