Interesting. Twitter agitator Douglass Mackey ('Ricky Vaughn'), known for his ties to online conservative forum '
My Posting Career' (a more cancerous Somethingawful spinoff) was involved with a company called 'Smartcheckr', run by his paymaster, Richard Schwartz.
It's come out this month that Smartcheckr is behind a project called 'Clearview AI'. Other edgy conservative types involved in Clearview AI include Peter Thiel, Chuck Johnson, and Pax Dickinson.
Apparently, Mackey's role at Smartcheckr involved collecting Facebook profiles of far-right people, including gaining access to controversial GOP candidate Paul Nehlen's Facebook followers by offering to provide services to improve his targeting of advertising to potential supporters.
So let's look at a couple news stories related to Smartcheckr/Clearview AI:
The 'terrorist subject' who Smartcheckr claims to have identified (though the NYPD denies it) seems to have been some random white guy from West Virginia who
left some rice cookers around in the subway for laughs.
Hmm.. so basically, Mackey seems to have been collecting images and metadata related to right-wingers so that his boss Richard Schwartz could use it to scan surveillance video and arrest them (or fit them up) for discarding kitchenware, graffiti, etc? Very interesting.