TL;DR: A February 2025 GAO audit revealed that ATF conducted at least 549 facial recognition searches using Clearview AI and Vigilant Solutions over a two-and-a-half-year period, with no dedicated policy, no risk assessment, and no agent training. ATF claimed it stopped using commercial facial recognition in April 2023. Then, during the July 2024 Trump assassination attempt investigation in Butler, Pennsylvania, ATF agents requested facial recognition photos of the shooter from local law enforcement. The agency now routes searches through state and local partners to keep doing what it officially stopped. On April 8, 2025, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime held a hearing that laid all of this bare, and the cross-partisan outrage from Second Amendment advocates and privacy groups may finally force accountability.
549 Searches, Zero Rules
Between October 2019 and March 2022, ATF agents ran at least 549 facial recognition searches using Clearview AI, the company that scraped 30+ billion photos from social media, news sites, and mugshot databases to build the most controversial face-matching system in law enforcement.[1]
They also used Vigilant Solutions, another commercial facial recognition platform popular with law enforcement.
Here's what the GAO found ATF had in place to govern this activity:
- Dedicated policy: None
- Risk assessment: None
- Agent training: None
- Tracking of which systems employees accessed: None
ATF didn't have "guidance or policies specific to facial recognition technology that addressed civil rights and liberties."[2] Agents used a tool that matches your face against billions of images, and nobody told them what photos were appropriate for searches, how to interpret results, or what to do when the system spits out a false match.
ATF headquarters officials told GAO they "were initially unaware that ATF staff sent photos to commercial facial recognition services."[2] The people running the agency didn't know their own agents were using the tool.
For two and a half years, ATF ran face searches on gun owners in a policy vacuum, and the bosses didn't even know it was happening.
"We Stopped," Then the Butler Shooting Happened
Facing the GAO's findings, ATF told investigators it had stopped using commercial facial recognition services as of April 2023. Case closed, right?
Not even close.
On July 13, 2024, Thomas Crooks opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. In the immediate aftermath, ATF agents needed to identify the shooter's body. According to Senator Ron Johnson's preliminary report on the assassination attempt, an Allegheny County Bomb Squad member texted photos of Crooks to a phone number with a Philadelphia area code (which was listed as belonging to an ATF agent) explicitly for facial recognition purposes.[3]
Johnson's report noted it remains "unclear why ATF would be the agency responsible for conducting facial recognition in an attempt to identify Crooks," especially for an agency that supposedly quit the facial recognition business a year earlier.
The Senate committee "continues to seek a transcribed interview with the agent" and "information related to any ATF facial recognition searches of Crooks' body."[3]
The Workaround Loophole
Here's where it gets worse. When ATF informed GAO it no longer allowed employees to use commercial facial recognition directly, it also admitted what it does instead.
ATF "leverages non-federal facial recognition systems by requesting that state and local partners run [facial recognition] searches."[2]
Read that again. ATF didn't stop using facial recognition. ATF stopped paying for Clearview AI directly. Now it asks state and local cops (who still have Clearview subscriptions) to run the same searches on its behalf.
House Judiciary Subcommittee Chairman Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Rep. Warren Davidson called this out explicitly: the indirect use through state and local agencies "does not absolve ATF of its constitutional obligations." Lacking internal tracking and accountability mechanisms "represents a systemic risk to Americans' privacy and Second Amendment rights."[4]
This is the federal surveillance playbook. When Congress or courts restrict a tool, agencies don't actually stop. They route around the restriction through partnerships. ICE does it. The FBI does it. Now ATF's doing it too.
The April 8 Hearing: Second Amendment Groups and the ACLU on the Same Side
On April 8, 2025, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance held a hearing titled "A Continued Pattern of Government Surveillance of U.S. Citizens." The witness list was unusual: the ACLU and gun rights organizations sitting at the same table.[5]
ACLU Senior Policy Counsel Kia Hamadanchy testified about "myriad government surveillance programs that impact Americans of all backgrounds," with facial recognition use by federal agencies rising while AI-powered tools make continuous video surveillance increasingly real.[6]
Gene Schaerr, general counsel for the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability, warned that "Americans are being quietly swept into a surveillance dragnet that operates far beyond its legal mandate." Federal agencies including the FBI and IRS access "data ranging from digital communications to location information without a warrant and often by purchasing it from commercial data brokers," allowing the government to "construct deeply personal profiles of individuals' lives, beliefs, and relationships without judicial oversight."[7]
Gun Owners of America (GOA) has been particularly vocal. GOA's analysis connected ATF's facial recognition activity to a broader pattern: the agency holds over 920 million firearms transaction records, nearly 866 million digitized using OCR technology, from gun retailers that surrendered their federal firearms licenses. Combine a facial recognition hit with those digitized records and you have something that looks an awful lot like a searchable national gun registry, which federal law prohibits.[1]
Where 2A Meets 4A
This story matters because it sits at the rare intersection where Second Amendment and Fourth Amendment advocacy converge.
Gun Owners of America, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), and Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO) have all raised alarms. Their argument is straightforward: if ATF can scrape your face from social media photos and match it against firearms transaction records, gun show attendance, or protest photos (all without a warrant) then both your right to bear arms and your right against unreasonable search are under attack simultaneously.
The ACLU makes the same argument from the other direction: facial recognition deployed without policy guardrails inevitably targets the people the government is already watching: gun owners, protesters, journalists, religious communities.
This cross-partisan alignment is rare. When the NRA's base and the ACLU's base are both furious, it usually means something genuinely unconstitutional is happening.
What Happens Now
Chairman Biggs has demanded records from ATF about its facial recognition practices, including details on the pass-through arrangement with state and local partners. Rep. Davidson introduced the Facial Recognition Act of 2025 (H.R. 4695) to require federal agencies to obtain warrants before using facial recognition technology.
ATF hasn't provided the full accounting Congress requested. The Butler shooting investigation remains incomplete. The workaround loophole remains wide open.
And the broader problem extends well beyond ATF. The GAO's original audits found that 18 of 24 federal agencies surveyed used facial recognition, and most lacked the policies GAO recommended. ATF is the headline, but the structural problem is government-wide.
If you own a firearm, you should know: the agency regulating your guns had no rules governing when or how it could match your face against a database of 30 billion images. It still doesn't have a warrant requirement. And its backup plan is to ask local cops to do the search instead.
References
- Gun Owners of America: ATF Utilizes Facial Recognition Software to Identify Gun Owners
- GAO: Facial Recognition Services: Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Should Take Actions to Implement Recommendations (GAO-23-105607)
- Sen. Ron Johnson: Preliminary Findings on July 13, 2024 Assassination Attempt
- AmmoLand: ATF Facial Recognition Scandal Deepens: Chairman Biggs Demands Records
- Biometric Update: Congressional Hearing Reveals Deep Concerns About Federal Surveillance Practices
- ACLU: Statement of Kia Hamadanchy, House Judiciary Subcommittee Hearing (April 8, 2025)
- PPSA: Statement of Gene Schaerr, House Judiciary Subcommittee Hearing (April 8, 2025)