Does life feel Orwellian sometimes? One researcher has a solution for you: graphic tees that confuse the neural networks in surveillance cameras.
June 29, 2026
About 10 years ago, an app developer named Hoan Ton-That scraped your social media photos. You didn't know it at the time, but he added your photos to a database, and used it to build a facial recognition platform called "Clearview AI." Your face has been in his database ever since.
In the years since, Clearview has only collected billions more photos, attracted investment from plutocrats, and been rewarded with multimillion-dollar contracts from law enforcement agencies across America like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
First in cautionary science fiction, and then in our timeline, facial recognition has almost always been trained and imposed on regular citizens without their consent. Clearview AI tacitly understood that, and today it's official US government policy. In an analysis of ICE's other facial recognition toy, "Fortify," the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledged that "ICE does not provide the opportunity for individuals to decline or consent to the collection and use of biometric data/photograph collection."
