The emails show how a firm backed by Shark Tank judge, Dallas Mavericks owner, and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban pushed a local police department to try and gain access to state driver's license photos to train its product. The emails also show the company asked the police department to vouch for it on a government grant application in exchange for receiving the technology for free.

Facial recognition technology is becoming more common across the United States, for both law enforcement and private companies. Now, emails obtained through a public records request provide insight into how facial recognition companies attempt to strike deals with local law enforcement as well as gain access to sensitive data on local residents.

“Chief, you seemed pretty keen on the use of facial recognition in stadiums. If you know of any place to start, please let me know,” a 2016 email from Jacob Sniff, a co-founder of facial recognition startup Suspect Technologies, addressed to Michael Botieri, chief of the Plymouth Police Department in Massachusetts, reads. Cuban, who invested in the company that same year, also co-led and closed an $810,000 round of investment into the firm last December. Cuban has used the company’s technology in the Mavericks’ locker room.

In the emails, Sniff repeatedly asked Botieri to deploy the technology in his district to help improve the product. Sniff mentioned plans for the technology to search through results for people of a particular gender or ethnicity, and deploy “emotion recognition.”

“I’m not involved in their day to day operations but my guess is that they were looking to acquire data sets to train models,” Cuban told Motherboard in an email, referring to the attempt to gain drivers’ photos from the state Registry of Motor Vehicles.

Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, who provided the emails to Motherboard, said, “They reveal that self interested technology vendors are working behind the scenes to push unreliable, invasive surveillance tools on unsuspecting communities, entirely in the dark.”

Botieri did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Do you know anything else about facial recognition technology, or who is buying it? You can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com__.

As for Suspect Technologies’ pitch, one January 2018 email describes a facial recognition system with various features that the company could implement at a future date. It would be set up on cameras in police lobbies and across town with “Real Time Person Detection,” which would “show where all people are (to be used in active shooter situation, or the events you monitor, abduction cases, etc.)” Another set of features would be focused on historical data, which could “show where all people have been in past X minutes,” and “Image Attribute Software (search people by age, gender, ethnicity, etc.)”