Police Secretly Monitored New Orleans With Facial Recognition Cameras

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Since early 2023, facial recognition cameras run by a private nonprofit have scanned New Orleans visitors and residents and quietly alerted police, sidestepping oversight and potentially violating city law, according to a new report.

In 2022, the Big Easy's city government relaxed its ban on the use of facial recognition technology. It could be used to investigate violent crimes, but had to be checked by a human operator before action was taken.

But an investigation published Monday by the Washington Post found that within a year, police were quietly receiving continuous real-time facial recognition alerts from a privately operated camera network. These alerts came from cameras managed by nonprofit Project NOLA, which runs a sprawling, privately funded surveillance network across the city, the report says.

Project NOLA claims access to more than 5,000 camera feeds in the New Orleans area, with over 200 equipped for facial recognition. The system compares faces against a privately compiled database of more than 30,000 individuals, assembled partly from police mugshots. When a match is detected, officers receive a mobile phone alert with the person's identity and location, according to the report.

The police were required to notify the city council each time they used facial recognition technology in an investigation or arrest, but reportedly failed to do so. In multiple cases, police reports omitted any mention of the technology, raising concerns that defendants were denied the opportunity to challenge the role facial recognition played in their arrest.

By adopting this system - in secret, without safeguards, and at tremendous threat to our privacy and security - the City of New Orleans has crossed a thick red line

As scrutiny mounted, the police department distanced itself from the operation, saying in a carefully worded statement that it "does not own, rely on, manage, or condone the use by members of the department of any artificial intelligence systems associated with the vast network of Project NOLA crime cameras."

"Until now, no American police department has been willing to risk the massive public blowback from using such a brazen face recognition surveillance system," said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, in a press release.

"By adopting this system - in secret, without safeguards, and at tremendous threat to our privacy and security - the City of New Orleans has crossed a thick red line. This is the stuff of authoritarian surveillance states, and has no place in American policing."

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