"On the day the Capitol was stormed by pro-Trump rioters in January... his phone began to buzz with text messages and phone calls from friends and colleagues, predicting that Clearview AI would be critical..."

"... for identifying participants...  One of Ton-That’s salespeople called because a police officer wanted free access. 'I said we could because it was an emergency situation,' [said the chief executive of Clearview, Ton-That]. And in fact, the next day, the company saw a surge in searches from law enforcement. The F.B.I. wouldn’t discuss whether Clearview AI was being used for its investigation of the riot.... There had been a time when public opinion seemed set firmly against facial recognition. But suddenly — with people showing their faces while rampaging through the Capitol — Clearview and similar products seemed quite appealing. Ton-That and I talked on the phone just a couple of days after the riot.... While he was clearly taken aback by the events unfolding in his adopted country, he also seemed keenly aware it could demonstrate the utility of his company’s product, and perhaps sway those on the fence if it played a role in finding and punishing the people involved. 'You see a lot of detractors change their mind for a somewhat different use case,' he said. 'We’re slowly winning people over.'"

From a long NYT article, "Your Face Is Not Your Own/When a secretive start-up scraped the internet to build a facial-recognition tool, it tested a legal and ethical limit — and blew the future of privacy in America wide open."