Mark Zuckerberg’s entourage wore Meta’s smart glasses in court, which led to a judge warning that anyone recording proceedings could face contempt. This incident raised concerns about privacy and the implications of using recording devices in sensitive environments like courtrooms. Business Insider Gizmodo
Now, it seems, US Department of Homeland Security has a Smart Glasses Project for linking the viewer to National facial recognition databases.
Ken Klippenstein
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No-nonsense reporting on the U.S. national security state and politics.
And Jeff Bezos and selling facial recognition software:
Amazon Staff Demand Jeff Bezos Stop Selling Face-Scanning Tech to Police | Newsweek
By Jason Murdock
Amazon workers called on the firm’s CEO Jeff Bezos to stop selling powerful face recognition tech to U.S. law enforcement and cease providing infrastructure to government-linked software giant Palantir, and said they “refuse to contribute to tools that violate human rights.”
The letter circulated inside Amazon after it emerged that several tech companies had sold software tools to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency at the center of a controversial family separation practice this week. It followed a May ACLU report exposing how Amazon face-scanning tech called “AWS Rekognition” had been sold to police and government agencies.
The staffers noted Palantir, the big data analytics company founded by Trump-supporting Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, takes full advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud technology to help “power its detention and deportation programs.” In 2014, Palantir was awarded an ICE contact worth $41 million to build an intelligence program that could allegedly aid deportations.
Over the weekend, Palantir released a 22-point summary of Karp’s 320-page book, “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” that the billionaire tech CEO co-wrote and published in early 2025.
“Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief,” the company wrote on X.
The ideas reflect Karp’s long-held worldviews, including the view that the tech industry has been insufficiently supportive of US national security. Karp, who holds a Ph.D. in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University in Germany, has delighted in his view that AI will devalue humanities degrees and place greater emphasis on traditional trades work.
The summary points range widely in subject matter, from proclamations about the tech scene (“Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime”) to the relationship between the tech sector and the military (“If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software”), and even religion (“The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted”).
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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