United States Customs and Border Safety plans to spend $225,000 for a 12 months of entry to Clearview AI, a face recognition instrument that compares images in opposition to billions of photos scraped from the web.
The deal extends entry to Clearview instruments to Border Patrol’s headquarters intelligence division (INTEL) and the Nationwide Concentrating on Heart, models that gather and analyze knowledge as a part of what CBP calls a coordinated effort to “disrupt, degrade, and dismantle” folks and networks considered as safety threats.
The contract states that Clearview supplies entry to “over 60+ billion publicly out there photos” and shall be used for “tactical concentrating on” and “strategic counter-network evaluation,” indicating the service is meant to be embedded in analysts’ day-to-day intelligence work reasonably than reserved for remoted investigations. CBP says its intelligence models draw from a “number of sources,” together with commercially out there instruments and publicly out there knowledge, to determine folks and map their connections for nationwide safety and immigration operations.
The settlement anticipates analysts dealing with delicate private knowledge, together with biometric identifiers akin to face photos, and requires nondisclosure agreements for contractors who’ve entry. It doesn’t specify what sorts of images brokers will add, whether or not searches could embrace US residents, or how lengthy uploaded photos or search outcomes shall be retained.
The Clearview contract lands because the Division of Homeland Safety faces mounting scrutiny over how face recognition is utilized in federal enforcement operations far past the border, together with large-scale actions in US cities which have swept up US residents. Civil liberties teams and lawmakers have questioned whether or not face-search instruments are being deployed as routine intelligence infrastructure, reasonably than restricted investigative aids, and whether or not safeguards have stored tempo with enlargement.
Final week, Senator Ed Markey launched laws that might bar ICE and CBP from utilizing face recognition know-how altogether, citing considerations that biometric surveillance is being embedded with out clear limits, transparency, or public consent.
CBP didn’t instantly reply to questions on how Clearview could be built-in into its techniques, what kinds of photos brokers are licensed to add, and whether or not searches could embrace US residents.
Clearview’s enterprise mannequin has drawn scrutiny as a result of it depends on scraping images from public web sites at scale. These photos are transformed into biometric templates with out the data or consent of the folks photographed.
Clearview additionally seems in DHS’s lately launched synthetic intelligence stock, linked to a CBP pilot initiated in October 2025. The stock entry ties the pilot to CBP’s Traveler Verification System, which conducts face comparisons at ports of entry and different border-related screenings.
CBP states in its public privateness documentation that the Traveler Verification System doesn’t use data from “industrial sources or publicly out there knowledge.” It’s extra probably, at launch, that Clearview entry would as a substitute be tied to CBP’s Automated Concentrating on System, which hyperlinks biometric galleries, watch lists, and enforcement information, together with recordsdata tied to current Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in areas of the US removed from any border.
Clearview AI didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Current testing by the Nationwide Institute of Requirements and Know-how, which evaluated Clearview AI amongst different distributors, discovered that face-search techniques can carry out nicely on “high-quality visa-like images” however falter in much less managed settings. Photographs captured at border crossings that have been “not initially supposed for automated face recognition” produced error charges that have been “a lot increased, usually in extra of 20 p.c, even with the extra correct algorithms,” federal scientists say.
The testing underscores a central limitation of the know-how: NIST discovered that face-search techniques can not scale back false matches with out additionally rising the chance that the techniques fail to acknowledge the proper individual.
In consequence, NIST says companies could function the software program in an “investigative” setting that returns a ranked listing of candidates for human overview reasonably than a single confirmed match. When techniques are configured to at all times return candidates, nonetheless, searches for folks not already within the database will nonetheless generate “matches” for overview. In these circumstances, the outcomes will at all times be 100% fallacious.
