The New Orleans City Council is considering Ordinance 35,137 that would authorize the continued use of the live facial recognition system implemented by Project NOLA. Project NOLA, a non-profit organization, runs a centralized surveillance system that has equipped New Orleans with more than 200 facial recognition cameras at various establishments and residential locations. The program, run by a former officer, was until recently, sending law enforcement live, real time alerts of people identified by facial recognition from predetermined lists. The use of Project NOLA’s live facial recognition system by the New Orleans police was a clear violation of a preexisting 2022 city council ordinance that limited the use of facial recognition technology to searches involving specific cases with violent crime. The 2022 ordinance did not allow for the use of live facial recognition or the mass deployment of the technology. Despite the police’s clear violation of the ordinance, the New Orleans City Council is considering a new ordinance to sanction the mass deployment of live facial recognition.
The possibility that New Orleans will officially implement mass surveillance via facial recognition would be an about-face that would see New Orleans go from a 2020 ordinance that rightly banned facial recognition because of the heightened risk of false positives for Black people to embracing a dystopian future of a dragnet facial recognition surveillance that treats everyone as a suspect. This opens the door to a level of intrusion that we’ve only seen in authoritarian governments. The intrusion will not stop at our faces, Project NOLA can not only track faces, but also clothing, cars, and bikes. The kind of surveillance presents a real threat to our privacy, civil liberties, and undermines our democratic values.
The use of live FRT surveillance would make everyone a suspect and go against democratic values. This type of mass surveillance would undermine individual freedoms and citizens’ ability to freely engage in social and political activity. The European Court of Human Rights unanimously concluded that highly intrusive technology (e.g. real-time dragnet facial recognition surveillance) is incompatible with the ideals and values of a democratic society governed by the rule of law. Mass deployment of live facial recognition suppresses dissent and disproportionally targets marginalized groups.
Sanctioning the indiscriminate use of live facial recognition would destroy the previous guardrails around this technology and would be the first major American city to specifically allow live facial recognition.
K… keep simping for big brother.
Every city will have it’s justification soon enough, so good luck with that. It’s just more efficient for the government to be able to track you in real time. Crime goes down real quick, especially if you stop believing a violation of civil liberties is a crime.
Bc after all, how could a government that is run by criminals be commiting a crime when they make the laws?
This is fucked up for so many reasons, but to me the fucking creepiest part of this, is knowing this is the same group of people that are protecting a sex trafficking ring of elite pedophiles.
They love to justify not having any regulations to hinder this technology by reminding people it can be used to find missing children. But it also has the potential to exploit children.
If the government can track anyone in real time, including children, with no oversight, how the fuck do we know the wealthy elites that often purchase the government through campaign donations won’t also be tracking children in real time?
Even if you didn’t already have one million reasons (and growing every day) to not trust the people running the government. Even if some of the most hated broligarchs in the U.S. hadn’t already been given government positions, military rankings, and top clearance.
With zero oversight and accountability, how the fuck can you be sure that only the government will have access to this system?