“Facial recognition generally relies on looking for a few different important facial features - nose, eyes, mouth, eyebrows, and jawline,” O’Neill told RT. O’Neill discovered that Juggalo makeup, worn by fans of ‘the worst band in the world,’ Insane Clown Posse, can defeat most kinds of facial recognition tech.

“This makeup actually replaces the jawline, as well as a few other large features, which makes it very difficult to match it to other regular faces,” O’Neill said. While heavy makeup is often used in other musical subcultures - like the ‘corpse paint’ favored by black metal artists - only Juggalo makeup has the jawline-obscuring, face hiding characteristics needed to reliably fudge facial recognition software.

As far back as 2016, a Georgetown Law Center report revealed that half of all American adults have had their faces recorded and included in police databases. That same year, police in Maryland were using facial recognition software to identify protesters and match them with mugshots.

More recently, online retail giant Amazon has started selling its big-brother-like ‘Rekognition’ technology to government and law enforcement agencies across the US. Rekognition can track, identify, and analyze people in real time, recognizing up to 100 individual people in a single image. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has warned that the rollout of Rekognition “raises profound civil liberties and civil rights concerns.”

O’Neill is concerned about the implications of facial recognition, and he warns that it’s not just law enforcement that people should be worried about.

“It could be potentially used maliciously, like waiting outside hospitals to sell information on who was there to insurance companies, or other things that might be morally questionable,” he said. After the revelation earlier this year that Facebook sent an undercover doctor to several top US hospitals to try to solicit confidential patient information, leaving such powerfully invasive technology in the hands of Silicon Valley might generate a lot of interest in new privacy hacks.

However, hiding as a Juggalo could draw more attention from law enforcement. As a predominantly white, underclass subculture, Juggalos are designated as a “loosely organized hybrid gang” by the FBI. The National Gang Intelligence Center has warned that as well as paying good money for songs like ‘Miracles’, Juggalos will “evolve into a more sophisticated criminal entity through associations with hardened, experienced gang members."

The band, led by Detroit rappers ‘Violent J’ and ‘Shaggy 2 Dope,’ launched an unsuccessful discrimination lawsuit against the FBI in response to the designation. Despite having the backing of the ACLU, the lawsuit was thrown out of court last December, leaving the band penniless and begging billionaire fan Elon Musk for money on Twitter.