Famously vengeful Knicks owner Jim Dolan has long spied on people at his iconic arenas. WIRED goes deep inside the operation that allegedly
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New Yorkers have known for a long time that going to a game or concert at the Garden meant surrendering some privacy. That, as you watched the show, the Garden in a real sense watched you. Since 2018, there have been reports of the venue deploying face-recognition technology in what critics believe are increasingly intrusive ways. Owner James Dolan has watch lists of basketball fans who have dared criticize his management. He keeps a close eye on his other venues too, including Radio City Music Hall and the Sphere in Las Vegas. Last March, Dolan’s security team blocked a graphic designer from seeing a concert; the designer, years earlier, had printed and sold a half-dozen T-shirts reading “Ban Dolan.” He has locked out whole firms’ worth of lawyers, even keeping out a mom who was trying to take her 9-year-old Girl Scout to a Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall; the mom’s coworker had pissed him off.
But the true extent of Dolan’s panopticon has only been caught in glimpses. A 2025 lawsuit by a former member of the MSG security team lifted the veil, just a bit. We started our own digging into the Garden's operations. We discovered that Dolan’s security teams obsessively tracked Nina Richards, a trans woman, over a two-year period, monitoring her movements through the venue down to the second. (WIRED is using a pseudonym in this article out of respect for her privacy.) Dolan's biometric surveillance is so extensive that a New York City police officer’s photo was added to a face-recognition database, and a child triggered an alert at one of Dolan’s properties. According to that lawsuit and our sources, Dolan’s head of corporate security takes such an expansive view of his mission that his employees will functionally cosplay as cops—patrolling the neighborhood, snooping on protesters if they happen to be in the area. You don't have to enter a Dolan venue to be under his watch.
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Most of us have become numb to the “surveillance capitalism” model of trading personal information for some kind of digital convenience—a better map or an AI model tuned to our quirks. The post-9/11 security state has habituated us to the idea of trading a fingerprint or a scan of our face in exchange for security. But what’s happening in sports and entertainment is relatively new: an attempt to get customers to give up their biometric data in exchange for a perk, or a hot dog. At Intuit Dome near Los Angeles, Citi Field in Queens, and Pechanga Arena in San Diego, fans are encouraged to use their face as their ticket or to pay for their food and drinks. “By integrating biometric authentication, Ticketmaster clients” can offer, among other things, “premium guests a frictionless, exclusive experience,” the company says on its website.
XtractOne, meanwhile, is looking to automatically flag people whose tweets or Instagram posts they don't like. Evans gives a hypothetical: “I can pull his picture right off of social media. I can feed it into our database, our eConnect database. Now we can get awareness of that person as he approaches the building.”
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All of this has done more than turn sports venues into panopticons. It has allowed Dolan's brand of score-settling to trickle out into the wider world.
As far as our sources know, the Garden is not at this moment automatically banning social media posters. But for years, Dolan "would come in, and he and Eversole would pore over all these social media comments from the Knicks and the Rangers," one veteran of MSG security tells us. Sports fans who talked shit would get “work-ups.” Ingrasselino, in his suit, says he was ordered to “perform full and intrusive background checks, surveillance, and assessments into individuals’ private backgrounds who were of no threat to MSG.” That included “sports fans who articulated frustration with team losses, chant[ed] for Mr. Dolan to sell the Knicks, or simply us[ed] foul language.”
If those posts could be interpreted in any way as threats, Eversole would contact their hometown police, multiple security team sources say. “He would take it upon himself to reach out to someone somewhere and introduce himself as the CSO of Madison Square Garden and demand that the local PD take action,” the security veteran adds.
One teenager posted a tweet, and MSG security asked local law enforcement to visit him. “They scared the crap [poop emoji] out of some 14 year old kid in Colorado,” one MSG security staffer texted in a message we reviewed. Cops would at times ignore Eversole's demands. He and his deputies would then “freak the fuck out when a PD somewhere would not play ball,” the second veteran continues.
Eversole would also allegedly push his subordinates to act more like municipal cops. He'd urge them to patrol the streets surrounding MSG, which is located in one of Manhattan's more derelict neighborhoods, functionally acting as a second, ersatz police force—without formal permission of New York's real one. “On many occasions, I was ordered to stop traffic, close sidewalks, and unlawfully detain individuals in the venue and demand identification,” Munn, the former security worker, wrote in his filing. Munn added that these orders were “against NY State/City laws without proper permits or NYPD's authorization, which MSG did not maintain.” An NYPD spokesperson confirms that such authorization was never given. […]
Ingrasselino also alleges in his suit that he was ordered to embed “in the middle of pro-Palestine or anti-Israel protests” that happened to be passing a Dolan venue. Other security sources say that they were not ordered to insert themselves into any demonstrations. But they confirm that they were asked to observe protests that went anywhere near a Dolan venue. Given those venues' central location, it happened a lot.
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[More] and more business leaders seem ready to embrace parts of Dolan's security state. Biometric surveillance is everywhere now: at your hotel, on your dating app, in the drug store, on Ring door cameras, in your Meta sunglasses. Trump's security forces, too, have deployed face recognition on the streets of Chicago and Minneapolis, to identify and intimidate activists trying to document the brutal paramilitary occupations there.
While the Trump administration is trying to corner the market on morally compromised henchmen, a corporate overlord who wants their own security force can easily find everything from paid muscle to private intelligence analysis to the dark arts of public influence. LinkedIn alone is littered with CIA and NSA veterans who are #readytowork. Executives from Elon Musk to Bari Weiss reportedly walk around their offices with bodyguards at times, as if they need to be protected from their employees. Dueling global workforce management firms have accused one another of both corporate espionage—and of spying on their spies. One security executive compares our current situation to “where Italy was 100 years ago,” when “people had guards at their homes and moved around with guys carrying rifles.”
In that sense, Dolan isn't an outlier; he's a model. Dolan may have gone further than most executives, by unleashing these increasingly sophisticated technologies and these increasingly common private enforcers on anyone he deemed an enemy-of-the-day. That doesn't make him some uniquely vindictive paranoiac. It puts him on trend. Like the security executive says, “We're in a time of private armies now.”
An MSG database tracked and categorized hundreds of celebs, famous Knicks superfans, and even some of Taylor Swift’s wedding guests. Labels
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Garden security cast a wide net in its search for anything remotely negative that someone posts online, the source says. “It doesn’t have to be that serious. You could just be critical of the team or the place itself,” the source notes. “You could post that you had a hard time getting in and you really didn’t like the way you were treated at one of the gates. Which is really nothing, right?”
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People of concern are ranked on a scale, the source explained. “Flag” is the lowest, an indication to discuss the VIP with a supervisor. Next is “low risk”—that’s the marking for Falco, Morgan, and Ben Stiller, their fellow Knicks ride-or-die. After that is “medium risk” (the actor Lily Allen, her ex David Harbour, and the country singer Morgan Wallen) and “high risk” (the hip-hop stars Freddie Gibbs, Lil Jon, DaBaby, and A Boogie Wit da Hoodie). The rapper Lil Tjay, who recently was involved in an altercation at the Garden’s Hulu Theater, is “BANNED FROM MSG,” according to the database.
Five of the publicly identified attendees at Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Madison Square Garden wedding were marked as “low risk”: the musicians Ice Spice, Selena Gomez, and Benson Boone, the TV host Michael Strahan, and the actor Mariska Hargitay.
The talent database also tracks some celebrities’ race, gender identity, and sexual orientation; 93 entries are marked as “LGBTQIA.” Why MSG felt the need to label Ricky Martin or Phoebe Bridgers or Geese’s Emily Green in this way is unclear.
“I’ve never met James Dolan. I don’t know the higher-up leadership at Madison Square Garden. But, like, there does seem to be a bit of a pattern here,” says Evan Greer, director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future, citing WIRED’s reporting on the Garden’s minute-by-minute surveillance of a trans woman. “They just seem overly interested in queer and trans people in their venue,” Greer adds.
The talent database also seems to hint at how MSG might use complimentary tickets to boost its political agenda. Listed are 32 political candidates who are or were “supported by MSG PAC,” along with hundreds of current and former elected officials. The database also includes a column noting each entry’s “claim to fame.” For nearly 60 people, that involves signing a letter or testifying in support of a renewed permit for Madison Square Garden that Dolan was looking to secure in 2023. That list includes union leaders; a lobbyist; the brother of a brain cancer patient, who had been helped by a charity that works with MSG; and the owner of Don Pepi Pizza, an eatery in New York’s skeevy Amtrak terminal, in Penn Station, which sits beneath the Garden.
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Also in the hacker collective’s data dump is a second, far larger database. It contains over 10.5 million entries peppered with people’s personal information, which appears to be pulled from the Garden’s Salesforce customer management system. Some entries were added as far back as 2012, and others were edited as recently as June 6. In this database are 9,782,361 unique emails, 2,820,221 unique phone numbers, and 2,956 entries that include birth dates. One of the reporters on this story is included in the database, as is Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City. (As a member of New York’s State Assembly last year, he cosponsored a bill banning places like Madison Square Garden from collecting any biometric data.)
A class-action lawsuit filed against the Garden organization in June claims that this spill of private data was a byproduct of Dolan’s growing surveillance state. “This scandal underscores why MSG Entertainment should not be collecting and retaining sensitive customer information in the first place,” said Surveillance Technology Oversight Project legal director Darío Maestro, whose colleague was included in a brief Garden dossier of activists released in the data dump.
