New Orleans May Hand Its Police Live Facial Recognition Tech. Critics Warn It’ll Help ICE.

Advocates point, in part, to a new state law, Act 399, which went into effect Aug. 1 and establishes criminal penalties for law enforcement officials who decline ICE requests for cooperation. “If ICE were to ask for any records that NOPD would hold, they would have to risk violating a state law and facing criminal charges [to comply with] what the ordinance is asking them to do,” Sarah Whittington, advocacy director at the ACLU of Louisiana, told Bolts.

Should federal agents get access, Whittington said, “this technology would allow them to use facial recognition to try and further their reach into our communities and track people.” She thinks ICE could “use the network of cameras to target specific people and communities and wait for the technology to alert them to a match and then use it to track that person to a location for arrest—likely away from their home and away from the public.”

Even setting aside these new state laws, experts say the only real way to prevent ICE from accessing sensitive data is to forgo collecting it in the first place. “It is very hard to wall off data collected from lawful government use,” George Washington University law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, the author of several books on big data policing, told Bolts. “The simple truth of digital surveillance is that if you build it, it will be used, and likely used against those with the least amount of political power.”

Su argues, though, that the city council’s attempts at safeguarding facial recognition technology seem to be designed according to an “an old idea” of how governments interact: “federal insulated from state, state insulated from local, and you can still have some stability or control for your own little community.”

In the era of Trump 2.0, he said, those rules no longer apply: “We’re probably at the lowest point with regard to local democratic control.”