Thiel-backed startup began contracting on "off-grid" facial recognition with U.S. Air Force
Thiel-backed startup began contracting on "off-grid" facial recognition with U.S. Air Force
The Brooklyn-based mesh networking company goTenna is backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and contracted with the Air Force on "off-grid facial recognition" in May.
The Brooklyn-based mesh networking company goTenna is now at least the second startup backed by billionaire provocateur Peter Thiel to contract with the U.S. Air Force on facial recognition. The controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI had two similar contracts each worth roughly $50,000: one was signed in December 2019, and another in November 2021 for “protecting airfields with augmented reality facial recognition glasses”. Neither of these two Clearview AI contracts — known as “Small Business Innovation Research” awards, and confusingly pronounced as ‘sibbers’ despite the acronym being SBIRs — proceeded past phase one, which typically consists of writing a whitepaper.
goTenna has previously had at least two of its Air Force SBIRs proceed into phase two experimentation, but they were for far less controversial mesh networking capabilities. The startup’s apparent expansion into military facial recognition is likely to significantly increase scrutiny on the company, particularly given that their Series C fundraising round was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Beyond Founders Fund, goTenna has also collaborated with In-Q-Tel, the primary venture capital arm of the U.S. intelligence community, since at least 2016. They have also been funded by Bloomberg Beta, the venture capital offshoot of billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s media empire.
The full description for goTenna’s new 90 day, $74,691 SBIR contract is: “off-grid facial recognition for vetting and situational awareness”, which strongly suggests support for U.S. military members applying facial recognition to third parties.
goTenna did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this contract, or on the specific questions of whether its facial recognition was trained on data sourced from social media, or whether a third party company such as Clearview AI was tapped for the capability.
Recent reporting from the author in The Intercept cited an anonymous participant in the vigilante nonprofit Skull Games that the Israeli surveillance firm Cobwebs Technologies was providing participants with access to Clearview AI’s facial recognition to deanonymize sex workers. Skull Games board member and Texas detective Joseph Scaramucci was also the subject of a July 2022 case study from Clearview AI.
Scaramucci has since played a major role in the enforcement of Texas’s reclassification of the censensual solicitation of sex work from an adult as a felony in September 2022. As for the arrested suspects, some of which have been as young as 18, the Founder and President of Skull Game suggested “enjoy[ing] the tears”.