~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?

I’m not defending cluster bombs, I’m saying it’s bullshit to kill multiple families in an apartment building and pretend you’re the fucking good guys because you have more sophisticated tech. Especially when there was no reason to attack Iran like this in the first place.

He’s been accusing Iran of being weeks away from having nuclear weapons since 2012. He almost gets voted out of leadership and when he doesn’t he jumps on the opportunity to start bombing Iran and taking out these scientists (and everyone around them) who he had been targeting since November.

He and Trump are going to get us all killed to gain money and power. Fuck them and fuck anyone that wants to keep defending this ignorant bullshit, as if people can’t see clear as day, exactly what these sacks of shit are doing.

But like… Presumably, you’re not just individually killing a bunch of civilians precisely

No, they’re not precise at all unless you consider also killing their families and potentially an entire building full of people to be acceptable “precision.”

That’s why it seems like bullshit to pretend lower tech cluster bombs are an inexcusable evil compared to Palantir AI drones.

Right now, the taxes I pay go partially to arming them,

And we are giving millions in contracts to Palantir to help them create these nightmare AI projects with zero oversight.

Alex Karp’s biography makes it pretty clear he’s trying to spin this shit as every American’s patriotic duty to support, and no different than the Manhattan project (as if that’s something great to aspire to in the first fucking place) during WWII.

I think it’s probably pretty hard to keep simultaneously assassinating 10 targets and their families under wraps, so they’re trying to get ahead of accusations by pretending it’s a show of military strength instead of horrifying skynet murder.

It looks especially bad when they’re pointing the finger at Iran for fucking cluster bombs.

The argument being cluster bombs are a dirty move, but using simultaneous AI powered assassin drones to strike while people are sleeping makes you the good guys?

It’s guaranteed the number of bystanders that were killed while they killed these “targets” is not zero.

No it doesn’t.

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.