Facial Recognition Goes to War

Hoan Ton-That, the chief executive of the facial recognition company, began to think about how he could get involved after seeing the destruction caused by Russia in Ukraine.

He believed his company's technology could offer clarity in complex situations.

I remember seeing videos of captured Russian soldiers who claimed to be actors.

He reached out to people who might be able to help him. Lee Wolosky, a lawyer who has worked for the Biden administration, was meeting with Ukrainian officials and offered to deliver a message.

The police and federal agencies in the United States used the app to solve crimes, according to the letter drafted by Mr. Ton-That. Concerns about privacy and racism within artificial-intelligence systems have brought scrutiny to that feature.

Mr. Ton-That wrote that the tool could be valuable to a country under attack. He said the tool could identify people who might be spies, as well as deceased people, by comparing their faces against a database of 20 billion faces from the public web.

Mr. Ton-That decided to offer Clearview's services to Ukraine for free. More than 200 accounts have been created for users at five Ukrainian government agencies by the New York-based Clearview. The app is also translated into Ukrainian.

It has been an honor to help Ukraine, said Mr. Ton-That, who provided emails from officials from three agencies in Ukraine. The dead soldiers and prisoners of war, as well as travelers in the country, have been identified. Increased paranoia has been caused by the fear of spies and saboteurs.

Two photos of dead Russian soldiers have been viewed by The New York Times, according to one email. The ministry ran the dead man's face through the app because he did not have identifying patches on his uniform.

The app showed photos of a man from Ulyanovsk, who wore a paratrooper uniform and held a gun, on a Russian social media site. An official from the national police said that they tried to contact the man's relatives in Russia to inform them of his death, but there was no response.

Identifying dead soldiers and notifying their families is part of a campaign by the Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov to break through to the Russian public the cost of the conflict.

Images from conflict zones, of slaughtered civilians and soldiers left behind on city streets turned battlefields, have become more widely available in the social media era. President Zelensky of Ukraine has shown pictures of attacks on his country to world leaders in order to make his case for more international aid. Beyond conveying a sense of war, those images can also offer a chance for facial recognition technology to play a significant role.

Critics warn that the tech companies could be taking advantage of a crisis to expand with little privacy oversight, and that any mistakes made by the software or those using it could have dire consequences in a war zone.

The deputy director of Fight for the Future believes that facial recognition technology should be banned worldwide because it has been used to suppress dissent. Russia and China are two of the countries that have deployed facial recognition in cameras.

War zones are often used as testing grounds for both weapons and surveille tools that are later deployed on civilian populations or used for law enforcement or crowd control purposes.

In Canada, Britain, France, Australia and Italy, Clearview's use of people's photos without their consent has been declared illegal. It is subject to fines in Britain and Italy.

We already know that authoritarian states like Russia use facial recognition to crack down on protests and dissent. Expanding the use of facial recognition doesn't hurt authoritarians like Putin.

Facial recognition has become more accessible to the public in recent years.

PimEyes and FindClone are both facial recognition services that can be used by anyone willing to pay for them. FindClone searches for photos from the Russian social media site, while PimEyes will surface public photos on the internet.

Vendors are choosing sides in the conflict. After the invasion started, a professor in Georgia banned Russia from using the site because he was worried it would be used to identify Ukrainians.

Russian customers are not allowed to use the service now.

Bellingcat, the Dutch investigative site, has used facial recognition sites for reports on the conflict and on Russia's military operations.

FindClone was Aric Toler's preferred face search engine. He described a three-hour video that showed men in military uniforms packing up materials, including TVs, car batteries and an electric scooter, for shipment.

Mr. Toler said FindClone allowed him to identify several of the men as Russian soldiers.

Journalists like Mr. Toler can sometimes play the role of arbiters for their audience.

The deputy prime minister of Ukraine, Mr. Federov, posted a picture from the same tape of a soldier at the counter. Mr. Federov claimed that the man was an officer of Russian special forces and that he had committed atrocities in the area.

Mr. Federov said that they would find every killer.

The technology can be used to identify casualties or track units. Peter Singer is a security scholar at New America, a think tank in Washington. It could make it difficult for civilians to lie low in tense environments.

The use of facial recognition technology in such a large scale is the first major conflict that we have seen.

In a world of more and more data being gathered, everyone leaves a trail of dots that can be connected.

That trail is more than just online. Satellite images, photos and videos captured by people in Ukranian are used to discern what is happening there.

The technology is not perfect, said Mr. Toler of Bellingcat. They know how to corroborate identifications.

Secondary information, such as a tattoo or clothing, is important to confirm a match because faces can look similar. It is not certain whether that will happen in a tense situation.

Mr. Toler doesn't know how long he will have access to his facial recognition tool. He said that FindClone has been subject to sanctions because it is based in Russia.

Mr. Toler said he was desperately trying to add more juice to his account. I'm trying to re-up my account by using her bank card.