Fight Evil. Join Anno.
First, they came for the defectors.
Then, they came for the diplomats.
Now, they come for the democracies.
The last month has been as horrifying as it has been inspiring. As insidious and indiscriminate shelling pummeled pregnant women and innocent children in Kyiv and Kharkov, Western companies with headquarters spanning from Honolulu to Helsinki cut ties with Russia and shuttered their doors in Moscow. Not content to merely comply with sanctions, many companies went above and beyond to tip the scales in Kyiv’s favor. SpaceX quietly inserted Starlink dishes into the country. AT&T provided free roaming cellular service. FedEx began transporting goods. Even Uber pledged to offer free rides to refugees and transport 60 tons of supplies to the Ukrainian border.
This is good. This is righteous. This is a dignified response to evil.
It’s not merely enough for Western businesses to stop dealings with Russia. Western businesses must hone their offerings to undermine Russia. This includes cutting-edge technology companies, whether they are in Silicon Valley, or Washington D.C.
Anno.Ai was built on courage and conviction that Western innovation and ideals will ultimately triumph over evil. We are no stranger to danger and adversity. Anno was born out of the ranks of the CIA and SOCOM elements with its founding team serving on the frontlines battling terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. We combined forces with the best-in-breed from Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce to develop the next era of artificial intelligence. An era of AI that respects human rights and privacy while also ensuring that evil is constrained. It’s a delicate balance — one that can be precarious for a private company to tackle in the 21st century. But while some of America’s biggest tech firms have turned their backs on Uncle Sam, Anno embraced Theodore Roosevelt’s axiom that, “no man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause.” At Anno, we are prepared to put our company on the line to curtail evil.
In many ways, this fight is personal. We witnessed this evil firsthand in late 2020. A close friend of Anno’s executive team was quietly serving America abroad when evil came to his house. A hostile country, most likely Russia, pointed a depraved device at the baby’s room and pulsed it with RF energy, enough to cause lasting and devastating traumatic brain injuries for the family who fled the house in terror. While Washington D.C. went about studying the problem, Anno set out to solve it.
No sophisticated attack occurs without premeditated surveillance and casing. Just like with Russia’s other brazen assassinations of defectors, Anno knew that a person or vehicle would have to visit the targets prior to an attack. But the adversary was smart. They knew not to bring cell phones or other electronics that could be tracked. They likely came in on foot and counted on the fact that no one watches security cameras anymore. Security cameras presented another issue: they are built to cover a wide area and capture more of the surroundings to review in the event of a crime. But the wide coverage means that there are too few pixels on a person’s face for facial recognition to be effective. Even if Western intelligence agencies maintained databases of every Russian intelligence officers’ face, security cameras would fail to pick them up, or they’d be shrouded by a medical mask or scarf in the brisk winter air.
Enter Anno. The world-class team of security-cleared PhD data scientists developed advanced algorithms that allowed us to track a person across cameras without the use of facial recognition. It didn’t matter if a Russian assailant was disguising his face anymore. It didn’t even matter whether the operative was on the West’s radar or not. If he was visiting the locations of Russian defectors or Western diplomats, we would know. We would alert. We would disrupt.
It may sound counter-intuitive, but as sophisticated as this technology was, Anno built it responsibly and with the utmost respect for privacy. Knowing that with great power comes great responsibility, Anno put limits on the technology so that governments could not track a person across days or know when and where citizens appeared. The technology doesn’t recognize faces. It doesn’t reference databases of names. Anno is as far from ‘Big Brother’ as the east is from the west. It is technology for which Western democracies can be proud, and technology for which Russia and its allies should be terrified. We protect privacy while bringing despicable acts into the daylight.
Anno is diligently working with elements inside of Ukraine. We are expanding our focus to encompass multimodal data correlation beyond the scope of cameras. If a sensor collects data, Anno is leveraging it to confront evil. Whether on the waves of the Black Sea, or the dense urban environments of Mariupol or Moscow, Anno is enabling those who defend freedom to disrupt those who seek destruction or harm. So, for the despots and dictators of the world, please take note when we say this: We Stand Against You.
Over 80 years ago, with a fascist tyranny breathing down his neck, Winston Churchill was credited as saying: “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something in your life.”
Fight Evil. Join Anno.
