New Orleans’ sprawling private surveillance system, Project NOLA, operates over 5,000 cameras across the city. While the privacy violations of this network have been well-documented, the cybersecurity practices behind it reveal an equally alarming threat. The only thing protecting access to Project NOLA is “Temp1234.”
Catastrophic Security Practices
Project NOLA’s access control demonstrates negligence that would be unacceptable in any professional security context:
Default Credentials: The system uses “Temp1234” as a default password—a vulnerability that has been a known attack vector for decades.
Email Distribution: Passwords are transmitted via email, creating multiple points of compromise. Email is not encrypted end-to-end, credentials persist in server logs indefinitely, and email accounts are frequent targets of attack.
Shared Accounts: Multiple users share single accounts, making attribution impossible and violating basic identity and access management principles. This means no audit trail of who accessed which cameras, no accountability for misuse, and inability to revoke individual access.
What This Means for New Orleans
These failures transform Project NOLA from a surveillance network into an open surveillance platform. Anyone who obtains these credentials—through email compromise, insider access, or social engineering—gains ability to monitor residents across 5,000 camera feeds.
The combination of weak default passwords, insecure credential distribution, and shared accounts creates a system where credentials are trivially discoverable, compromise is difficult to detect, attribution is impossible, and revocation requires system-wide password changes.
This isn’t just poor security practice—it’s a fundamental failure to protect the privacy of hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents who are surveilled without their consent.
This isn’t a one off mistake. You can see this abysmal security repeated over and over for YEARS. All of this information is available to any Louisianan making a public records request to the City of New Orleans. See for yourself:
