The news shows that MSG is not only deploying the controversial facial recognition technology that W

Our Take

This is the part of the surveillance story that rarely gets attention: it's not just that a private company is scanning your face when you walk into a show. It's that the same company apparently kept files on the people who pushed back. Jim Dolan's MSG has already made headlines for using facial recognition to ban lawyers involved in litigation against the company. Now 404 Media's reporting suggests the surveillance apparatus was also turned on critics and activists — the people exercising the most basic First Amendment right to object. Credit to 404 Media for digging this out, because this is exactly the kind of mission creep we warn about: tech sold as 'security' quietly becomes a tool for retaliation against dissent.

Flock Safety's ALPR network operates on a different legal footing than MSG's face-scanning turnstiles, but the underlying danger is identical. Once a private or quasi-private entity builds a surveillance system, there's rarely a hard wall stopping it from being pointed at whoever is inconvenient — a lawyer, a journalist, an activist, an ex. Data collected for one stated purpose has a way of getting repurposed the moment someone in charge decides it's useful. That's the whole argument against normalizing these networks in the first place: the capability doesn't stay narrow.

If you want to see how far this infrastructure has spread in your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting these systems in front of your city council before they're used against you too.