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, Dolanâs security team blocked a graphic designer from seeing a concert; the designer, years earlier, had printed and sold a half-dozen T-shirts reading âBan Dolan.â He has locked out whole firmsâ 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 momâs coworker had pissed him off.
But the true extent of Dolanâs 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 Dolanâs 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 officerâs photo was added to a face-recognition database, and a child triggered an alert at one of Dolanâs properties. According to that lawsuit and our sources, Dolanâs head of corporate security takes such an expansive view of his mission that his employees will functionally cosplay as copsâpatrolling 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.
Most of us have become numb to the âsurveillance capitalismâ model of trading personal information for some kind of digital convenienceâa 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 whatâs 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. âBy integrating biometric authentication, Ticketmaster clientsâ can offer, among other things, âpremium guests a frictionless, exclusive experience,â 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: âI 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.â
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 âwork-ups.â Ingrasselino, in his suit, says he was ordered to âperform full and intrusive background checks, surveillance, and assessments into individualsâ private backgrounds who were of no threat to MSG.â That included âsports fans who articulated frustration with team losses, chant[ed] for Mr. Dolan to sell the Knicks, or simply us[ed] foul language.â
If those posts could be interpreted in any way as threats, Eversole would contact their hometown police, multiple security team sources say. âHe 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,â the security veteran adds.
One teenager posted a tweet, and MSG security asked local law enforcement to visit him. âThey scared the crap [poop emoji] out of some 14 year old kid in Colorado,â one MSG security staffer texted in a message we reviewed. Cops would at times ignore Eversole's demands. He and his deputies would then âfreak the fuck out when a PD somewhere would not play ball,â 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 forceâwithout formal permission of New York's real one. âOn many occasions, I was ordered to stop traffic, close sidewalks, and unlawfully detain individuals in the venue and demand identification,â Munn, the former security worker, wrote in his filing. Munn added that these orders were âagainst NY State/City laws without proper permits or NYPD's authorization, which MSG did not maintain.â An NYPD spokesperson confirms that such authorization was never given. [âŚ]
Ingrasselino also alleges in his suit that he was ordered to embed âin the middle of pro-Palestine or anti-Israel protestsâ 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.
[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 espionageâand of spying on their spies. One security executive compares our current situation to âwhere Italy was 100 years ago,â when âpeople had guards at their homes and moved around with guys carrying rifles.â
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, âWe're in a time of private armies now.â
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