Written by Tonya Riley
Jan 10, 2022 | CYBERSCOOP
The FBI on Dec. 30 signed a deal with Clearview AI for an $18,000 subscription license to the company’s facial recognition technology. While the value of the contract might seem just a drop in the bucket for the agency’s nearly $10 billion budget, the contract was significant in that it cemented the agency’s relationship with the controversial firm. The FBI previously acknowledged using Clearview AI to the Government Accountability Office but did not specify if it had a contract with the company.
The FBI didn’t respond to a request for comment, but it isn’t the only federal law enforcement agency to ramp up its procurement of privately-owned facial recognition technologies in recent months. In September, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent almost $4 million on facial recognition technology from a company called Trust Stamp, as Business Insider first reported. The same month agency purchased a contract with Clearview AI starting at $500,000 with the potential to go up to $1.5 million dollars. In total, ICE investment in Clearview AI has more than doubled during the Biden administration, said Jack Poulson, executive director of the nonprofit Tech Inquiry.
The contracts demonstrate that despite a growing chorus of concerns from lawmakers, regulators and civil liberties advocates about the dangers of facial recognition technology, federal law enforcement agencies have no interest in rolling back their use of the technologies. Instead, they’re plowing ahead with private partnerships with companies whose databases of photos of private citizens eclipse government databases in scale.
In fact, CyberScoop identified more than 20 federal law enforcement contracts with a total overall ceiling of over $7 million that included facial recognition in the award description or to companies whose primary product is facial recognition technology since June, when a government watchdog released a report warning about the unmitigated technology. Even that number, which was compiled from a database of government contracts created by transparency nonprofit Tech Inquiry and confirmed with federal contracting records, is likely incomplete. Procurement awards often use imprecise descriptions and sometimes the true beneficiary of the award is obscured by subcontractor status.
This lack of transparency is especially noteworthy in light of a June report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office that found 13 federal agencies that have law enforcement, including the FBI, did not track which non-federal sy
