transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] It was so crazy, in fact, that members of the security staff at the Garden, they had some local bars they liked to hang out after the games. They were afraid they were being surveilled there.

Speaker 2:
[00:11] Do not try to go to a basketball game, hockey game, or concert in New York, unless you wanna be potentially tracked and surveilled even outside the venue forever. There's a shocking story that just broke on Wired written by Noah Shachtman and Robert Silverman titled The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden's Surveillance Machine. In the piece, the reporters detail how Jim Dolan, a multi-millionaire who owns The Knicks, The Rangers, Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, The Sphere in Las Vegas and tons of other venues, has built this private surveillance deep state effectively to mass surveil anybody that he wants. They've tracked LGBTQ people, protesters, lawyers, average fans, people that Jim Dolan personally doesn't like and more. In one case, using facial recognition, the Knicks surveilled a trans woman tracking her every single move out of fear that she'd show up on Madison Square Garden's television broadcast. They literally do this to anyone who could be slightly perceived as an enemy or critic of Jim Dolan or anybody even related to anybody who is slightly criticized or could potentially criticize Jim Dolan. What makes this story so insane and terrifying is that this is a peek into the world that we are constructing where multi-millionaires and billionaires can effectively build state-level mass surveillance systems to track, monitor, prosecute, and attack anyone that they don't like. To discuss all of this, I have Noah Shachtman here, one of the co-authors of The Wired Report. Noah, hi. Thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker 1:
[01:38] Hey, long time.

Speaker 2:
[01:39] I know. For people that don't know, Noah was my boss. He's an icon in journalism and I didn't even look at the byline when I saw this story because it was so crazy. Everyone was sharing it, I read it, and I was like, who wrote this? I was like, what? Noah Shachtman. For people that haven't read, I guess, what got you interested in reporting out on the surveillance infrastructure around Madison Square Garden and what were your broad findings?

Speaker 1:
[02:02] Yeah. The one-on-one is this, is that James Dolan, who owns the New York Knicks, he owns the New York Rangers, the hockey team. He owns that sphere in Las Vegas and he's building another one in DC. He's also got the Radio City Music Hall, another iconic arena, the Chicago Theater in Chicago. That guy has been kind of obsessed with his enemies and getting revenge on his enemies for years. In 2018, what he started doing was instituting biometrics, facial recognition at his various properties. At first, it was pretty janky, but it's gotten more and more sophisticated as facial recognition has gotten more sophisticated. Now he uses it to kind of enforce a ban list on thousands of people. And he also uses it to have a watch list, which people are sort of creepily surveyed as they enter Madison Square Garden or The Sphere or wherever else. This has been a known story in New York for a while. But what got me interested was there's this lawsuit about six, eight months ago now, in which a member of Dolan's own security team sued the garden and sued his bosses. And so for the first time, we kind of had a way in, a peek inside what is kind of Jim Dolan's deep state. And so we took that and we ran with it.

Speaker 2:
[03:19] This shocked me a while ago when I think I saw a headline where like he had banned some guy from entering in for wearing like the wrong merch or something. Like he had banned like specific people from entering, which I guess he was facial scanning them when they walk in and then banning them from entering the garden. Like that in itself seems crazy, but I don't know. I work a block away downtown from the crypto arena where they scan everyone's face to walk in. And like, it seems like surveillance is becoming this like normalized thing at sports arenas all over. So I mean, how crazy is it what he's doing? Like is this a very extensive kind of surveillance system or is it just like, oh, this is New York, so everyone's paying attention, but like everybody's doing this type of stuff everywhere?

Speaker 1:
[03:58] Well, I'd say it's a little bit of both. I'd say like Dolan is at the forefront of a trend, which is any billionaire, and that includes most sports owners now, any billionaire can build their own private surveillance state. And that's what's happening at crypto.com arena. SoFi, down the street, it's happening in New York, it's happening everywhere, right? So in that sense, it's normalized. But where Dolan takes it to 11 is how he employs that technology and who he employs it against. And so I reviewed this 18-page internal report that was focused on a single woman at a single game on Pride Night in 2022. And they followed this woman everywhere. When she walked in, when she got on the elevator, when she got a drink, when she went to the bathroom, when she came out of the bathroom, when she gave a hug to somebody. Why? Because she was trans, and they could not stand the idea that there is a trans woman in the garden that might A, get on their TV broadcast, and B, seem to be very familiar with a lot of the garden staff and maybe even some of the players too. And God forbid, a trans woman had connections in the garden, and so they stalked her basically.

Speaker 2:
[05:15] Yeah, it's so crazy because reading this story, honestly, this trans woman sounds like an ideal customer. Like she's buying drinks, she's attending games, like she's like kind of doing everything that it seems like you'd want from a fan. Like she's so friendly with the staff because she comes all the time. Like she's a fan, she's maybe even knows some of the players. Like, I don't know, like she seemed like this type of consumer that you would think that a franchise owner would want, but because she's trans, you know, she's being surveilled. So, I mean, can you elaborate a little bit more on, you know, maybe why this woman was targeted and what the campaign actually looked like? Was it just surveillance? Like how were they kind of cataloging her activities and reporting on them?

Speaker 1:
[05:55] The part that we know for sure is that it was mostly surveillance and, you know, what they would call workups, which were basically like open source intelligent dossiers to kind of, you know, track what this person was doing online in addition to what was in the arena.

Speaker 2:
[06:11] Wait, so they were tracking her public internet persona in addition to the physical activity she was doing in Madison Square Garden?

Speaker 1:
[06:17] Oh yeah, 100%. In fact, this intelligence report, this 18 page report that I was talking about, that just tracks her on one day at one game. And by the way, it was Pride Night. So the idea that they were like having a hissy fit over like a trans woman at Pride Night is extra nuts. Report also includes like all of her Instagram posts from that day and how many likes she got and all that kind of stuff too. No, so they were absolutely correlating what she was doing online with what she was doing IRL and to build up a fuller picture. Now, she, as far as I know, was not tracked outside of the garden physically, but other people were. For example, we got the reports that there's orders given to track physically in real life, send private investigators or staff investigators, to go after this well-known ex-player named Charles Oakley, who is very critical of Jim Dolan. People we talked to say they were given orders to go track him. We also know that when the state started looking into Dolan's practices, and sending people to go look around, Dolan hired private investigators to go look at the state's investigators. Even though it feels like, okay, maybe I can make some deal that if I go to see a concert, or if I go to a game, maybe it's okay to be surveilled in there. Well, no, the surveillance didn't stop in the four walls of the garden. It was so crazy, in fact, that members of the security staff at the garden, they had some local bars they liked to hang out after the games. They were afraid they were being surveilled there.

Speaker 2:
[07:52] Well, it's just so all-encompassing. I think this is what's so scary about surveillance creep generally, is you start by surveilling something small. It's only in these instances. It's only to prevent a bomb attack or something, that you have to install these cameras and then you see it creep. I'm curious how far back it went because it seems like it's getting more and more invasive.

Speaker 1:
[08:15] Yeah. There have been reports back, I would say, 20 years that he had the place bugged, that he had Madison Square Garden bugged. I was just mentioning this guy, Oakley. He was talking to another fellow player, Patrick Ewing, the most famous nick of all time, maybe 10 years ago, let's call it. Patrick told Oakley, hey, you got to shut up. This place is bugged. When we heard that story from Oakley, we were like, it's got to be a one-off. But we subsequently heard all these other stories about people under the considered, studied, learned assumption that everything they were doing or saying was being bugged within the garden. Then in 2018, things supercharged. Then they started bringing in facial recognition to the picture. At first, it was super janky. They would just literally strap on some cameras onto some old school metal detectors and kind of feed some information to this video management system they had. But over time, the system got more and more sophisticated. First of all, as you know, like AI or machine learning, whatever you want to call it, has allowed facial recognition to get from worse than the human eye to far better than the human eye. And it used to be that you had to like very much like tell the facial recognition algorithm exactly what to look for. Here are the eyes, here's the chin, here's the nose. To now, you just feed the pictures into the system and it'll figure out that stuff for itself and it'll figure out who's who for itself. So the system has gotten more and more sophisticated. Then, and this is like one of my favorite parts, it's sort of supercharged because of a dude that was running a quick lube shop in Montana. I'm not kidding, because he in a former life was like a techie sort of guy. And when he moved to Vegas, he had a buddy, friend of a friend, guy who needed some help solving employee theft problems at his like chain of franchises at the airport, like Burger King and McCarran Airport. And so he hooked up like kind of like a little like basic video surveillance system of the employees to keep them from stealing whoppers or whatever. And he realized over time that you could use that for more and more sophisticated stuff for like really advanced facial recognition. He then wound up selling that to a club in Vegas. That club was owned by James Dolan at the time. And all of a sudden it went to The Sphere and to The Garden and to all of these other places. And now, instead of it being a janky system, now it's one that they think that they claim can ID people 40 people a second per camera. So that means that even it's before you get your ticket, it's before you go through the metal detector, it's anything like that. It's like when you're approaching the garden, you're getting ID like that.

Speaker 2:
[10:58] Who are the people that they're most interested in surveilling? Like obviously they're targeting this trans woman. You know, I'm assuming like I guess it sounds like somebody that made merch that he disagreed with, but do you have a sense of kind of the demographics or the types of people that they're really interested in watching? Do we know anything about who they're watching?

Speaker 1:
[11:16] I don't have a sense of the overall demographics, but here's some things I can tell you. I can tell you that it's pretty wide. How wide? Like this. We got a screenshot of a little girl, like a young, young girl who, I mean, if she was 10, I'd be shocked. She was in the system. Like, we don't know why, but she was in the system. How wide? We found out that there was a former employee who got added to the system and then his photo was added afterwards from his New York Police Academy graduation. So this is a guy they knew as a New York cop that they added to the system. So they cast the net pretty wide. Let me give you another example. There was a woman, a mom, who was trying to take her little girl to see the Rockettes, to see the Christmas show at Radio City. She's banned. Why is she banned? Because one of her colleagues was involved in a legal dispute with Dolan, and so the entire firm was banned. So it's pretty wide.

Speaker 2:
[12:17] That's insane. I feel like we're seeing this big mask escalation of surveillance by the government, and we're hearing a lot about ICE, you know, scanning people's faces at protests, these government surveillance systems. Is the government involved with this, or is this just like his private surveillance enterprise? And how does like New York City deal with something like this? Because I mean, if he's surveilling everyone outside Madison Square Garden, I guess that's technically like his private property, but doesn't the government have anything to say about this? Or are they kind of like happy that someone else is, you know, also building a surveillance infrastructure that they can theoretically leverage?

Speaker 1:
[12:48] I would say they are mostly unhappy with what's going on. When I put this to the New York Police Department, which has this extensive, you know, counterterrorism department, they were like, what? No, we're not dead. We're like, we don't send this guy any information. Like he claimed that it was to stop terrorism. They're like, no, absolutely not.

Speaker 2:
[13:07] It's really just to like surveil people that he doesn't like.

Speaker 1:
[13:09] Correct. Now, let me just give you two caveats real quick. One kind of makes some sense. The other one, well, I'll let you make up your own mind. One is that, as you remember from the Luigi Mangione case, right? The New York Police Department can request private companies' camera feeds, outdoor camera feeds, like not inside, but out on the streets' camera feeds, and they can use that to look for people, right? And so famously in Luigi's case, they couldn't find anything really on the company's camera feeds, but they did find in taxi cabs. That's where they found the famous pictures of him. So they say they retain the right to do that from Madison Square Garden, but they don't give any information to Madison Square Garden, right? So it's not like if, you know, crazy criminal, mass murderer, you know, showed up at the garden, they would have the information from the NYPD. Now, the company has added in a couple of photos that we know of, might be more, but we know of a few, from the FBI's most wanted list. One of the photos we know they added was some Iranian hacker, like some dude in Tehran, which makes you think that maybe this is not the most serious of security measures, right? Because this dude isn't about to show up and catch a Harry Styles show.

Speaker 2:
[14:28] Yeah. I mean, none of this is really about security, is it? It sounds like it's about surveillance and control and just building this, like you said, it's like a deep state, like a personalized deep state where he can just harvest massive amounts of info. I mean, what are things that he could do with this info that he's harvesting? I mean, why should people be concerned? I feel like some people, every time you cover surveillance, there will be people that are like, well, that sucks, I guess. Yeah. As long as I don't work for a law firm that antagonizes him, or as long as I don't have some weird mistake type thing, like I should be fine.

Speaker 1:
[15:00] I mean, that's definitely one way to go through life is like-

Speaker 2:
[15:02] Oh, bad things don't happen to you. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[15:04] But I mean, the history of these things is often in the other direction, right? And I probably can't report on it right now, but literally right before this, I heard kind of a horror story about someone just wrong place, wrong time who got caught in this and suffered pretty adverse consequences.

Speaker 2:
[15:21] Yeah, there was a man who was recently wrongfully arrested and ended up in jail because of a faulty facial recognition thing. There's another woman that suffered the same consequence we've seen women and men banned from stores, banned from getting groceries, et cetera, because the facial recognition wrongly determines that they're a problem, or maybe rightfully, maybe the store owner doesn't want them there for some reason. Their cousin said something mean about the store owner online. People might not realize how caught up in this stuff they could be.

Speaker 1:
[15:49] Yeah, absolutely. Look, among people that work for the garden, it's an open secret that this kind of information could be weaponized against them, and there's a real atmosphere of paranoia that persists there. That's what every single person that we talked to had to say, was that even the people at work there, and some of these are like tough dudes who are like former FBI and former CIA and former NYPD. A lot of them are scared shitless on their job, and they're terrified that they're going to say the wrong thing, and then all of a sudden, things are going to be used against them. There was some high level employees that were overseeing the building of the Sphere, right? And they were just having a weekend. In fact, it was Super Bowl weekend, I think, a year ago or two years ago. All of a sudden, they find out the head of security has been digging through their email, has come up with what they say was like a pretextual reason to fire them, and they were fired, I think, the next day or the day after. So that was alleged in a court case in the Delaware Chancery Court, I think two years ago now. And so that's the allegation. And Madison Square Garden's response was, well, it's totally routine for companies to dig through their employees' email. You and I know that's not the case. It was also Madison Square Garden's assertion in court that it was totally routine for companies to employ private investigators to spy on people. That doesn't line up with my experience.

Speaker 2:
[17:10] Dolan, you know, is this kind of rich, crazy guy, but you cover all this stuff related to surveillance, and you know, are very familiar with the practices of these billionaires, like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, like heard also hires private investigators to stalk people. It seems like this class of rich people in this country are building their own deep states, and this might not be so unique to Dolan. Obviously, he's the most petty and crazy and kind of on the forefront of it. But do you see kind of practices like this becoming normalized among the super rich?

Speaker 1:
[17:38] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's really the whole premise of the story, is that, you know, you now as a rich person have all these tools available to you, and all these personnel available to you, that formally would only be accessible by a national level intelligence service. You know, you've got experts in surveillance and in research and in, you know, all kind of black bag jobs and all kinds of things like that. And, you know, there's plenty of people looking for work. You've got the kind of technology that, you know, a few years ago was unimaginable except for like government level intelligence agency. You know, I talked to one guy who was like, Oh yeah, I've got a whole facial recognition system set up in my yard. I was like, why? He was like, I don't know, because, you know, and look, ring cameras now, the ring cameras you have, you can opt into those being part of facial recognition like that. It's really all pretty easy to set up. And look, we've seen with Musk, we've seen with like Barry Weiss, that they're now like routinely bringing bodyguards into them, into the office setting, right? So it's not even necessarily to protect them against outside threats, it's to protect against their own employees. And they look at instances like the Luigi case or like this attack on Sam Altman's home. And they use it to justify amping up these really, you know, powerful kind of private intelligence services. I talked to one guy who's a well-known figure in this world. And he said, it's like we're in back in the time of like Italy in the 1500s, where every business leader has their own private army. And he said, we're in the time of private armies now.

Speaker 2:
[19:16] Yeah, I mean, I think of Jeff Bezos hiring someone like Gavin De Becker, who is this guy who's like, I think he was like former FBI or CIA. He's really famous for running this like security operations. But security means a lot of surveillance. And this came about when his initially the information about him and Lawrence Sanchez leaked initially. And, you know, he was trying to figure out who leaked that. And I feel like just increasingly these billionaires, as you said, they're surveilling their employees, they're surveilling people around them. They're surveilling anyone who they deem a threat, which is a lot of people because anybody that criticizes them online or criticizes their products according to OpenAI or, you know, X or et cetera could be considered dangerous in their mind. I think that's very ridiculous. But I feel like it gives them this sort of like pretense to surveil.

Speaker 1:
[20:03] Look, in the case of Dolan, I mean, if you fired off a tweet like Jim Dolan sucks, you might get an open source intelligence dossier built on you. If you said, this team needs to be blown up and so does Jim Dolan, I'm just making something up. I don't believe that. That's just I'm making up what might be perceived as a threat. They're going to try to get the local cops after you. And in one case, you know, we got these internal text exchange from the security, from Dolan Security Services, and they'd gone after a 14-year-old kid in Colorado. And the text was like, well, at least we scared the poop emoji out of some teenager. And you know, unfortunately for journalists, right? Like sometimes threats can be an unfortunate fact of life. And you also know that most of these big media organizations do have some kind of security officer that might take a step like that. But it's not for just some rando, like spouting their mouth off or exercising their free speech, right? It's if there's a credible actual threat on somebody's person. That wasn't the case, at least in the examples we saw.

Speaker 2:
[21:09] I feel like what's so scary is like the chilling effect that all of this has as well on speech and just like what people will say online or what they will do. I mean, certainly if I was like a sports fan and I wanted to go to Madison Square Garden regularly and I read an article like this where I became aware of this surveillance system, I would feel nervous to post anything critical online. I wouldn't want to say anything bad about Dolan or even the venues that he operates. I wouldn't criticize The Sphere. I think that that is scary for anyone. I mean, just the potential ways that he's silencing criticism of himself across the internet. This is just a random billionaire or millionaire guy that deserves scrutiny.

Speaker 1:
[21:49] Yeah. Listen, you may not even know, right if you're a random fan, what venues he owns or what venues his friends own, and maybe they'll share some information, right? So I agree, that's why this is like, it's a really dangerous practice. And look, the business of defending like a high profile target, like Madison Square Garden or like The Sphere, that's a tricky enough business, right? I mean, there have been actual terrorist attacks on these venues, and so that's a very difficult job to have already. You don't need to make it more complicated by basically surveilling randos because you don't like their tweets.

Speaker 2:
[22:27] What has been his response to your article? Is there, you know, does he feel any shame about this? Is he gonna be dialing it back or is it just full speed ahead?

Speaker 1:
[22:35] He hasn't responded. You know, we sent him a long list of questions. He didn't like basically deny any of it, but he said it was all out of a lot of the allegations were from rapacious litigators, which is a look because he himself is a well-known printer of lawsuits and he said that he was considering legal options against Wired. So, you know, look, we'll see what happens. I hope I'm still able to go to, you know, see Dua Lipa on her next tour. And I don't hold out a lot of hope for these playoff games coming up, but maybe Dua Lipa. And I hope that they tighten up on this stuff. And I hope more people find out and speak up about, you know, this kind of corporate surveillance.

Speaker 2:
[23:16] Well, Noah, thank you so much for joining me and chatting about all this.

Speaker 1:
[23:19] Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[23:20] All right. That's it for this week's episode of Free Speech Friday. If you like my work, please, support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my sub stack newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.co. I send a weekly roundup of everything that I'm reading and following online. Every single dollar of your subscriptions on sub stack and Patreon, ensure that this series can continue to be produced. Obviously covering mass surveillance, criticizing people in power is not very conducive to advertising. I currently have zero lasting brand partnerships. So literally every single dollar of your support makes such a difference. On my Patreon, I do bonus episodes, a monthly Q&A live stream and more. Again, you can get my newsletter on sub stack or get my newsletter through Patreon. Please, please click the links below and support my work. And I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday. See you then.