Clearview AI hits watchdog groups with subpoenas | Hacker News Reader

Clearview AI hits watchdog groups with subpoenas

politico.com

114 pointsdsr1217 comments

> Clearview's attorney Andrew J. Lichtman said in a statement that “Clearview AI is vigorously defending itself against claims in multi-district litigation and therefore has served subpoenas to appropriate parties relating to its defense.”

> That litigation is a privacy case in Illinois district court that does not appear to involve Open The Government, Martinez or Lucy Parsons Labs. Clearview did not respond to a question on how the communications with journalists were relevant to the Illinois case.

If I understand this correctly, it's like a DNS amplification attack. They are involved in a case and they are claiming that these proportedly unrelated parties have information vital to their defence. They are using the court to send subpoenas on their behalf and consume their enemies resources until either they fold or tell them everything they want to know.

IANAL, but it seems to me like abusing the letter of the law for this kind of bad-faith move, while maybe hard to prove, should carry its own penalty, which an office shouldn't protect against. If someone decides to move forward with litigation in this way, and it turns out (provably, of course) that they knew full well that this was entirely just to get rid of inconvenient parties or keep them busy, they should expect personal consequences.

Organizations don't have a conscience, but people will not stand for taking personal risks for the imagined benefit of their employer.

> Organizations don't have a conscience, but people will not stand for taking personal risks for the imagined benefit of their employer.

I find this to be very true independently of this case: in general, I think people are a lot too much protected from consequences of their actions because they are supposedly acting on behalf of an employer, all the way to the top, until you reach the infamous 'legal personality' of corporations, at which point you've deflected all liability to a very powerful body that can just throw away a few million dollars to get out of jail free. Of course there are details to be worked out, but in general I believe individuals who make decisions should be made personally liable of the consequences, regardless of the organization they work for (and this of course is not exclusive of prosecuting that organization in its own right).

Doesn't a judge have to sign off on subpoenas? I wish the article explained more about how that happened in this case.

Every time we get a bad President, we get a slew of bad judges.

It's very difficult to get a set of rules and practices that are better than the political system they came from.

Read the Wikipedia page for them. Follow the links for the founders. Never buy anything from the companies on their customer list.

I didn’t realize BestBuy uses them. I’m never buying anything there again until I see a news article saying BestBuy stopped using Clearview AI.

> Never buy anything from the companies on their customer list.

I looked up that list, and, sadly, you'd pretty much have to go off-world to boycott those companies.

I’m in Canada, so BestBuy and Walmart are the only ones I’ve ever patronized. It’s pretty easy for me to stop spending my money at those two places.

We're doing some shady shit, some people called us out on it, now we're going to do even more shady lawyer shit to try to beat them into submission. --asshats

Seems like SOP to me.

What is the Streisand effect?

Not Streisand.

SLAPP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slapp

"A hit dog will holler."

I discovered this turn of phrase today when I typo'd "hot dog" as "hit dog" in Google.

ClearviewAI? Fuck those guys five ways! Where do i donate to help defend against this SLAPP-like behaviour?

You do not get to just shut up your critics like that!

"Please don't fulminate."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not saying you owe facial surveillance companies better, but you owe this community better if you're participating here.

fair

appreciated!

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