By: Bryan Sicard
As Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine enters its third year, war crimes ranging from murdering civilians and sexual violence to routine attacks on charitable institutions like hospitals and churches have plagued Ukrainians. But the war crime that has perhaps generated the most Western attention has been the forced transfer of civilians, especially children, from Ukraine and into Russia and Belarus. This was so severe that on March 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants indicting Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, a children’s ombudsman who Putin’s Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights. Estimates of how many children have been forcibly removed from their homes range from 20,000 to Lvova-Belova’s own estimate of 700,000. Though some children have returned home, most have not and are stripped of their identity: by being indoctrinated with Russian or Belarussian ideology, issued new passports, fed lies about their real parents, and even given new names and birthdays.
However, a recent form of software has emerged that might help undo a few of the countless acts of destruction Russia has unleashed. This technology, Clearview AI, a facial recognition company founded in 2017 mostly used by police and law enforcement agencies helps to search for criminals. According to founder Hoan Ton-That, Clearview works by comparing billions of facial photographs from the internet, including Russian social media, and “can instantly identify someone just from a photo.” Clearview has been popular with American police departments as a tool that can help identify people who may not be in government databases. For example, thanks to Clearview, the Indiana State Police were able to solve a shooting case in just 20 minutes working from a single still captured by a witness.
Recognizing the potential for Clearview to be used as a weapon against Russia’s invasion, Ton-That offered his software to Ukraine’s government for free claiming, “I thought if Ukrainians could use Clearview, they could get more information to verify [Russian soldiers’] identities.” Clearview has proven to be very popular with Ukraine’s government, who today use it in almost all of their agencies. Leonid Tymchenko, the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, highlighted that “[e]very day we identified hundreds of Russians who came to Ukraine with weapons” thanks to Clearview, claiming to have already identified nearly a quarter-million Russian soldiers. Additionally, Clearview is being introduced as a potential resource to track the whereabouts of Ukraine’s forcibly transferred children. For example, Igor Ponochovnyi, head of the Prosecutor’s Office for Crimea, credits Clearview with confirming the identities of 198 missing children, as well as enabling the Prosecutor’s Office to also identify those children’s new Russian adoptive parents.
Government usage technology for facial recognition is certainly not new and dates back to at least 1855 when Pinkerton created the first rogues’ gallery of suspects for his detectives to memorize. But, Clearview is a highly controversial technology as it can be used by governments in ways that jeopardize civil liberties in our twenty-first century world of mass surveillance. Some U.S. politicians have called for it to be banned, citing a government study that black, brown, and Asian individuals were in general 100 times more likely to be misidentified than whites. Ton-That has pushed back against this, citing Clearview’s over 99% accuracy rate with all racial demographics and no known cases of a wrongful arrest when used by American police. Ton-That also attempted to discredit these studies, citing their lack of transparency and questionable scientific rigor.
Regardless, Clearview is still the topic of political debate in nations around the world. It has been banned in the United Kingdom, is subjected to heavy fines in the EU, and has been prohibited in many U.S. cities and states for commercial usage or police powers. Concerning its usage in Ukraine, the ethics of using facial recognition in a war zone is questionable. Critics like Evan Greer of Fight for the Future argue that “[w]ar zones are often used as testing grounds [for] surveillance tools that are later deployed on civilian populations” and Clearview has been “eager to exploit [Ukraine’s] humanitarian crisis” to normalize its usage. But there is merit in noting that tech companies like Clearview-rival PimEyes have blocked Russian access to their software. This offers Ukraine a strategic advantage as this exodus of industrial and tech corporations jeopardizes the reliability of Russian hardware and software.
However, there are key political implications that suggest Ukraine has to be cautious when considering its usage of Clearview. Ukraine has tried unsuccessfully for years to join the European Union, but its prospective admission is nearly a surety thanks to consistent economic support from the EU since the invasion. But, with so many Western countries cracking down on Clearview, it can become a political albatross for Ukraine, especially as Ukraine has plans to embed Clearview into its digital infrastructure after the war. This might perpetuate a false stereotype of Ukraine as inherently corrupt, which human-rights attorney Tetiana Avdieva of Kyiv warns of, stating “I don’t want Ukrainian authorities to have the reputation of the guys who use very intrusive and abusive services” like Clearview, which could tarnish Ukraine’s reputation on the European stage.
Clearview’s impact on digitizing the effects of war has already proven to be immense. It has not only been used to confirm children who’ve been taken but also to identify who has been carrying these kidnappings out for the Russian government. Importantly, Clearview recognizes that the tolls of war and familial impacts are not one-sided. Though in part serving to discredit Russia’s false claims of not suffering heavy losses, Clearview’s power helped inspire a Ukrainian-made website that helps Russian families search if their soldier is one of over 70,000 documented deaths. With mortality information often either unavailable or covered up by nations like Russia without a free press, Clearview’s impact can help pierce government propaganda in totalitarian regimes.
All this helps show that in the desperate times Ukraine endures today, they should advantageously exploit Clearview as its capability to document the perpetrators and victims of war crimes, along with identifying the dead, is too beneficial to ignore. However, Western concerns about privacy are warranted and Clearview’s positives should not automatically justify its incorporation into Ukraine’s (or anyone else’s) national security infrastructure in times of peace. The pros and cons of utilizing such powerful facial recognition will be the topic of fierce geopolitical and philosophical debate throughout most governments in the coming years. Provided that Ukraine can win their fight for existence in part from the assistance of any and all technological innovations at their disposal, they should be no different.
Student Bio: Bryan Sicard is a third-year law student at Suffolk University Law School. He is a staff writer for the Journal of High Technology Law and currently works as a Director of Research for the Ukraine Accountability Project, where he’s volunteered since 2022.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the views of the author alone and do not represent the views of JHTL or Suffolk University Law School.
