Six agencies, including the U.S. Park Police and the FBI said they had used facial recognition on people who participated in protests after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer in May 2020. The agencies said they only used it on people they suspected of breaking the law, according to the report. The U.S. Capitol Police used Clearview AI to conduct its investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Customs and Border Protection and the State Department said they ran searches for Capitol rioters on their own databases at the request of other federal agencies.

The Trump administration's privacy, competition and consumer protection cops plan to embark on a cross-country listening tour to gauge how academics and average Web users believe the U.S. government should address digital-age challenges, from the rise of artificial intelligence to the data-collection mishaps that have plagued companies like Facebook. The effort announced Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission and its new chairman, Joe Simons, includes 15 or more public sessions in a series of cities that have yet to be announced. The hearings are expected to touch on a wide array of topics like the agency's "remedial authority" to address privacy and security abuses, the potential risks posed by big data, and the commission's tools to enforce antitrust laws as media, tech and telecom companies gobble each other up or seek to enter new lines of business. The public outreach will begin in September and continue into January 2019, the agency said. It could presage tougher scrutiny of Silicon Valley in response to complaints that the FTC has been too soft on tech giants and the ways they collect, swap and manipulate personal information about billions of Americans.

WHEN most people fight city hall, they attend meetings, circulate petitions or file lawsuits. When Murray Craig, a retired programmer, fought his town council in British Columbia, he picked up his old craft and wrote code. In the end, he created software that his company claims can ''detect government corruption in five minutes.'' The software, called Minutes-N-Motion, applies artificial intelligence to the problem of finding needles in the haystacks of government documents. While standard document-searching software can pinpoint keywords, Mr. Craig's program makes connections to draw conclusions on issues like whether a public official may have acted on a matter presenting a conflict of interest.