Category: Uncategorized
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NOPD Drone Flights Are Now Tweeted as They Are Logged
This post originally appeared on The Perdido Institute. Every NOPD drone flight now gets posted to X within minutes of NOPD logging it. The posts come from DroneWatch, a small open-source tool I released today, and they appear on @MWollenweber. NOPD publishes its Skydio drone flight records as a public ArcGIS layer. Each record carries…
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The Perdido Institute Is Open
The Perdido Institute is live. It is a Louisiana nonprofit I founded to protect New Orleans residents from unlawful surveillance and to hold city government to its own laws. The website is perdidoinstitute.com, and new writing will go on the Institute blog. Perdido is Spanish for lost. Privacy includes the right to be lost: to…
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September 2026 in Review
September was a strong month in the fight against illegal surveillance in New Orleans. More complaints filed, more records pried loose, more of NOPD’s own numbers checked against NOPD’s own records. None of it works without the people who read, share, sign, and show up. Thank you for the support. Your assistance turns a stack…
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A Scoreboard for NOPD Accountability
Since July 2025, I’ve filed more than 100 complaints with NOPD’s Public Integrity Bureau (PIB). Most report officers asking Project NOLA to run facial recognition, which is unlawful. Others cover NOPD drone flights and NOPD blocking me on social media. PIB has issued 18 case numbers in response. Keeping track of which complaint ended up…
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NOPD’s Drone Dashboard Has an API 85 Flights Are Missing
In a September 1 post, NOPD announced a public drone dashboard ahead of its Drone as First Responder rollout. Superintendent Kirkpatrick framed it as balance: police smarter with technology, put guardrails in place, be transparent. I’ve been prying these records loose one request at a time all year — 273 flights with no logged reason for 206 of them in January–April, then better paperwork over the…
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NOPD Mass Surveillance: November 2025
I’ve obtained another public records production from the City of New Orleans — request 26-651, 69 pages of email between NOPD officers and Bryan Lagarde of Project NOLA, the private nonprofit that runs a facial-recognition-equipped camera network across the city. 26-651_Redacted.pdf What’s in it The emails run from November 1 to November 30, 2025 —…
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The 2027 Budget Rewards the One Department That Hasn’t Earned It
Mayor Moreno’s proposed 2027 budget cuts the General Fund by 4.5% and asks nearly every department to absorb it. One department is exempt. NOPD’s General Fund allocation rises $5.1 million to $167.1 million, it adds about 50 positions while the rest of city government sheds roughly 165, and its share of the General Fund grows…
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Asking NOPD for Its Axon License Plate Reader Audit Logs
Today 404 Media asked readers across the country to request Axon’s license plate reader (ALPR) activity reports from their local police. 404 calls these reports Axon’s version of Flock’s network audits. Those Flock audits were the basis for 404’s reporting that ICE was getting Flock data, and that a Texas officer searched cameras nationwide for…
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NOPD Mass Surveillance: October 2025
I’ve obtained another public records production from the City of New Orleans — request 26-650, 80 pages of email between NOPD officers and Bryan Lagarde of Project NOLA, the private nonprofit that runs a facial-recognition-equipped camera network across the city. Every complaint described below is in this folder. What’s in it The emails run from…
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NOPD April–August 2026 Drone Flights: Better Paperwork Same Mass Surveillance
NOPD’s drone flight log through early August 2026 arrived in response to public records request 26-10297. This post covers flights from April 1 forward. NOPD’s record-keeping is markedly better than what it has produced before. The problem is what the improved records reveal. Most flights are still not tied to a police incident, and the…
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NOPD Ran Facial Recognition on a Robbery Victim
On October 29, 2025, an NOPD detective emailed a private facial recognition surveillance company a photograph of a crime victim and asked them to find him on camera. Eighty-seven minutes later he got an answer — plus something he never asked for: a month of covert surveillance on a woman who had done nothing but…
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August 2026 in Review
In August I trained a room at the Healing Center to pull NOPD records, published my request templates, filed four complaints against NOPD detectives for illegal use of facial recognition and mass surveillance, and launched a petition to end illegal surveillance in New Orleans. I worked through two records productions — one nearly 2,000 pages,…
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NOPD Remains Unaccountable: Drone Report Numbers Don’t Match Flight Logs
On August 31, NOPD published drone flight statistics for the first half of 2026, filed under “Transparency.” The release reports 209 flights in Q1 with a tidy breakdown: 164 for special events (121 during Mardi Gras), 13 for fatality scene reconstruction, 2 rescues, 1 tactical operation, 11 training flights, and 18 exempt from disclosure under…
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November 2025 NOPD Unlawful Requests for Facial Recognition
I’m publishing public records request 26-651 — 69 pages of email between NOPD and Project NOLA’s Bryan Lagarde, covering November 2025. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XcQOBKRaVUbNkJvEcowVZxuvilPc8qno/view?usp=drive_link The pattern The threads are repetitive, which is the point. A detective emails Lagarde directly from a NOPD email address, often attaching a still image, and asks Project NOLA to locate, backtrack, or…
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Sign the Petition: Stop Illegal Surveillance in New Orleans
I’ve spent the past year and a half documenting how NOPD surveils this city — public records requests, PIB complaints, and a growing stack of the department’s own documents. The record is no longer ambiguous. It’s time to put it in front of the New Orleans City Council with signatures behind it. Sign the petition…
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Need to Illegally Spy on New Orleans? Just Email Project NOLA
A 311 complaint was enough to bypass New Orleans City Ordinances and start the paperwork to install banned face-tracking camera. January 15, 2025. A Third District NOPD officer is working a trash complaint — illegal dumping under the France Road overpass. She’d filed a 311. Sanitation said two to three months. So she emailed Bryan…
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One Request to Rule Them All: Responsive Document 25-20667
Filing public records requests is a tedious process that often leads to disappointment and sometimes incremental progress. But on occasion the fates give you a precious gift that can change the course of the future. For me, that was New Orleans Public Records Request 25-20667. The responsive document to request 25-2067 is nearly 2,000 pages.…
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My Public Records Templates are Public
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.…
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Go Read: “AI-Powered Surveillance Networks are Worse Than You Know”
A drone is an AI-powered aerial surveillance system. It’s a camera, and cameras don’t stop crime or provide first aid. Instead of a police officer responding to your call, he’s sitting at headquarters watching a screen. The response time metric looks fantastic. But help isn’t any closer. The drone isn’t for you. To quote The Wire, “You…
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Don’t Spy on Me
Saturday, August 8 · 2:00 PM · The Healing Center, 2372 St. Claude Ave · Free · No sign-up, no technical background required For years, I’ve pulled on a thread. NOPD kept telling the City Council one thing about surveillance; the records I requested told another. Thousands of pages later, here’s a sample of what…