| When thousands of right-wing extremist Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6th and then—somehow—were allowed by Capitol police to quietly return to their homes and hotels, many Americans who are usually opposed to pervasive surveillance suddenly felt very differently. Twitter and Facebook were flooded with calls for law enforcement agencies to use cell phone surveillance and even facial recognition to identify and arrest the insurrectionists. Now, it seems, grassroots hacktivists and coders are taking matters into their own hands. Late last week, a site called Faces of the Riots appeared online, showing a grid of thousands of faces of people who were among the January 6 Capitol mob. The site's creator, a college student in the "greater DC area" who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity, says he used open source facial detection and recognition tools to extract and deduplicate the faces from 827 videos of the event. The source of those videos? The right-wing social media site Parler, whose entire contents were scraped and archived by hackers before the site went offline just days after the Capitol riot. Faces of the Riot's creator insists that he's not trying to encourage vigilante action against the insurrectionists, but the website is already raising serious privacy criticisms. The postings don't distinguish between lawbreakers—who trampled barriers, broke into the Capitol building, and trespassed in legislative chambers—and people who merely attended the protests outside. The project also represents the serious dangers of ubiquitous facial recognition technology—and could have profound implications for human rights and freedom of expression. Read WIRED's exclusive interview with Faces of the Riot's creator—and its critics. Andy Greenberg | Senior Writer, WIRED | 
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