Last weekend I stood in a room at the Healing Center and walked a crowd of people through what I’ve found out about surveillance in New Orleans. Drone flights with the reason field left blank. A state intelligence director quietly handed access to Project NOLA — a massive 5000+ camera private face tracking spy network. A police department telling the City Council one thing while its own paperwork said another.
The question I got most that afternoon wasn’t about any of that. It was: how did you get this?
I’ve spent the last several years being a thorn in NOPD’s side. I’ve published their records, filed complaints with the Public Integrity Bureau over unlawful drone flights and facial recognition use, and shown up at City Council with documents the department would rather nobody read. None of it came from a source inside the building. I don’t have one. Every piece of it came from a public records request — a letter, an email address, and the patience to send it again the next month.
So here’s the answer to the question. Linked below are my templates.
Louisiana Public Records Request Templates →
Louisiana law guarantees every adult the right to inspect and copy public records. Every drone flight log, contract, policy manual, and email in this city sits behind a door that opens for a correctly written page of text.
If you’re in New Orleans, you don’t even need an envelope. The city takes requests through a public portal: nola.nextrequest.com/requests. Paste the template in, hit submit, and you’re on the clock. Requests and responses there are visible to everyone, so you can also read what other people have already asked for before you spend your own effort on it.
What’s in the folder
Contract fishing — start here. Ask an agency for every contract, purchase order, invoice, and renewal involving a named vendor. This is the request I hand to people who have never filed one, because it’s the hardest kind to refuse. Contracts are unambiguously public, they’re already gathered in one place, and they’re not sensitive enough for anyone to fight you over. You’ll get something back, which teaches you the process without a denial in the way. And the answer is worth having on its own: contracts tell you what technology exists, what it cost, what the agency promised about how it would be used, and which vendors to fish for next. Nearly every thread I’ve pulled started as a line item.
Monthly Project NOLA correspondence. A standing request for email between agency officials and Project NOLA and its founder. Filed monthly, not once. Ask the same narrow question over and over, and eventually the month comes around where the answer is interesting.
Monthly drone flight logs. Every flight, every date, every stated reason. One month of logs is trivia. Twelve months is a pattern: which neighborhoods, how often, and how many flights the department couldn’t be bothered to justify in writing.
Monthly surveillance request forms. The paperwork officers are supposed to generate when they use a surveillance capability. The logs are useful when they exist. They are more useful when they don’t, because a department that can’t produce the form it requires of itself has told you something the press release didn’t.
The monthly cadence is the whole trick, and it’s why I’m giving these away rather than just describing them. A narrow, repeating request is hard to call burdensome, cheap to fulfill, and impossible to quietly bury. It also converts a one-time curiosity into a time series — and a time series is what lets you say this changed instead of this happened.
Now go exercise your right to hold your government accountable
Pick an agency. Pick a vendor you’ve seen mentioned in a council meeting or a news story. Send the contract request. That’s the whole first step, and it takes about ten minutes.
You don’t need my permission or my name on it — change the details and send it. But you also don’t have to do this alone. If you’re not sure who the custodian is, if a request comes back denied, or if you just want someone to read your draft before you hit submit, email me at projectmayhem@insomniac.tech. I’ll help.
