People will say it doesn’t make a difference, but it apparently made enough of a difference that they still can’t find the guy that was putting pipe bombs around the US capitol. I think at least a portion of the “they can still identify you under your mask with computers” claims are based on very niche situations (high quality footage of someone wearing a thin, fabric mask) and exaggeration or allowing people to incorrectly draw their own conclusions.

Just don’t ever go to a conservative area. They’ll lynch you for promoting “woke agenda”.

In my city, a private company, Project Nola, owns the cameras. The owner is a former LEO and basically started a private security company in the city around 2015. He charges people an installation fee and cloud storage fee for the cameras, but has allegedly always offered surveillance footage to the cops for free because he wants to help tackle crime. There has never been an official contract with the city or police

I could possibly see a small company legitimately starting out that way, but this company actually popped up in the city during the middle of a secret partnership between the city and Palantir. The partnership, which enabled Palantir to collect data on individuals in order to create and patent predictive policing software was exposed in 2018.

There is allegedly no link between the two private companies, but the business model of the local surveillance company seems very hard to match the level of growth despite what would seem to be a fairly low profit margin it charges people using its service.

At some point the owner of the local surveillance company began combining his surveillance with facial recognition software, which then provides real time tracking of individuals on a watchlist to police (or anyone working with the company) when a match is made via information the surveillance cameras are constantly scanning for. The cameras can scan for details like a specific face (which is still prone to error/false positive matches) or it can scan for more vague details like walking gait, clothes a suspect may be wearing, or the type of car they may be driving.

The owner of the surveillance company, insists he does share the data he collects with anyone other than the law enforcement agencies he is working with. Originally this was apparently only NOPD, but now it’s also the state police, FBI, and ICE/ICE state affiliates such as the National Guard, ATF, Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, and some other Louisiana state departments.

If that were true, it would still be quite concerning, but given that he apparently began using facial recognition software at some point over the last few years, and the most common facial recognition software used by LEOs and private companies is also a company backed by Peter Thiel, I find that claim nearly impossible to believe.

Here is some info about that other Thiel backed company, Clearview AI

Before the police in New Orleans began using the facial recognition software, they had to lift a city wide ban in 2022, that had originally been put in place in 2020

Two years after the city’s partnership with Palantir allegedly ended, it was revealed the city was using facial recognition software, despite years of denying use. After this use was revealed, the 2020 ban of the technology was put in place. In 2022, the mayor requested the ban be lifted, so that police could continue using facial recognition software, but an ordinance regulating use was created in order to offer some regulation and protection of this use. However, last week, a Washington Post article revealed that police had just ignored that ordinance anyway.

Most people in New Orleans, including myself, were oblivious about most of this information until the Washington Post article was released. NOPD has allegedly stopped using the tracking software since the Post began its investigation, but is hoping to get the city to remove the ordinance they were in violation of.

As concerning as all of this is, what’s perhaps even more concerning are the provisions included in the 2022 ordinance, that was created with the intention of providing some small level of regulation and protection to the public once the ban was lifted.

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.