Martin Aspen, the purported author of a September report that tried to link Presidential nominee Joe Biden's family to the Chinese government, was fabricated for the lone purpose of disseminating the information, the man behind the scandal has revealed. Christopher Balding, a blogger and occasional journalist, revealed to NBC News in a piece published Thursday that the identity of the "intelligence" document's co-author, Martin Aspen, was made up. Aspen, previously labeled as a Swiss security analyst, had a profile picture that was generated using computer software. It was an "entirely fictional individual created solely for the purpose of releasing this report," Balding said. Public records also do not support Aspen's existence.

Way back in May 2011, Eric Schmidt, who was then the executive chairman of Google, said that the rapid development of facial recognition technology had been one of the things that had surprised him most in a long career as a computer scientist. But its "surprising accuracy" was "very concerning". Questioned about this, he said that a database using facial recognition technology was unlikely to be a service that the company would create, but went on to say that "some company … is going to cross that line". As it happens, Dr Schmidt was being economical with the actualité, as the MP Alan Clark used to say. He must surely have known that a few months earlier Facebook had announced that it was using facial recognition in the US to suggest names while tagging photos.