Looks like this got deleted from the original community where I posted it, so re-posting what I can remember here.
This screenshot is from a post I made on my city's subreddit.
The ACLU is saying it is "the stuff of authoritarian surveillance states, and has no place in American policing.”
“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. “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.
The NOPD has stopped using it since WaPo began investigating because it violated a city ordinance, but federal agents (ICE) and state police are still using the real time tracking app.
I realized after reading an Axios article about it on Wednesday that the ordinance was created after the mayor, suddenly asked the city to lift a blanket ban on the technology and other controversial predictive policing policies.
The city's mayor has been facing federal charges regarding a scandal for several years and is currently just running out the clock on her last term as mayor. She has also been accused of other corruption such as accepting gifts as bribes in the past
The ban on predictive policing policies was originally created following the end of a secret partnership between Palantir and the city of New Orleans from ~2012-2018.
Months after the city first abandoned it's contract with Palantir, Mayor Cantrell seemed to be looking for loopholes that would allow her to continue using controversial predictive policing
I have tried to avoid pile-on critique of the mayor, and I actually voted her the first time she ran. However, one of the most common questions people in my city ask, is "how has she not been arrested?" I want to stress this is my own speculation, but given the details that are emerging now, I do wonder if these charges may have been related to why she so willingly turned over the city's privacy to the federal government in 2022?
The proposed ordinance, if passed, would largely reverse the council’s blanket bans on the use facial recognition and characteristic tracking software, which is similar to facial recognition but for identifying race, gender, outfits, vehicles, walking gait and other attributes. One provision also appears to walk back the city’s ban on predictive policing and cell-site simulators — which intercept and spy on cell phone calls — to locate people suspected of certain serious crimes.
That provision could, for the first time, give the city explicit permission to use a whole host of surveillance technology in certain circumstances, including voice recognition, x-ray vans, “through the wall radar,” social media monitoring software, “tools used to gain unauthorized access to a computer,” and more.
Lastly the proposal would allow the city to use “social media or communications software or applications for the purpose of communicating with the public, provided such use does not include the affirmative use of any face surveillance.” The Lens asked Tidwell and Green why this was included and what it was meant to allow, but neither responded.
While she may not have realized it at the time, the removal of the ban, along with her oddly warm welcome of the Governor's own state police force, Troop Nola, has placed the entire city in danger as the 2025 Trump administration continues to remove protection for civil rights and liberties as well as oversight for potential abuse of NSA surveillance
Louisiana State Police (LSP) Troop Nola, are now permanently established in the city and cannot be regulated by city policy and regulations. This means that they can also not be regulated by the same city ordinance that compelled the NOPD to pause their use of the controversial surveillance and real time tracking notifications.
As of yesterday, the Justice Department decided to stop investigating civil rights accusations previously made against LSP, while Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry and his long time friend Attorney General Liz Murrill, were reported to have celebrated the decision.
This is only going to grow, and I suspect that it's being used in many other major cities. The U.S. is rapidly metastasizing into a dystopian fascist surveillance state. We're watching the collapse of the U.S. in real time, and it's disturbing.
Idk about being used anywhere else now, but if it isn't stopped or at the very least regulated soon it definitely will be all over the U.S.
New Orleans was the testing ground for Palantir predictive policing going back as early as 2012. I have been suspecting it will serve as a testing ground not just for AI, but for the complete authoritarian take over of blue states, for a while now.
There are some pretty blatant plans for how to do so. Like this proposed bill by a LA DOGE member to seize land within a 50 mile radius of national guard bases in the U.S. Doesn't really seem like much of a coincidence that would be pretty much all of New Orleans if the base where the Louisiana National Guard is headquartered decided to do that. Imagine if that passes in Louisiana and then spreads to other states? How do you plan to stop the national guard from a red state marching into a blue one it shares a border with to seize territory? Especially following something like an emergency or natural disaster? Do you honestly think Trump will do anything at the federal level to stop it?
So when people say to just move, it feels like they're telling you to flee your home to avoid a tsunami you know will follow you just about anywhere you could go without leaving your country. If you did anyway, and nobody stops it from engulfing the entire U.S., it seems pretty likely it would eventually just follow you anywhere around the globe. Anytime you may think you somehow managed to make it to higher ground, the threat will always remain until somebody contains it and stops it from spreading.
It even seems like other red states may be preparing to do just that. Look at this National Guard training drill that happened recently in MS
Why those states specifically? Considering how different everything would be in terms of landscape and infrastructure, why would you bring the national guard in from Utah and Wyoming to Mississippi to take place in a drill preparing them for a natural disaster??
Nothing really makes us special to keep being used as a testing ground like this, except being a continuous work in progress, and it being easier to use corruption and money to violate rights, cover things up, intimidate people into not speaking out, and having fewer resources available for people to take legal action when their rights are violated. Looking at the way things are shifting throughout the entire U.S., it kinda seems like that way of running things is already getting a head start to prepare this to spread to even really wealthy and economically sound blue states.
This story from WaPo came out Monday, and there has been practically no local news coverage of this information except for one story reporting on the guy that owns the cameras, trying to claim that if police had full unregulated access, they would have caught more of the suspects that escaped from the jail last Friday. Even that is a new phenomenon for New Orleans. Keeping this shit quiet doesn't make it go away or play nice. It only gives it time to grow stronger.
This administration will not stop it. They want it. Also expect deployment of WAMI, which basically can track and monitor you everywhere you go. This has also been deployed in some U.S. cities.