Business Insider
Ukraine is using facial recognition to ID dead Russian soldiers and send photos of corpses home to their moms: report
Laura Italiano – April 15, 2022
- Ukraine is sending photos of dead Russian soldiers home to their families, The Washington Post reports.
- Officials hope that the gruesome images will turn everyday Russians against the war.
- The corpses are being ID’d using facial recognition technology donated to Ukraine by Clearview AI.
Ukraine is using facial recognition software in a gruesome campaign to turn Russia’s mothers against the war, The Washington Post reported Friday.
The free software, donated by the controversial US company Clearview AI, is being used to scan and identify the faces of Russian soldiers who died on Ukraine soil.
Images of the Russian soldiers’ corpses are then sent back to their families in Russia, The Post reported.
The hope is that the grim reality of battlefield deaths will shock everyday Russians into turning against the war.
Both Ukraine and Russia have weaponized facial recognition in the ongoing war. Russia is using the technology to identify and arrest anti-war activists. Ukraine is using it identify both its own dead and those of the enemy.
Nearly 9,000 facial recognition searches have so far been run on dead or captured Russian soldiers, The Post reported.
Russian families have been sent images relating to 582 dead soldiers, volunteer hackers who work with the Ukraine government told The Post.
Clearview has been criticized for its scraping of social media images and its use by US law enforcement. Ukraine’s free access to the software’s database of 2 million images from Russian social media is demonstrating a new use of the technology as anti-war propaganda.
The strategy could backfire, some warned.
“Is it actually working?” London-based surveillance researcher Stephanie Hare told The Post. “Or is it making [Russians] say: ‘Look at these lawless, cruel Ukrainians, doing this to our boys?'”