According to the FBI on Sunday, the guy who crashed a pickup truck into partygoers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on New Year’s Day wore Meta smart glasses while preparing and carrying out the assault.
The use of the glasses as a tool to carry out a terrorist act is a troubling development for the product, which Meta introduced in 2023, even if there is no proof that they were necessary for the incident, which left 14 people dead and numerous others injured.
The company’s foray into the market, where Google and Snap had already tried and failed, is Meta smart glasses, which are functional eyeglasses with many of the features found in smartphones, such as a camera, speaker, and an AI assistant that can translate text and look up answers online. On Meta’s website, models range in price from $299 to $379.
The technology is supplied by Meta, and the frames for the spectacles are licensed by Ray-Ban. Although Meta declined to provide sales figures and Ray-Ban did not reply to a request for comment, market research firm IDC claimed that Meta had sold over 730,000 pairs last year.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, stated on the company’s July earnings call that demand for the glasses was still exceeding supply and that they were a larger hit sooner than anticipated.
The glasses have also drawn a lot of criticism for potentially violating people’s privacy because they enable their owners to record everything in their area of vision. To let everyone around them know that they are recording, the glasses contain a little light. However, two Harvard students transformed a pair of glasses into a real-time facial recognition tool last year to demonstrate that it was possible. Their artificial intelligence-powered gizmo looked for faces inside the wearer’s field of vision, found online matches, and nearly immediately displayed the person’s biographical details.
According to IDC, smart watches and earbuds currently dominate the smart wearable industry, but sales of smart glasses are predicted to gradually rise over the next years.
During a press conference on Sunday, Lyonel Myrthil, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Orleans field office, stated that Shamsud-Din Jabbar wore the glasses while he scouted the French Quarter and took video footage of the area in October when he was lodging in a New Orleans rental house. Jabbar used the glasses to capture Bourbon Street, and the FBI has released the tape.
Despite having a similar appearance to ordinary glasses, meta glasses enable hands-free video and photo recording. According to Myrthil, they also give users the option to broadcast via their video.
When he carried out the attack on Bourbon Street, Jabbar wore a set of Meta glasses, but he chose not to use them to broadcast his activities live. According to him, the glasses remained on Jabbar’s person after NOPD neutralized him, and we think he wore them all night long.
After he crashed his truck into crowds of people, the 42-year-old assailant was shot and killed by police.
Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, told NBC News on Sunday that the firm is in contact with law authorities over this issue, but he would not elaborate. Meta generally complies with court demands to provide law authorities with user information.
“Jabbar’s alleged use of the glasses shows a slight but significant escalation in the established tactics of terrorists scoping out a target area before attacking,” said Sam Hunter, head of strategic initiatives at the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Education and Technology Center.
Hunter remarked, “It’s becoming so discrete that just riding around on his bike with regular glasses doesn’t look strange.” They are not prohibitively expensive.
According to him, the video captured by the Meta glasses also depicts locations from a marginally more natural perspective than a camera mounted on a helmet or smartphone.
“When you’re trying to plan an attack, you’re really getting a sense of the eyeline, eyesight, and all the things that you’re going to want to look out for,” Hunter explained. It’s becoming increasingly clear from the video what that environment truly looks and feels like.
According to him, “they’re so discreet in terms of capturing that footage that I wouldn’t be surprised if you see versions of them or folks using them for attack planning in the future.”
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