New Orleans Is Watching You: Facial Recognition and the End of Public Freedom

Watching Without a Warrant

Imagine boarding a city bus and having your face scanned, matched against a government watchlist, and tracked through your daily movements, all without your knowledge or consent. This is not a dystopian fantasy. It is happening right now in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the push to expand this kind of surveillance to public transit systems across America is accelerating. What is unfolding in New Orleans is not just a local controversy. It is a warning about what happens when law enforcement, working through private organizations, quietly dismantles constitutional protections that Americans have relied on for generations.

Now compare to China’s social credit system. If you happened to get angry at the DMV yesterday, or you are late paying your electric bill or if a local official wants your dog, you could be denied entrance to the bus. This is the future we may be looking at if this become pervasive.

This is about control.

What New Orleans Is Doing

New Orleans has become the first American city with a live facial recognition network operating in public spaces. The system is run by a private nonprofit called Project NOLA, founded by former police officer Bryan Lagarde. The network draws from over 5,000 cameras mounted on private and public property throughout the city. About 200 of those cameras have facial recognition capability, scanning the faces of people walking through the French Quarter and other neighborhoods in real time. When someone’s face matches one of approximately 250 people on Lagarde’s internal watchlist, a computer voice alerts his staff.

The New Orleans Police Department cooperated with this system secretly for two years, using it in dozens of arrests, before a Washington Post investigation exposed the program in May 2025. Officers sent photos to Lagarde through personal phones, calls, and emails, keeping the arrangement entirely off official records. According to emails obtained through public records requests by privacy researcher Matthew Wollenweber, cooperation was still ongoing as of November 2025, months after police leadership announced a pause.

How This Violates the Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures. It requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant based on probable cause before tracking individuals or searching their private information. The Supreme Court reinforced this in United States v. Jones, ruling that police must have probable cause and a warrant to use technology to follow someone continuously.

Live facial recognition does exactly what the Fourth Amendment is designed to prevent. It allows police to track a person’s movements across an entire city, reconstruct where they have been over days or weeks, and map their social associations by identifying who they appear with repeatedly on camera. All of this happens without a warrant, without probable cause, and without the person’s knowledge. University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo described the New Orleans arrangement as a “shell game,” warning that routing surveillance through a private organization “will circumvent those protections” the Constitution is meant to guarantee. When government uses a private company to do what it legally cannot do itself, that is not innovation. That is evasion.

The City Law Being Ignored

New Orleans passed a city ordinance that allowed limited use of facial recognition in criminal investigations but included firm restrictions. Critically, the law banned its use as a “surveillance tool.” Project NOLA’s live system, which runs continuously and tracks people who have not been accused of any crime, directly violates that prohibition. The city council considered new legislation to formalize police cooperation with Project NOLA after the Washington Post story broke, but that ordinance never advanced. A proposal to let the city build its own live facial recognition system has also stalled.

Despite these legal barriers, evidence strongly suggests the program never fully stopped. Wollenweber reported that the police department never formally ordered officers to stop using the system, and his public records requests revealed continued use well after the supposed pause. When he filed complaints against officers shown to be sending photos to Project NOLA, the department dismissed them, claiming the requests did not constitute a “use” of facial recognition. The city’s own law is being ignored, and there is no accountability in sight.

Who Is Fighting Back

Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project

Jay Stanley has been one of the most consistent and forceful critics of live facial recognition in American public life. He points out that the United States went 25 years after the failed Tampa experiment without any city deploying live facial recognition on its streets, and that New Orleans has now shattered that restraint. Stanley wrote a detailed report for the ACLU documenting that Project NOLA continued operating despite the claimed pause, using emails Wollenweber obtained through public records requests. His core argument is that surveillance systems never stay narrow. “It may be used for a very narrow watch list today,” he said, “but there are very good reasons to think it’ll expand over time.” Stanley argues that once the infrastructure exists and is treated as legitimate, it will inevitably be used against immigrants, political activists, and anyone whose views are disfavored by whoever holds power. He calls Project NOLA’s continued operation “an alarming new expansion of how face recognition is used in America.”

Sarah Whittington, Advocacy Director, ACLU of Louisiana

Sarah Whittington has focused on the specific legal violations at stake in New Orleans and the broader danger of allowing private organizations to run surveillance systems that government agencies cannot legally operate themselves. She clearly stated that Project NOLA’s live facial recognition violated the city’s own ordinance, which “did not allow for this type of live facial recognition from a third-party entity.”

Whittington also raised the alarm about what happens when a city builds surveillance infrastructure that federal agencies can then access. Even a strong city ordinance cannot protect residents “if the federal government or the state government steps in to say, ‘Well, you’ve built this system, and we have come.'” She argues that without a clear prohibition, the city has effectively surrendered to a private surveillance model with no democratic accountability.

Will Owen, Communications Director, Surveillance Technology Oversight Project

Will Owen represents an organization that focuses specifically on how surveillance technology is deployed against the public without adequate oversight or consent. His argument centers on the fundamental injustice of treating ordinary people as test subjects for unproven and demonstrably biased technology. “City residents should not be guinea pigs for transit systems to test Silicon Valley’s latest unproven, biased surveillance tech,” he said. Owen’s position reflects broader research showing that facial recognition systems produce higher error rates for women and people of color, a fact documented by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Those errors are not abstract. They have already resulted in wrongful arrests and civil rights lawsuits. Deploying this technology at scale on public buses or city streets means that the people most likely to be misidentified and wrongfully stopped by police are already among the most vulnerable.

The Road Ahead

Project NOLA operates with almost no external checks. Its watchlist is controlled entirely by Bryan Lagarde, with no auditing, no formal process, and no accountability. Wollenweber found that the system sends suspect videos over unsecured Google Drive folders and uses shared passwords with no centralized identity management. There is no public record of who is on the watchlist or why.

This is the future being built, one camera at a time, on city buses, on French Quarter balconies, and above bar entrances. The argument that people have nothing to fear if they have nothing to hide ignores what it means to live under constant observation. Freedom of movement is not simply the ability to travel from one place to another. It is the ability to move through public space without being named, tracked, and filed away by a system controlled by people you never elected and cannot hold accountable. That freedom is being dismantled right now. The question is whether enough people will demand it back before it is gone entirely.

PB Editor: There is a vast difference between tracking criminals you have already committed a crime, and tracking everyone just in case they do commit a crime. Innocent until proven guilty – and we should not be doing automatic surveillance on innocent people.

If you are subjecting my face to faciall recognition, you are essentially searching my face. This is a direct violation of the fourth amendment and we should not allow it.