Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

Why not build a facial-recognition tool for the Trump administration, one that the “deportation squads” could use to hunt undocumented immigrants? Johnson teamed up with Hoan Ton-That, a Vietnamese-Australian spam coder who was also a Gawker target. It was a long shot, a fascist troll fantasy. “It was a joke,” the silent partner, Johnson said, “but it became real.”84 Thiel gave them $200,000, and the team added Richard Schwartz, a conservative who went from attacking the New York City welfare system as a politician to running an employment contracting firm for welfare recipients. The new company was called Clearview AI, and the founders kept the ultra-right agenda under wraps while they scraped billions of photos from the web.