Fresh Air - Best Of: David Byrne / Inside The AI Company That Knows Your Face

Episode Date: November 4, 2023

David Byrne talks about his life and music. The Talking Heads movie Stop Making Sense – which many people consider the best concert film ever made – has been restored and remastered for its 40th anniversary. Also, we'll talk about the capabilities and consequences of facial recognition technology with New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill. Her book is called Your Face Belongs to Us.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, David Byrne, co-founder of Talking Heads. If you never understood his lyrics for Burning Down the House, here's why. I thought, let me see if I can make a song that is basically a lot of non-sequiturs that have some kind of emotional impact. The Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, which many people consider the best concert film ever, has been restored with a remastered soundtrack

and released for the film's 40th anniversary. Later, we'll talk about the capabilities and consequences of facial recognition technology with New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill, author of Your Face Belongs to Us. It comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply.

This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. My guest is David Byrne. He was a founding member of the band Talking Heads, one of the seminal bands of the punk new wave period of the 70s. The Tucking Heads weren't exactly punk, but they weren't like any band that came before them. They recorded eight albums between 1977 and when they stopped playing together in 1988.

If you love their music or if you never saw or heard them, this is a great time to watch the 40th anniversary edition of their concert film Stop Making Sense, which is playing in theaters. It's newly restored with a remastered soundtrack. Many music critics and fans consider it among the best concert films ever made. Byrne went on to record solo albums, collaborate on experimental theater pieces with Robert Wilson and Spalding Gray, and a ballet with choreographer Twyla Tharp. He still has the record label he founded in 1988, Luaka Bop. His first releases were compilations of Brazilian music, but then he expanded into African pop and later jazz and gospel, as well as his own solo albums. Spike Lee directed the film version of his 2019 concert

Broadway show American Utopia. Byrne's musical Here Lies Love is currently on Broadway. He won an Oscar as one of the composers of the score for the Bertolucci film The Last Emperor and was nominated for one for the song he co-wrote with Mitski and Sun Lux for the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once. That's a long way to go from CBGB. It is a long way to go. Who would have thought? Who would have thought? David Byrne, welcome to Fresh Air. Welcome back. Thank you. Good to be back. It's been a really long time. Yes. So let's start with Psycho Killer, the first song Talking Heads wrote, which is on their first album, Talking Heads 77. And it also starts off Stop Making Sense. So you walk on stage with a boom

box. You put down the boom box. It plays a rhythm track. You play along on your guitar and start Thank you. Can't seem to dress up to the facts Tense and nervous, can't relax Can't sleep, bed's on fire Don't touch me, I'm a real liar Why? Psycho killer Run, run, run, run away You start a conversation You can't even finish it You're talking a lot

But you're not saying anything When I have nothing to say My lips are sealed Say something once Why say it again? Psycho killer Kiss kiss kiss Paka paka

Paka paka Run run Run run run away Oh oh Run, run, run, run, run away Psycho killer Kiss the sea Run, run, run, run, run away So, David Byrne, Psycho Killer was the first song that you wrote with drummer Chris Franz and bass player Tina Weymouth. What was the germ of the idea?

Was it your idea to write a song about a serial killer? Do you think of him as a serial killer or just a kind of really bad date? Yes. Well, I don't know if he's a serial killer, but yes, somebody who's kind of deranged and is a killer. And my idea was, oh, to do something. It was an experiment to see if I could write a song. We were, Chris and I had a, we were putting a band together, or we had a band, and we played, you know, other people's songs at school dances and things like that.

And I thought, oh, let me see if I can write a song. I tried years ago when I was in high school, and it failed miserably. I said, let me try again. So I thought I would try and write something that was maybe a cross between Alice Cooper and Randy Newman. Were you fans of each of them? Oh, yeah. Because they're kind of on opposite extremes. Kind of on opposite extremes. So I thought I'd have the kind of dramatic subject that Alice Cooper might use, but then look at kind of an interior monologue the way Randy Newell might do it. And so I thought, let's see if we can get inside this guy's head. So we're not going to talk about the violence or anything like that, but we'll just get inside this guy's kind of muddled up,

slightly twisted thoughts. And so that's what I thought I would do. I imagined that he would imagine himself as very erudite and sophisticated. And so he would speak sometimes in French. And so I went to..., who had grown up some of the time in Brittany, and her mother's French. And I said, oh, can you help me? We want him to say something pretty grand here. But say it in French as if he's going to tell us

what kind of ambitions and how he sees himself. So what does he say in French? I've never... Oh, it's like, I realize my destiny. It's very kind of old-fashioned. I think Tina said

this is very Napoleonic kind of French. It's very kind of, I realize my destiny. I must do what I must do. Something like that. So, I love that song so much. Now,

he also, you also sing the fa-fa-fas in there. Oh, yeah, that was a little reference to an Otis Redding song. Okay, I was wondering about that.

Yes, absolutely. Because he had a sad song. It's also called the fa-fa-fa. Yes. It's a parenthesis song. Yeah, a called the Fa Fa Fa. Yes. It's a parentheses song. Yeah, a little parentheses. A little thing where a reference, I noticed, writing song in there.

Except you do the deranged version of it. Yes. But, you know, well, that's the subject. That's the voice of the guy who's singing. Yes. No, exactly. Exactly. A character song who's singing. Yes. No, exactly. Exactly. A character song like Randy Newman.

Yes. So, but that was, to me, that song was unique in everything that we did. In that once we did it and we started playing it around the schools in Providence, people liked it. They said, we want to hear you play that song. And I realized, oh, okay. Now I realize I can write a song. So now let me write some that are a little more what I want to say or less an experiment in can I write a song,

but I'm going to write a song that expresses more what I want to say and how I want to say it and experiment with the song format and the way their songs are constructed. And so, yeah, that song to me seemed like a unique early experiment. So Talking Heads started by stripping everything away and then later adding things in. So I'm going to quote you from your book, How Music Works, in terms of what you stripped away. You wrote, you wanted no rock moves or poses, no pomp or drama, no rock hair, no rock lights, no rehearsed stage pattern, definitely no noodling guitar solos. So why did you want to remove all of that? And is there anything you left out in that sentence that you wanted to remove?

I think that covered a lot of it right there. The idea was, I was aware that other contemporary acts, people around us, some of them were adopting poses or clothes or guitar styles or whatever that seemed to be from a previous era,

from a previous generation. And I thought to myself, well, those were invented or created by other people, and they belong to them, and they express something about their generation. But how do I do something that belongs to us, that speaks to our generation, that speaks to our concerns? And I thought, well, then I have to jettison everything that went before and be very careful not to adopt any of that stuff. And it's a big temptation. You know, you want to play in a rock club and all that.

There's a big temptation to just slip into the things you've seen other people do that you loved growing up. And I said, no, we have to resist all that. So we have to strip everything down bare bones and then allow these things to come back in as you discover something, a way of doing that seems like it belongs to you, that belongs to your peers and your concerns. But then you started adding things in, and it wasn't the things that you wanted to take out, but it was things like, you know, more of an expanded rhythm section, a more theatrical presentation, as we see in Stop Making Sense.

Oh, choreography, I might add. So I just want to ask you about the big suit that you wear for a little bit of the performance in Stop Making Sense. And in the credits, it says the suit was built by. It doesn't say costume designer or designed by. It says built by, as if it were like architecture. That's true. It is. And it's also true that I didn't go to someone and say, I just want a big suit.

I had a little drawing of what I wanted the end product to look like. Very sketchy. Just a little drawing of what I wanted the end product to look like. Very sketchy. Just a little line drawing. But it was basically a rectangle with feet sticking out the bottom and a little tiny head on top. And so I went to a kind of small clothing manufacturer, designer in downtown New York, Gail Blacker. And I said, how can we do this? I'm kind of influenced by kind of Japanese theater, the no costume, where it's wide, it's rectangular, but when you turn sideways, it's not fat. So it's not really a fat suit. It's more like a box. It's more like a box, a flat box that's facing the audience.

And it's meant to face forwards. So we had to realize I had to wear a kind of girdle underneath and put the pants attached to this padded girdle thing. So the pants kind of just hung down. They barely touched my legs. And same with the jacket. The jacket had a big shoulder armature, and the jacket just kind of hung down from that and barely touched my chest. The suit has become iconic, but what was it like to inhabit it?

How did it change you as a performer on stage? When I started wearing the big suit, I realized that it had a life of its own. Because it kind of just draped down like curtains from my hips and shoulders, I could wiggle a little bit and it would ripple, like curtains or sheets or whatever. So you could do all these things with it. If I wiggled side to side, it would kind of shimmy around. I could do all these things with it that I couldn't do just by myself. It had its own properties that you could kind of activate that way.

I thought it was kind of odd, kind of slightly surreal. It meant something. I wasn't sure what it meant. I guess it didn't matter. It sure made an impression. Yes. People have interpreted it as meaning like, oh, this is the archetypical kind of businessman kind of imprisoned in his suit, imprisoned in his whole situation.

That's not what it was. Well, that might be unintentional, but it might be there. I don't deny it, but it wasn't my intention to kind of, oh, I want to kind of make fun of businessmen. Right. Okay. Let's take a short break here. Then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is David Byrne. And the newly restored version of the Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense, is playing in theaters.

We'll hear more of our interview after a break. This is Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with David Byrne, a founding member of the band Talking Heads. A restored and remastered 40th anniversary re-release of the band's concert film, Stop Making Sense, is playing in theaters. So let's hear another song from the film Stop Making Sense. And I want to play Burning Down the House, which is one of your best non-songs. And it holds up so well, so many years later. So now it's sometimes interpreted about being about global warming, climate change, you know, burning down the house, fight fire with fire.

What were you really thinking of when you wrote it? The phrase burning down the house, I'd heard being used as a chant at a Parliament Funkadelic concert that I'd seen. They didn't have it in a song. It was just a kind of chant that they started chanting and the audience joined in. And it meant like, we're going to blow the roof off the sucker. We're going to set this place on fire. It's going to be, you know, we're going to have a really amazing time here. Yeah, it didn't mean literally let's set fire to our houses or anything else. Where the world is burning. Yes. And the rest of it, I thought,

let me see if I can make a song that is basically a lot of non sequiturs that have some kind of emotional impact, that they have some kind of emotional resonance, but literally they don't make any sense. I'm so glad you said that because, you know, I've never understood exactly what is this song about. I love it and I love the individual lines. But, yeah, I can never find like what is the narrative here?

Yes. So like the film title, it doesn't make literal sense, but it makes emotional sense. Sure. Yes. And rhythmic sense. Yes. Yeah. All right. Let's hear it. This is the version from the concert film, Stop Making Sense. Ooh, baby Strange but not a stranger I'm an ordinary guy Burnin' down the house Hold tight Wait till the party's over

Hold tight We're in for nasty red-eye There has got to be a way Right in front of the house Here's your ticket, pack your bags Time for your very number four Transportation is here Close enough but not too far

Baby, you know where you are Fighting fire with fire All the way Yeah, you might need a paper Take it down Keeps walking in broad daylight 365 degrees Burning down the house

It was once a fine place Sometimes I listen to myself Gonna come in first place People wonder where the work's at, baby What did you expect? Gonna burst into flames Go ahead That's Talking Heads. Gonna burst into flames. Go ahead.

That's Talking Heads from the 40th anniversary restored edition of Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert film. So I'm going to quote you again from this is from your book, How Music Works. And you're talking about dancing, and you say, a nerdy white guy trying to be smooth and black is a terrible thing to behold. I let my body discover little by little its own grammar of movement, often jerky, spastic, and strangely formal. How did you come up with who you were on stage moving in space and not doing, you know, either like Temptations moves or hip-hop moves? of adopting moves that I loved that I'd seen other people do. And so I think, yeah, by that time, I'd worked with Twyla Tharp. She did an evening dance piece called The Catherine Wheel. Yeah, and I'm going to interrupt you right there for a second because one of the things you do in addition to jogging and plays is you kind of stagger or stumble around stage, around the stage,

very intentionally. And it looks like you're almost going to fall, but you don't. And I thought, like, that is so Twyla Tharp, because her choreography is like normal movements elevated to dance. And like stumbling, staggering, that's one of those normal movements that I've seen her use. Yes. So I was around when they were rehearsing things and doing a lot of that kind of movement. Not that I lifted any directly, but I thought, oh, there's all this is the vocabulary of what it's available. What you can do is really wide. So you were inspired by her approach to movement? I was inspired by her and the stuff that she was doing. I was inspired by a lot of folk dance or a dance that I'd seen on kind of ethnographic films of rituals and like on stumbling and the stuff on Once in a Lifetime by kind of the Baptist church,

people going into trance, whether it was in Baptist church or in Santeria or whatever. I thought, oh, this is, they might not think of it this way, but it's a kind of dance. It may not be choreographed in the same kind of way, but it is a kind of dance. It's definitely movement and it's definitely connected with music. So I thought, okay, I'm not going to copy that, but that direction is someplace I can go as well. I want to go back to the early days of Talking Heads. I want you to describe your first night at CBGB on a double bill with the Ramones. You opened for them. CBGB was like the most famous of the New York punk new wave clubs

in the 70s. Did you already know the Ramones when you opened for them? We opened for the Ramones, I think, probably the first time. We didn't know them that well personally. We'd maybe said hello. But musically? Musically, yes. We'd seen them play a couple of times there. And we knew what we were dealing with. What were you dealing with? We knew that they did kind of hilarious pop songs. But musically, it was like this roar. It was like standing next to a jet engine or something. And we often got called an art rock band, but I think we also thought that the Ramones were very much an art rock band. It was very conceptual, what they did and how they did it and how they looked. It was all very considered. So we really liked it.

We didn't want to sound like them. That wasn't what we were doing, but we liked it. But we realized, wow, I don't think we can play after them. The audience will be kind of stunned and maybe slightly deaf. So we'll go before. And it was a wonderful time when the audiences were just curious about what was this new kind of pop music that was emerging downtown and in different places in London and elsewhere. They didn't know much about any of it.

So they were just curious and they would go, oh, this band sounds like a jet engine playing pop music. And this one is kind of this twitchy, kind of Sire Records, the label that signed Tucking Heads. He told me that he came up with the expression new wave because the promotion people for Sire were describing Tucking Heads as punk. But Stein thought you were, quote, the furthest thing from punk. Did you feel like the furthest thing from punk? We felt that, yes, musically we sounded very, very different. And visually, we felt very, very different than what was then considered punk rock. But this kind of DIY, the do-it-yourself idea that was prevalent amongst the punk rockers and us, we thought we have that in common.

We have in common the fact that, okay, we can do it, and we can do it with the means that we have available, and we can speak to the concerns of our generation and our contemporaries, and they felt the same way. You've often been described as not the most social person. I read one description that at a party, you'd be the person sitting alone in the corner. So as somebody who I assume is something of a loner socially, I don't know. I'm just... Less so now. But yes, there was definitely a time when that was the case. And I have to make clear that that didn't mean I was unhappy. No, right, right, right.

But being somebody who was more of a loner than a group person, what was it like for you to be or at least be perceived as part of a scene? At first I found it really annoying because I thought of myself and what we were doing as being very unique and being part of a whole kind of scene or style or name or whatever it might be. I thought, no, just listen to us for what we are. But then later on I realized, oh, having a kind of handle like this has been very handy for the press to say, okay, we're going to write an article about punk rock. And we'd get included in

that, which was for us not a bad thing. And I realized, oh, we benefited by writing on the coattails of that. And then eventually people got to know us for what we were. You've described yourself as being on the autism spectrum, although you've never been officially diagnosed. Can I ask what makes you think you're on the spectrum? A friend told me. was, what year was it? Early 2000s, late 90s maybe, a friend of mine picked up a book about the autism spectrum, which was kind of a, it's an old idea, but it's an old idea that had come back into vogue at that point. And she read aloud to me the various aspects of people who are on the spectrum. And then she said, David, this sounds like you. And I couldn't disagree, at least on the mild end of the spectrum.

So what sounded like you? What characteristics? Kind of the ability to kind of intensely focus on something that interested you, to kind of exclude other things and really kind of be intensely focused. Maybe being somewhat socially awkward, socially uncomfortable a little bit. Taking things sometimes very literally, which I still do that a bit. When sometimes having a conversation with someone, they'll say something, and by the tone of their voice or their look or whatever,

they'll understand that they're telling me no. But I'll hear them say yes, the word, you know, yes or whatever. And so I'll go, but you said yes. What? I don't understand. So yeah, there's a little confusion there sometimes. But most, those were the main symptoms that I can remember. What about like repeating things over and over, whether it's like listening to something over and over again, or seeing something over and over again or doing a gesture or movement over and over again? Wow. I hadn't even thought of that. I think you might be right. I mean, some of that is what dancing is. Especially when you're doing the same movement over and over. Yes.

That sometimes there's a kind, yeah, there's an attachment to that kind of repetition. That it actually has a, when something is repeated, it has a different meaning than when it's done just once. Do you find it soothing? Yes. Yes. Do you find it soothing? Yes, yes. So when your friends had suggested that maybe you're on the autism spectrum, and you thought, yeah, yeah, maybe, why didn't you bother to get an official diagnosis? Probably because I thought, this is just me. I'm not unhappy.

I might be a little bit different than some other people, but I'm not unhappy. This is the way I experience the world. But I'm doing fine. I really enjoy writing the songs and performing and the other things that we do. So why act like I have something wrong that needs to be treated? I just want to say it has been so much fun to talk with you. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you. It's been too long. Yes, you were on our show in 1992. A long time ago. Yeah, it's great to talk again. You too. Thank you very much. David Byrne co-founded the band Talking Heads, a restored and remastered 40th anniversary re-release

of the band's concert film Stop Making Sense is playing in theaters. Coming up, we'll talk about the capabilities and consequences of facial recognition technology with New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill, author of Your Face Belongs to Us. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. Facial recognition technology is convenient when you use it to unlock your phone or log into an app. But you might be surprised to know that your face is most likely already in a facial recognition database that can be used to identify who you are without you even being aware it's happening or knowing who's using it and why.

A company expanding the technological possibilities of this technology and testing its legal and ethical limits is Clearview AI. It's a startup whose clients already include some law enforcement and government agencies. If you haven't already heard of it, it's in part because the company didn't want you to know it existed. It did its best to remain secretive until it was exposed by my guest, If you haven't already heard of it, it's in part because the company didn't want you to know it existed. It did its best to remain secretive until it was exposed by my guest, Kashmir Hill. She's a New York Times tech reporter who first wrote about Clearview AI in 2020. She describes her beat as the future tech dystopia and how we can try to avoid it.

Kashmir has continued to report on Clearview AI and other developments in facial recognition technology. Now she has a new book called Your Face Belongs to Us, a secretive startup's quest to end privacy as we know it. Kashmir Hill, welcome to Fresh Air. Tell us what the Clearview AI facial recognition technology is capable of doing. So the way it works is that you upload someone's face, a photo of someone, to the Clearview AI app, and then it will return to you all the places on the Internet where that person's face has appeared, along with links to those photos. So we're talking about anything that's on the internet, your photos on social media. It could lead to your Facebook profile, your Instagram account, your Venmo account, your LinkedIn profile, reveal your name, you know, possibly where you live, who your friends are. And it may well reveal photos that you didn't realize were on the Internet. Maybe some photos you didn't want to be there.

And you'll talk about photos you didn't know they have on you a little bit later. So let's talk about some of the nightmare scenarios that Clearview's facial recognition technology might create. So let's think about the worst case scenarios for facial recognition technology. Some of the sensitive uses that I think about are, you know, a woman who is walking out of a Planned Parenthood and there are protesters outside and they look at her face, take her photo, find out her identity, make assumptions that she had an abortion, and, you know, write about her online or mentioning her name, you know, harass her right there in the moment. Or for police use of this technology, you know, it can be very useful for solving crimes. But, you know, it can

also be wielded in a way that could be very chilling or intimidating. Say if there are protesters against police brutality and the government is able to very easily identify them. And we have seen this already happen in other countries, not with Clearview AI's technology, but with other facial recognition technology. In China, you know, this kind of technology has been used to identify protesters in Hong Kong. And for more surprising uses like naming and shaming people who wear pajamas in public or making sure that somebody in a public restroom doesn't take too much toilet paper. They have to look at a face recognition camera, only get a little bit of toilet paper, and then wait a certain amount of time until their face can unlock more. Who would have ever thought of that? Okay, so in the U.S., who has this Clear View facial recognition technology now, and are there restrictions on who can use it? So in the U.S. right now, I mean, Clearview AI has been used by thousands of police departments, according to Clearview AI. And it has come up in public records requests. A lot of local journalists have done reporting on their local departments using it. They have a contract with the Department of Homeland Security.

They have a contract with the FBI. And they have received funding from both the Army and the Air Force. So what would they use it for in the military? Well, in the military, you can imagine this being very useful for identifying strangers around military bases, you know, in cities that we're in. Clearview AI has actually given their technology for free to Ukraine to use in its war with Russia. And the Ukrainians say that they have used it to, you know, identify Russian spies who are trying to blend in with the population and killed, and to find their identities, to find their social media profiles. And they have then sent those photos to their loved ones, you know, to a wife, to a mother, to a boyfriend, to a sister, to a brother to say,

look, this is your loved one. They are dead. And it was a way to try to turn the tide of public opinion in Russia against the war to show them the toll. But a lot of people who saw that use thought it was just an incredibly chilling and disturbing use of this kind of technology and more. There are U.S. government agencies using this technology too, right? Yes. We have some limited look at how every single agency uses the technology. So I talked to a Department of Homeland Security officer who has used Clearview AI, and he told me about a specific case in which he used it. And it was a case of child sexual abuse. He had an image that had been found in a foreign user's account in Syria. And they didn't know exactly who the abuser was or who the child was or even where this photo was taken. They were able to determine that it was in the U.S. kind of based on essentially electrical outlets.

And so he used Clearview AI to search the face of the abuser. And it ended up having a hit on Instagram. And it was a photo where this man appeared in the background of someone else's photo. It was a photo at a bodybuilding convention in Las Vegas. And this man was standing behind a workout supplements counter. And this was the breadcrumb that the DHS officer needed to find out who he was. He ended up calling the workout supplements company, you know, asking them if they knew the man. And eventually they located him in Las Vegas and arrested him. And so it was really, you could kind of see the power of a technology like this in officers' hands. Yeah. So there's really been incredible successes identifying child predators, but there's been failures too where somebody was falsely convicted, wrongly convicted of a crime based on faulty facial recognition technology.

Yes. So Randall Reed is a man who lives in Atlanta. He's a black man. He was driving to his mother's house the day after Thanksgiving, and he gets pulled over by a number of police officers. There were something like four police cars that pulled him over. And they get him out of the car. They start arresting him. And he has no idea why or what's going on. And they say, you're under arrest. There's a warrant out for you in Louisiana for larceny.

And he is bewildered. He says, I've never been to Louisiana. And it turns out there was a crime committed there. A gang of people who to Randall Reed's face. And Randall Reed ends up being held in jail in Atlanta for a week while they're waiting to extradite him. And he has to hire lawyers in Georgia, hire a lawyer in New Orleans. And the lawyer in New Orleans was able to, by basically going to one of these stores and asking for the surveillance footage, to realize that, oh, wow, this suspect actually looks a lot like my client. And this detective ends up telling him that, yes, facial recognition was used.

And so Randall Reed basically takes a bunch of photos of his face and a video of his face and sends that to the police. And then the charges end up being dropped. But this was, I mean, this is incredibly traumatic. And in this case, Clearview AI was the technology that was used to identify him. And that is one of the huge problems about the use of Clearview AI is, you know, if police are using this to solve basically a shoplifting crime, they're doing that by searching this database of millions of people. You know, Clearview says that there are 30 billion faces in its database. And so this is a question that activists are asking, you know, should we all, all of us who are in that database, be in the lineup anytime a small crime is committed in a local jurisdiction? You know, a lot of us already use facial recognition technology in our private lives, like to use it to unlock your phone or log on to an app.

Do you use it? Like, what are your thoughts about that in terms of what you're exposing yourself to, if anything? Yeah. I mean, people think that because I'm a privacy reporter, I must be a complete, I must have everything on lockdown. But I am a normal person who lives my life in normal ways. It's part of how I get ideas for stories is just seeing how we interact with the world and what happens when my information is out there. So, you know, I do unlock my phone with my face. When I was traveling to do research for this book, I went to London because they have police vans there, these mobile vans that they send out with facial recognition cameras on the roof to scan crowds and pick up wanted people off the streets. And so I really wanted to go there and have that part of what's happening with facial recognition technology in the book. And when I got to Heathrow Airport, rather than having to wait for hours in line for a customs agent to look at my passport, I just put it on a little scanner bed, looked into a camera,

and there is a biometric chip on your passport that has your face print, and it matched me to the passport and just let me write in. I mean, there are many beneficial uses of facial recognition technology, and it's part of why I wanted to write this book, because I wanted people to understand it doesn't need to be an all or nothing situation. I hope that we can harness the beneficial uses of facial recognition technology that are convenient to us, that make our lives better without having to embrace this completely dystopian, you know, world in which facial recognition technology is running all the time on all the cameras, on everybody's phone, and anywhere you go, people can know who you are and, you know, have it just end anonymity as we know it.

That's a chilling thought. Let's talk about how you first found out about Clearview AI because it had been doing everything in its power to prevent the public from knowing about it. How did you first find out it existed? So I got a tip in the fall of 2019 from a public records researcher who had been looking into, you know, what types of facial recognition technology police were using, you know, which companies, how much they were paying for it. And he had gotten this 26-page PDF from the Atlanta Police Department. And it included this company that he hadn't heard of before. There wasn't much online

called Clearview AI that claimed that it had scraped billions of photos from the internet, including social media sites, and that it was selling it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies. And there was a really surprising, privileged and confidential legal memo that the Atlanta Police Department turned over, written by Paul Clement, who is, used to be one of the top lawyers in the country. He was a solicitor general under George W. Bush. He had written this memo for police to reassure them that they could use Clearview AI without breaking the law. And this just caught my attention right away. And I started digging in. And, you know, the more I dug, the stranger this company seemed.

Well, you couldn't find their office. You couldn't find anyone to talk with. What were some of the obstacles you ran into? So, I mean, you found their address, but you couldn't find a building. So one of the strangest things was, you know, they had a very basic website and it just described what they were doing as artificial intelligence for a better world.

And there was an office address there. And it just it happened to be just a few blocks away from the New York Times. And so I mapped on Google Maps, I walked over, and I got to where it was supposed to be in the building did not exist. And that was very strange to me. I also looked them up on, you know, on the, on the internet and they had only one employee on LinkedIn. His name was John Good. He only had two connections on the site. It definitely looked like a fake person. You know, I reached out to that John Good and never got a response. You know, I called everyone I could find that seemed to have some connection to the company. No one would call me back. And so then I turned to police officers

trying to find people using the app. And that's where I had success. I talked to officers who had used it. They said it was incredible. It worked like nothing they had ever used before. But through the process of talking to police officers, I discovered that Clearview AI was tracking me, that they had put an alert on my face. And every time one of these officers uploaded my photo to try to show me what the results were like, they were getting a call from Clearview AI and being told to stop talking to me. And Clearview AI actually blocked my face for a while from having any results. And that was very chilling to me because I realized, well, one, this company has this power to see who law enforcement is looking for, and they're using it on me. And also that they had the ability to control whether or not a person could be found. Yeah. But you were able to see

what pictures they had of you. And they had photos of you that you didn't know existed, including photos where you're like buried in the background, but it was still able to identify that photo as you. Tell us about some of the most surprising photos that were harvested. Yeah, so eventually the company did talk to me. They hired a very seasoned crisis communications consultant. And so I was able to meet Juan Tontat, who is the technical co-founder of Clearview AI. And he has since run my face through the app several times. And in one case, it brought up this photo that I recognized as being taken in Washington, D.C. And there's somebody in the foreground and somebody on the sidewalk in the background

walking by. And I was looking at the photo and I didn't immediately see me until I recognized that the person in profile in the background of the photo was wearing a coat that I bought in at an American vintage store in Tokyo many many years ago and so I realized wow that's me I can't even recognize myself with my human eyes that that's me but this you know this algorithm is able to find me there was a photo on the internet of somebody had had been talking to for a story, and that made me realize I may need to be much more careful with sensitive sources out in public if something like this becomes more ubiquitous. Because I won't anymore be able to trust necessarily that if I leave my phone at home and meet them at a dive bar, that someone can't make the connection between us. So yeah, it was just very surprising. I even at one point covered my mouth and nose, you know, the way that you would with a COVID mask. And even then, Huantan Ta'at was still able to take a photo of me and bring up other photos of

me. It really is astounding how far this technology has come from its early days when it was very buggy and didn't work very well. Cashmere Hill, thank you so much for your reporting and your new book. I hope this isn't really the end of privacy as we know it, but... Thank you, Terry. And I do think there is hope for privacy. Oh, good to hear. Cashmere Hill is a tech reporter for The New York Times and author of the new book, Your Face Belongs to Us. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer this week is Adam Staniszewski. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.