The Clearview Database That's Still Scraping: DOJ Can't Stop It

Our Take

Credit to Tech Exposed for digging into the legal paperwork most people never see — the inspection reports, the settlements, the regulatory dead ends that let Clearview AI keep operating like nothing happened. The core point is one we hammer on constantly: a surveillance company doesn't need to win in court if it's built from day one to outlast every lawsuit thrown at it. Clearview did that with faces. Flock Safety is doing the same thing with license plates, and the two systems are increasingly feeding the same investigative pipelines.

This isn't a coincidence of timing. Once a local police department can run a face through Clearview and a plate through Flock in the same afternoon, you've got a de facto national tracking system assembled from private vendors who answer to shareholders, not voters. No warrant, no public vote, no real oversight — just an API call. The DOJ 'walking away' from Clearview is exactly the kind of regulatory fatigue that lets ALPR networks expand unchecked in thousands of towns that never held a public hearing on it.

If you want to see how far this has already spread in your own neighborhood, check our camera map and then go do something about it with our take-action resources — because waiting for federal regulators to stop these companies clearly isn't a plan.