Surveillance at Madison Square Garden

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. So, a criminal hacking group, did you hear this? Recently broke into Madison Square Garden's computer systems and dumped roughly 45 gigabytes of data online. Inside the leaked files, the tech news site Wired found an internal database in which the garden had quietly assigned risk scores to hundreds of its own celebrity guests. The rapper Fat Joe, who led the NYX Championship Parade float, was labeled medium risk. Former Vogue editor Anna Wintour also labeled medium risk, and dozens of people flagged separately by their sexual orientation. There were 93 entries marked LGBTQIA.
Now, that database only came to light because of the hack, but it fit a pattern first reported by Wired back in April, when it published an investigation into how MSG's owner, James Dolan, has turned his venues into one of the most aggressive private surveillance operations in the country, as they described. His team uses facial recognition, not just to keep out regular troublemakers, but they reported to track critics, banned lawyers and protesters. In one case reported by Wired, the team documented one transgender fan down to the second of her movement inside the venue over a period of two years. That is to say that person was tracked that meticulously by MSG. A note, Madison Square Garden does call the reporting false, and they say they're weighing legal action against Wired. So these are reports that are disputed, we say upfront.
But here to talk about both stories is Noah Shachtman, contributing editor at Wired, one of the reporters behind both investigations. He is also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. Noah, welcome. Thanks for coming on WNYC today.

**Noah Shachtman** (2:14)
Thanks for having me.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:15)
For listeners who may have just heard about Jim Dolan for the first time during the NICS 2026 NBA Championship season, NICS N5, who is he and how much influence does he have in the entertainment industry?

**Noah Shachtman** (2:31)
Jim Dolan has been the owner of the NICS for about a quarter century. He basically inherited the team and the Rangers and Madison Square Garden from his dad who was a cable television magnet.
For much of that time, he was considered kind of a thin skinned, underachieving nepo baby. Perhaps most famous for his Americana band, JD and the Straight Shot, which would regularly open for big classic rock acts like the Eagles because of his entertainment connections, which were considerable. Look, this guy controls the most iconic venue in the world in Madison Square Garden and several other runners up, like Radio City Music Hall. But in recent years, Dolan's image has started to shift. He was responsible for The Sphere in Las Vegas, which has been very successful, sort of against the odds. And after decades of misfortune, finally, our beloved Knicks are a great team again. And that's in large part because Dolan stopped meddling with them.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:51)
He hired a general manager who he gave a lot of free rein to, Leon Rose, who everybody says gets a lot of credit for the championship. But Jim Dolan hired him. For your April investigation, you discovered that Dolan security teams, as you reported it obsessively, you used that word, tracked one Nina Richards, a trans woman over a two-year period, monitoring her movements through Madison Square Garden down to the second.
Tell us more about that. Who is she? Why in your telling in the article was she targeted and how?

**SPEAKER_3** (4:33)
Right.

**Noah Shachtman** (4:33)
So that's a pseudonym to protect the person's privacy.
But this was a person who was a familiar face at the garden, knew many of the staff, and got to know many of the players. And there was a concern among Dolan's security guys that this was somehow a PR problem of some kind, that this transgender woman was getting too tight to garden staff and to next players. And so in the case that we document, it was pride night, and I obtained an 18 page report, which detailed how they tracked her second by second, when she got food, when she got a drink, when she got up from her seat, when she got back down, even when she went into the bathroom, it was that creepy and that meticulous.
How did they do it? Well, Madison Square Garden has been sort of a pioneer in high-tech and biometric surveillance of its venue. Everybody that goes into Madison Square Garden has their face scanned and is logged in a database. And then depending on whether that person is deemed a risk or not, they are then followed by cameras or by human staffers throughout the course of their stay at Madison Square Garden.