New Orleans police secretly used a private network of facial recognition cameras for two years to continuously monitor streets and automatically alert officers when suspects were identified, violating city ordinances and civil rights protections.
From 2023 to 2024, the New Orleans Police Department secretly operated a live facial recognition surveillance system through Project NOLA, a nonprofit that manages over 5,000 cameras across the city with more than 200 equipped with facial recognition technology. The system automatically scanned faces of people in public spaces against a database of over 30,000 individuals and sent real-time alerts to officers' phones when matches were detected. This violated a 2022 city ordinance that limited facial recognition use to specific violent crime investigations with mandatory reporting to the city council. The system contributed to at least 34 arrests since early 2023, including people charged with nonviolent crimes. Officers failed to disclose their use of facial recognition in police reports and none of the cases were included in mandatory city council reports. The program was paused in April 2024 after Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick became aware of potential legal violations. Project NOLA was founded by former police officer Bryan Lagarde and operates independently without formal city contracts, using cameras that appear to be made by Chinese company Dahua, which is banned for federal use due to security concerns.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that memorize and leak sensitive personal data or infer private information about individuals without their consent. Unexpected or unauthorized sharing of data and information can compromise user expectation of privacy, assist identity theft, or cause loss of confidential intellectual property.
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed