From the New York Times, unlike a Bavaro, this is the Daily.

Today, a secretive company promising the next generation of facial recognition software

has compiled a database of images far bigger than anything ever constructed by the US government.

The Daily's Annie Brown speaks to reporter Kashmir Hill about whether the technology

is a breakthrough for law enforcement or the end of privacy as we know it.

It's Monday, February 10.

Kashmir, how did this story come to you?

I got an email. It was a Wednesday morning I was checking my phone.

It was from a tipster who had gotten a bunch of documents from police departments.

One of the police departments had sent along this memo about a private company

that was offering a radical new tool to solve crimes using facial recognition.

And what would make a facial recognition tool radical?

The law enforcement has for years had access to facial recognition tools,

but what this company was offering was unlike any other facial recognition tools that police

had been using because they had scraped the open web of public photos from Facebook, from Venmo,

from Twitter, from education sites, employment sites, and had a massive database of billions of

photos. So the pitch is that you can take a picture of a criminal suspect, put their face into this

app and identify them in seconds. And when you read this memo, what do you make of what this company

is offering? So I've been covering privacy for 10 years and I know that a technology like this

in public hands is the nightmare scenario.

This has been a tool that was too taboo for Silicon Valley giants who were capable of building it.

Google in 2011 said that they could release a tool like this, but it was the one technology

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