New Orleans Police Continuing to Use Live Face Recognition Despite City Law Subscribe to the Free Future Newsletter Free Future home A troubling New Orleans face recognition program revealed by a Washington Post investigation last year continues to operate despite violating a city law and a claim that it has been paused, and is being used in more problematic ways than first reported, according to emails obtained through an activist’s public records requests. If allowed to stand, this one-of-a-kind program would represent an alarming new expansion of how face recognition is used in America. Face recognition is used by a number of police agencies around the nation, but almost always to discover the identity of an alleged perpetrator who appears in a photo. New Orleans police officers, however, have used — and appear to be continuing to use —live face recognition through an organization called Project NOLA. That means that they can do: - Real time monitoring. The systems operators can set the system to issue instant alerts when someone on a watch list appears on some of the system’s 5,000 camera system (the newer ones, which have face recognition functionality embedded within them). - Search. The operators can also enter a name or image and pull up the video of every time the person appears in any of the recordings the system has made (Project NOLA says it retains them for 30 days). - Tracking. The retroactive construction of a person’s movements across the city over time, which can be highly revealing of how they live their life. - Relationship identification. Such a system also enables even more invasive social network analysis by tracking a person’s repeated co-appearances in a video with another person. There has been no reporting that Project NOLA is doing this in automated fashion, but