October was a busy month. The biggest piece of work was building the Perdido Institute, a New Orleans nonprofit that now houses all of my surveillance and police accountability work. It opened on November 2. I also filed a full cycle of records requests, built a tool that tracks NOPD drone flights, and reported seven software vulnerabilities. Thank you to everyone who reads, shares, signs, and shows up.
The petition to stop illegal surveillance in New Orleans goes to the City Council and Mayor Moreno. It had 457 signatures on November 10, up from 418 when I published the September recap. Please sign it, share it on social media, and ask your friends to sign. The rest of this post is the reason it exists.
I built the Perdido Institute
I spent most of October building the Perdido Institute, which opened on November 2. It protects New Orleans residents from unlawful surveillance and holds city government to its own laws. Perdido is Spanish for lost, because privacy includes the right to be lost in your own city. Perdido Street is also where City Hall sits.
The Institute runs five programs: surveillance accountability, police accountability, public records assistance, help getting answers from city agencies, and evidence-based government. My PIB complaints, the NOPD and Project NOLA email productions, the drone flight log analysis, and my public records templates all moved here. Earlier posts stay at insomniac.tech as an archive.
Its first tool is RETINA, a public map of surveillance cameras and automated license plate readers in New Orleans. At launch it held 1,117 points, built from two city datasets, OpenStreetMap, and reports from residents. You can filter it by operator, show only cameras flagged for facial recognition, and report a camera the map is missing. It has no analytics, no trackers, and no account.
The Institute is volunteer-run. If you want to help with records research, documenting cameras, or policy work, write to [email protected].
I’m blocked on new complaints
Every qualifying thread in the NOPD and Project NOLA email I have is now a filed complaint. The newest of those records are from November 2025. The next batch, December 2025, is request 26-652. I filed it on January 12, 2026. As of November 10 it has been open 302 days, with no records, no invoice, and no written denial. Until the City produces it, I have nothing new to file from.
Here’s my October work
Oct 1. September 2026 in Review. The September recap: seven complaints filed, five records requests filed, and 11 blog posts.
Oct 5. I filed the September records cycle with NOPD. The five requests cover September 1 to 30, 2026: Project NOLA emails (26-21492), facial recognition and surveillance request forms (26-21493), requests to LA-SAFE, the state fusion center (26-21494), drone flight logs (26-21495), and Axon license plate reader audit reports (26-21496).
Oct 5. I built a tracking sheet for my 2026 requests, with one row per month and one column per request type. It showed I had never requested the May 2026 Project NOLA emails, so I filed that request the same day (26-21490).
Oct 5. I emailed my August 2026 records request to the Orleans Parish District Attorney after missing two monthly cycles.
Through October. I built DroneWatch, a small tool that watches NOPD’s public drone flight log and posts each new flight to X at @MWollenweber within minutes of NOPD logging it.
Security research
I spent much of October on vulnerability research, and I reported what I found through a bug bounty vendor.
Vulnerability research is the work of studying software to find flaws that let someone do what they shouldn’t: read private data, get past a login, or take control of the computer the software runs on. Researchers hunt for these flaws so they get fixed before someone uses them against the people who rely on that software.
Finding a flaw is half the job. Reporting it responsibly is the other half. A bug bounty vendor is a company that pays independent researchers for vulnerability reports, confirms each finding, and notifies the company that makes the software. The software maker gets a fixed deadline, usually a few months, to ship a fix before anything is published. Until then, the details stay private, so nobody can use them in the meantime.
I filed seven reports in October, three on October 14 and four on October 29. All seven are still open:
I won’t name the software or its maker until fixes are available. I’ll write up the full details once the disclosure process allows it.
The City answered
On 26-652, the City Attorney’s Office wrote on October 13 that it would turn to the request after finishing another of mine. On October 30 it sent its standard notice that email requests take extra time to compile. Still no records.
November started strong. DroneWatch went public on November 9, and the RETINA code is now open source. More on both in next month’s recap.
If you live in New Orleans, please sign the petition, share it, and ask one friend who lives here to sign.
