In a situation our internet-poisoned brains can’t help but code as “My dossier on anti-surveillance activists is raising a lot of questions already answered by my dossier on anti-surveillance activists,” the proprietors of Madison Square Garden—which, for the unfamiliar, is a sports/Billy Joel venue, and not a sovereign nation with a more obvious need for its own opposition research division—have reportedly been keeping dossiers on anti-surveillance activists.
This is per 404 Media, reporting on a hacker-dumped batch of info pulled from MSG Entertainment’s databases earlier this month—and which included files on three activists who’ve made public statements criticizing the stadium’s use of facial recognition software, which it started employing back in 2018.
The dossiers in question included information on three people who’ve been public critics of Madison Square Garden’s use of the technology: Evan Greer, director of digital rights group Fight For The Future; Albert Fox Cahn, founder-in-residence of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP); and Adam Schwartz, privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The dossiers included background information on each “Facial Recognition Activist,” as well as social media handles, follower counts, and quotes and screenshots of social media posts they’ve made about facial recognition tech. Given that they’re, well, anti-surveillance activists, all three have responded to the knowledge that Madison Square Garden was keeping tabs on them, with Schwartz telling 404 “The wake of a data breach would be a good time for Madison Square Garden to stop subjecting its patrons to biometric surveillance.”
Madison Square Garden’s use of facial recognition software has been controversial, to say the least—especially because proprietor James Dolan has been alleged to use it for some extremely petty bullshit. That includes a story from 2022, when it reportedly flagged an employee at a law firm involved in entirely disconnected litigation against a restaurant owned by the company, getting her kicked out of a Rockettes show at Radio City Music Hall; The Verge reported a similar story earlier this year in which a guy who designed a shirt mocking Dolan several years back—but who, critically, hadn’t attended a show at an MSG-owned venue for decades himself—was reportedly flagged by scanners and told he was permanently banned from all of the company’s venues. Wired ran an extensive piece back in April about the company’s bizarre corporate surveillance state, including a security chief whose job allegedly includes trawling the websites of law firms MSGE is beefing with and uploading all of the staff pictures he can find to the company’s surveillance tech; it’s the kind of thing that’d be outright absurd, if it didn’t have actual impacts on people’s sports-and-concert-attending lives. Or, to put it in Cahn’s “good enough to get put on a list by corporate surveillance hawks” words: “It’s creepy when the largest corporations in the country amass the surveillance power that only governments once had, but it’s outright Orwellian when those tools target New Yorkers simply for opposing their corporate surveillance state.”
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