~2012ish: Palantir receives contract with city of New Orleans

2015: Privately owned Project Nola surveillance cam program created

2018: City cancels very shady contract with Palantir that helped them create and test their predictive policing tech

2020: Peter Thiel becomes major investor in Clearview AI facial recognition technology. Free trials are given to ICE and multiple local law enforcement agencies across the U.S.

Late 2020: Ban on facial recognition tech and predictive policing in New Orleans

2022: ~18 months later, Cantrell requests City Council lift the ban, and it is replaced with shady surveillance ordinance giving the city some very concerning privileges in certain circumstances

2024: Cantrell says she won’t fight Landry establishing Troop Nola as a permanent police presence in the city, despite concerns from civil rights advocacy groups

Feb 2025: Forbes reports that Clearview AI remains unprofitable due to multiple ongoing lawsuits and previous inability to secure federal contracts. The company says future focus will be large federal contracts.

May 2025: Washington Post reveals NOPD has been ignoring the fairly lax laws regarding facial recognition tech in the 2022 surveillance ordinance while working with Project Nola. NOPD pauses use of tech, but Troop Nola and federal agencies continue use bc they’re not under city jurisdiction

Wow, I didn’t even know that. Louisiana State law. That some dumb fucking bullshit.

https://www.legis.la.gov/legis/law.aspx?d=78402

They make an exception for medical masks, but I also saw that video of a protestor getting hassled and arrested for a medical mask recently.

I guess I’m just going to have to start using face paint to trick their cams

Not just the military. I found out Palantir had a contract with my own city to develop and test their predictive policing technology until 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd

The city banned predictive policing and facial recognition tech, then quietly lifted the ban and replaced it with a very concerning ordinance in 2022. https://thelensnola.org/2022/02/17/mayor-cantrell-moves-to-reverse-bans-on-facial-recognition-predictive-policing-and-other-surveillance-tech/

Then it came out that the city wasn’t even following the rules they had created in the sketchy ordinance. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/05/19/live-facial-recognition-police-new-orleans/

The private surveillance company using the facial recognition tech (which was created during the time Palantir was still under contract with the city, but is allegedly totally unrelated to Palantir 🙄) couldn’t keep providing the real time facial recognition tracking to city police bc WaPo exposed they were violating the ordinance. However, since it’s only a city ordinance and they’re a private company, they can still provide it to literally anyone else in the city (state police, federal agents, ICE, military).

They’ve already been doing a lot of shady shit to American citizens, and it’s naive to just trust that they won’t eventually start using these kinds of AI drone weapons on American soil.

Who TF is actually going to want to use these platforms bad enough to do this shit?

Facebook sucks and has for quite some time.

Reddit is mainly just very poorly disguised government surveillance and AI generated advertisement, and none of the content is even enjoyable or enticing. Who TF is their target audience?

It’s funny how all 3 countries involved in this (4 if you count Russia) are being hurled towards catastrophe and likely world ending destruction by powerful men who are not even admired by a large percentage of the populations they control.

Nobody that actually wants a regime change in any of these countries, wants this war to happen.

A destabilizing war, allegedly necessary to create regime change, will act as a chaotic distraction from questionable leadership, and help each of these men, at least temporarily, tighten their slipping power grips.

The people of Iran, Israel, and the U.S. are not fighting each other. 3 or 4 men are fighting with angry threatening words and tweets, and making the choice to put all of humanity at risk to do so. Fucking absurd.

It’s not normal. It’s ok until the majority of America accepts what can really be done with that database Trump is having Palantir build.