The New Orleans City Council is considering an ordinance that would allow the city's police department, in the name of fighting crime, to use real-time facial recognition technology to find and track people as they move about the city. As The Washington Post reported last month, New Orleans police had already been secretly receiving real-time facial recognition notifications via a private surveillance camera network operated by Project NOLA.
Reason's Autumn Billings noted back in May that use of these automatic alerts may have violated an earlier city ordinance meant to protect the public's privacy from a generalized surveillance tool and prevent wrongful arrests due to software errors. "This is the first known time an American police department has relied on live facial recognition technology cameras at scale, and is a radical and dangerous escalation of the power to surveil people as we go about our daily lives," warned the American Civil Liberties Union in the wake of the Post's revelations. Undeterred by these concerns, the proposed city ordinance would sweep those protections away and make it legal for the New Orleans Police Department to use real-time facial recognition notifications.
The police would activate real-time surveillance by uploading an image of a suspicious person into the facial recognition system. The system scans the faces of all citizens as they walk past the video camera network, seeking to identify and then track the person of interest. Of course, if the police can track criminals, they can track you too. But what's the big deal? After all, as Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels purportedly observed, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
