Leonid Tymchenko spent the first month of Russia’s invasion sitting in his dark government office after curfew. Unable to go home, Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs scrolled through Telegram, looking at thousands of videos and images of advancing Russian soldiers. When Tymchenko was offered a chance to test a new facial-recognition tool, he uploaded some of the photos to try it out.
He could not believe the results. Every time Tymchenko added a photo of a Russian soldier, the software, made by the American facial-recognition company Clearview AI, seemed to come back with an exact hit, linking to pages that revealed the soldier’s name, hometown, and social-media profile. Even when he uploaded grainy photos of dead soldiers, some with their eyes closed or their faces partially burned, the software was often able to identify the person. "Every day we identified hundreds of Russians who came to Ukraine with weapons,” Tymchenko tells TIME in a video interview from his office in Kyiv.
In the ongoing war against Russia, Clearview has become the Ukrainian government’s “secret weapon,” Tymchenko says. More than 1,500 officials across 18 Ukrainian government agencies are using the facial-recognition tool, which has helped them identify more than 230,000 Russian soldiers and officials who have participated in the military invasion. Ukraine's use of Clearview has rapidly expanded beyond identifying Russian troops on their soil. The nation has come to rely on the private U.S. tech company, which has just 35 employees, to assist with a vast range of wartime tasks, many of which have not been previously reported, according to interviews with officials from half a dozen government agencies, law-enforcement officers, Ukrainian analysts, and Clearview executives.
Read more at TIME Magazine.