Alexandria Mom, Florist and Journalist Goes to the 2026 Intelligence and National Security Summit — and Tries Facial Recognition in Real Time

Alexandria, VA — This article is a little different from my normal Zebra Beat, but I figured if facial recognition is something I’m curious about, you, our reader, are probably curious too.

By now, most of us are accustomed to having our faces scanned at DCA or Dullas airports. Facial recognition and other biometric technologies have become increasingly visible parts of air travel. We are also used to cameras on street corners and in stores, and to putting countless photographs of ourselves on social media.

We may not always be comfortable with that exposure, but for many of us it has become a fact of daily life.

We hear about facial recognition and have watched fictional investigators use seemingly magical versions of it on television shows like NCIS and in the movies. But few of us have ever had the opportunity to experiment with the real technology on ourselves.

I recently did.

Trying Clearview AI for Myself

During the 2026 Intelligence and National Security Summit, I attended a Clearview AI lightning-round presentation titled “How Facial Recognition Technology is Reshaping Intelligence-Driven Investigations.”

Clearview AI is an American facial-recognition company whose technology is used by law-enforcement, government, military and intelligence customers. The company says its searchable database contains more than 70 billion facial images collected from publicly available sources on the internet.

During the presentation, attendees were invited to try the technology for themselves afterward.

I volunteered.

I had been curious about just how advanced facial-recognition technology had become—and where it might eventually lead.

I stood in front of a laptop camera. Rather than taking an ideal, straight-on photograph, we intentionally took an obscure, non-frontal image to make the test more difficult.

Within seconds—not minutes—more than 260 photographs associated with my face appeared on the screen.

Twenty Years of My Face on the Internet

The Clearview employee seemed surprised to find so many photographs of someone attending a national-security conference. I explained that I was a florist and a journalist and had been very active on social media.

Then we started going through them.

In a strange way, I watched portions of my life from the past 20 years appear on the screen.

This is the part where I want to stress that the images we found during my demonstration were all publicly available. Clearview says its own searchable database is built from publicly accessible images on the internet.

But I asked about private data too. The Clearview representative demonstrating the system told me that, when working with a customer, Clearview’s technology can be integrated with that customer’s private or closed datasets, allowing the facial-recognition technology to search images within those authorized data sources as well.

The demonstration wasn’t showing me private photographs of myself. It was showing me what could be found about one ordinary person using publicly available images scattered across the internet—and there were more than 260 of them.  It made me nervous about what my son’s digital footprint will be when he is my age.  They will have photos of him for his entire life, because myself and those who love them posted them publicly.

The Photos I Had Forgotten

Perhaps the biggest surprise was seeing photographs of myself from about 20 years ago on an old Flickr account belonging to a friend whose name I no longer even remember. They weren’t scandalous photographs. They were perfectly innocuous dating back to the days of The Flying Fish Resteraunt (those that know, know).

But I wouldn’t necessarily choose to have them floating around the internet today.

I was even more impressed when the technology found my face reflected in a mirror and when it identified me in the background of someone else’s photograph.

Then there were the photographs that weren’t me.

The system also displayed lower-confidence potential matches: women who were not me, but who, somewhat unnervingly, really did look like me.

That part was a reminder of something important about facial recognition. A computer-generated match isn’t necessarily an identification. Clearview itself describes its results as investigative leads that should be reviewed and independently verified rather than treated as definitive proof of someone’s identity.

Fascinating, Impressive and a Little Unsettling

My feelings about facial recognition remain mixed and a little uneasy.

But seeing it operate in person changed my understanding of it. What had previously existed for me somewhere between airport security, street corners, newspaper stories and NCIS suddenly became tangible.

The most remarkable part wasn’t that a computer could recognize my face.

It was that photographs I had forgotten existed, scattered across different corners of the public internet over two decades, could be connected to one another in seconds.

Whether that makes you fascinated, uncomfortable or a little of both, facial recognition is no longer science fiction.

For me, it was more than 260 photographs on a screen.