Madison Square Garden Facial Recognition Surveillance Used to Ban and Track People Around

According to WIRED, Madison Square Garden’s incredibly invasive facial recognition system has been used to ban critics of the stadium and even track a trans woman around who did nothing wrong.

James Dolan, owner of the venue, has reportedly had a track record of deploying dystopian surveillance in order to keep a ban list of people he doesn’t like for one reason or another, for any reason you can think of.

His security team banned a graphic designer for making a shirt that says “Ban Dolan.” For that, it’s suspected he was added to the facial recognition systems. He wasn’t even at MSG, but New York’s Radio City Music Hall, another venue owned by Dolan.

The shirt was worn by his friend to MSG, but the security team had seemingly looked up the designer of the shirt and added him to their system via social media pictures.

Another incident saw a mother booted from a Rockettes show she was going to see with her 9 year old daughter, just because she worked for a law firm that had been involved with personal injury cases against a restaurant under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment.

“I don’t practice in New York. I’m not an attorney that works on any cases against MSG,” she told NBC10 Boston.

The ban affected all the other lawyers at the firm as well.

A trans woman named Nina Richards was personally targeted by the then security chief Jeff Eversole, a former senior director of global investigations at Oracle, a surveillance nightmare in its own right.

Eversole told his deputies to compile dossiers on her and make sure she was in the facial recognition system, and ordered the site’s security to focus on her simply because she was a trans woman, according to a former MSG security staffer, Donnie Ingrasselino, in a lawsuit.

Ingrasselino believed that she was targeted explicitly “because of her gender identity.”

WIRED interviewed other former employees who alleged that “she posed no threat.”

Eversole reportedly showed her picture in meetings and continually misgendered her.

WIRED obtained a detailed 18-page report shows how closely she was being monitored:

07:10:20 // CAM 0241 // scans her ticket to section 102, Row 8, Seat 5

“07:11:14 // CAM 1434 // goes up terrace escalators on level 3 to level 6 concourse

07:12:52 // CAM AC10 // hugs usher

Appendix A of the report has a screenshot of the embrace, with Richards circled in red.

08:08:58 // CAM 1093 // talking with F&B worker at the Draft Kings Bar

08:10:49 // CAM 0512 // pays for the drinks

08:31:19 // CAM 0485 // eating at a table”

Richards was banned from MSG under a false stalking allegation, ironically enough.

Richards used to have an Instagram account with 44,000 followers, but today it’s all been nuked, presumably due to the surveillance, even telling WIRED to use a fake name.

MSG invested at least $6 million into metal detectors with cameras built in for facial scanning in order to capture every face that enters.

This overzealous approach leads to all kinds of innocent people getting flagged as suspicious, including a little girl in one case flagged as “priority 8.” Surely a terrorist in waiting.

Madison Square Garden isn’t the only example of excessive surveillance. It’s seemingly becoming less and less possible to exist in public without being constantly under watch.