Author of the article: Washington Post Drew Harwell, The Washington Post Date of publication: 15 Apr 2022 • 5 hours ago • 8 minutes reading • 310 Comments Zinaida Makishaiva, 82, reacts as she recounts how she was treated by Russian soldiers during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in Borodyanka, in the Kiev region of Ukraine, April 11, 2022. Photo by REUTERS / Zohra Bensemra
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Ukrainian officials conducted more than 8,600 face-to-face searches of dead or captured Russian soldiers 50 days after the start of the Moscow invasion, using scans to identify corpses and contact hundreds of their families in one of its most technologically advanced applications. until today.
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The country’s Army, a volunteer force of hackers and activists led by the Ukrainian government, says it used the identities to inform families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including sending them photos of abandoned bodies. Ukrainians are defending the use of face-scanning software by US technology company Clearview AI as a brutal but effective way to incite dissent in Russia, discourage other fighters and hasten the end of a devastating war. However, some military and technology analysts worry that the strategy could fail, sparking outrage at a shock campaign aimed at mothers who may be thousands of miles away from the Kremlin’s war machine drivers.
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The West’s solidarity with Ukraine makes it tempting to support such a radical act designed to capitalize on family grief, said Stephanie Hare, a London-based researcher. But communicating with the soldiers’s parents, he said, is a “classic psychological warfare” and could set a dangerous new standard for future conflicts. “If it were Russian soldiers who did this to Ukrainian mothers, we could say, ‘My God, this is barbaric,’” he said. “And does it really work? Or does it make them say, “Look at these lawless, cruel Ukrainians doing this to our boys?” ” Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That told the Washington Post that more than 340 officials in five Ukrainian government agencies can now use its tool to conduct face-recognition searches at any time, free of charge.
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Clearview employees now make weekly, sometimes daily, Zoom training calls with new police and military officials seeking access. Ton-That recounted several “oh, wow” moments as Ukrainians saw how much data – including family photos, social media posts and relationship details – they could collect from a single corpse scan. Some of them use the Clearview mobile app to scan faces while on the battlefield, he said. Others are connected for training while at a checkpoint or on patrol, with the night sky visible behind their faces. “They are so enthusiastic,” Ton-That said. “Their energy is really high. They say they will win, in every call “. The company, Ton-That said, first offered its services last month to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry after seeing Russian propaganda claiming that the soldiers arrested there were actors or swindlers.
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The system was used primarily by police and federal investigators in the United States to see if a photo of a suspect or witness matched any other in their 20 billion image database and downloaded from social media and the Internet. But about 10 percent of the database comes from Russia’s largest social network, VKontakte, known as VK, making it a potentially useful battlefield scanning tool, Ton-That said. Clearview shared emails with The Post from three Ukrainian agencies – the National Police, the Ministry of Defense and a third agency that asked the company to remain confidential – confirming that the software was used. Officials in these services and the Army IT refused to comment further or did not respond to requests for comment. Clearview declined to name two other Ukrainian services, saying it was using its own software.
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In an email shared by Clearview with The Post, a Defense Department spokesman said he had tried Clearview by scanning photos of dead soldiers’ faces and was pleasantly surprised when the tool returned links to the Russian VK and Instagram accounts. With the encouragement of the military, other services have also tested the technology, Ton-That said. A National Police official said in an email shared with The Post that the service scanned the face of an unidentified man found in Kharkov with his head bowed and showed him the VK profile of a 32-year-old man who had been photographed with his supporters. of the Kharkiv People’s Republic, an separatist group. Ukrainian services, Ton-That said, used the app to verify the identities of people at military checkpoints and to check if a Ukrainian was a possible Russian intruder or saboteur. He said the system could prevent Russian soldiers from committing war crimes for fear of being detected, and said Ukrainians were considering using the tool to verify the identities of Ukrainian refugees and their hosts as they left for safety.
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But officials’ strategy of informing families of the deaths of their loved ones has raised concerns that it could anger the very Russians they hoped to persuade. A national security expert said Ukraine’s other actions – holding press conferences with captured Russian soldiers and posting photos and videos of prisoners of war on social media – were seen in Russia not as a welcome display of truth but as humiliation from the enemy. A video posted by the military on the Telegram this month showed excerpts from what the group described as conversations with relatives of Russian soldiers. In a conversation, someone to whom photos were sent with the bloodied face of a Russian soldier replied: “It is photoshop !!! THIS CANNOT. “The sender wrote, according to the video:” This is what happens when you send people to war. “
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In another conversation, a stranger sent a message to a Russian mother saying that her son was dead, along with a photo showing a man’s body on the ground – face grimacing and mouth open. The recipient responded in disbelief, saying it was not him, before the sender passed him another photograph showing a gloved hand holding the man’s military documents. “Why do this?” the recipient wrote back. “Do you want me to die?” I do not live anymore. You have to enjoy it. “ The stranger replied that thousands of young men were already dying. This is “the only way to stop all this madness,” the sender wrote. “How many other people must die?” The Post was unable to independently verify the conversations and attempts to contact the mother were unsuccessful. But other elements of the same video show Clearview’s face recognition search interface along with the names of Russian soldiers. In an excerpt, a search of a corpse reveals the VK profile of a man photographed standing on a beach. The man’s profile, which remains on the internet, shows that he watched online groups dedicated to the Russian army, as well as a gym, fishing and barbecue.
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In addition to scanning corpses, Ukraine is also using face recognition to detect Russian soldiers being caught on camera looting Ukrainian homes and shop windows, an official from Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation told The Post. Mykhailo Fedorov, the head of the ministry, shared this month on Twitter and Instagram the name, city of origin and personal photo of a man who was said to be sending hundreds of pounds of looted clothes from a Belarussian post office to his home in Eastern Russia. “Our technology will find it all,” he wrote. An agency official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Clearview that he had used the system to locate people detained in the country and to check social media for anything suspicious, including the “range of contacts”. More than 1,000 such searches were conducted in the first few weeks, the official said in an email shared by Clearview with The Post.
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Some analysts have said that Ukraine could use advanced technology to counter Russia’s most rudimentary military equipment or to seek humanitarian aid in a conflict marred by horrific Russian attacks. However, the search results for face recognition are incomplete and some experts worry that a misidentification could lead to informing the wrong person …
