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.
Timeline of predictive policing and facial recognition surveillance in New Orleans:
~2012-2018: Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology
2015: Meet The Man Who Runs New Orleans’ Entirely Privatized (And Controversial) City Surveillance System
2017: ProjectNOLA plans to expand crime camera network, work more closely with New Orleans officials
2018: Months after end of ‘predictive policing’ contract, Cantrell administration works on new tool to ID ‘high-risk’ residents
2020: New Orleans City Council bans facial recognition, predictive policing and other surveillance tech
2022: Mayor Cantrell moves to reverse bans on facial recognition, predictive policing and other surveillance tech
2023: Wholly ineffective and pretty obviously racist’: Inside New Orleans’ struggle with facial-recognition policing
May 2025: Police secretly monitored New Orleans with facial recognition cameras
June 2025: City camera technology not useful for facial recognition: Project NOLA founder
Future surveillance across America as of 2025:
June 2025: Trump’s Palantir-Powered Surveillance Is Turning America Into a Digital Prison
Would be hilarious if it flagged Trump as dangerous because of all his unhinged rants but I’m sure he’s on the whitelist, which I suppose is an apt name here.