We Got Inside Knicks Surveillance — and MSG's Deep State Is Stranger Than You Think

Tracking players. Monitoring kids. Allegedly watching a fan enter the bathroom. The panopticon of notorious owner James Dolan has been caught in glimpses. But a WIRED investigation — revealed in collaboration with PTFO — lifts the veil on the Orwellian scope (and occasional clown show) of MSG security, from The Garden and The Sphere to the streets of New York and out across America. Correspondent Noah Shachtman and Pablo hear from spooked insiders, read snooping group chats, scour a second-by-second confidential report, plus view the facial-recognition database itself — only to discover that paranoid billionaires... are all around us. • Read the full digital cover story https://www.wired.com/story/madison-square-garden-jim-dolan-surveillance-machine at WIRED • Subscribe to Pablo's newsletter https://pablo.show/ for exclusive access, documents and invites (Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  When I walked into the studio, right, did you recognize my face? I did. Facial recognition?

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• 2:27Speaker 04

  So what are we doing? We're talking about the playoffs?

• 2:30Pablo Torre?

  We're talking about how every time I walk around our city, both of us are from Manhattan, born and raised, people yell at me, "Don't go after Jalen Bronson."

• 2:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely not.

• 2:43Pablo Torre?

  "Leave the Knicks alone" is the number one bit of feedback that I get while doing my power walks around the city, which is how I exercise as the Knicks are entering the playoffs. It's very clear that people are afraid that a show like this that cares about investigating stuff might partner with someone like Noah Shakman to do an episode about the New York Knicks.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:06Pablo Torre?

  And so this is a collaboration that we've done with you and Wired Magazine. It's a big new feature you have, double byline, you and Bobby Silverman, and we got documents, Noah.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  We sure do.

• 3:17Pablo Torre?

  I want to introduce you to the proceedings here with a line from your article, if that's okay.

• 3:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:22Pablo Torre?

  Because it does say that in your decades reporting on national security, and this is you as a journalist who's covered the Pentagon, covered intelligence services, you've gone to Iraq, to Afghanistan, how many times in all?

• 3:35Speaker 04

  I mean, not that many, but too many.

• 3:37Pablo Torre?

  And yet, quote, "You never encountered people taking such elaborate steps to avoid being outed as a source as you did reporting on this story from inside of Madison Square Garden."

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was nuts, man. You know, we were reporting this story a lot in this crazy cold winter that New York had, and we had sources who insisted on staying outside the entire time. We had people who were absolutely convinced they were being tailed. We had people that were terrified they were being watched. Several of our sources were current and former members of the Garden's security team. And many of those people were former cops, you know, were figures in law enforcement or intelligence of some kind. And it's a matter of public record. You can go on LinkedIn and see that former FBI agents, former CIA officers,

• 4:31Speaker 04

  and former New York City cops joined the Garden's security staff. And so in a way, I know it sounds crazy, but these terrified people were part of James Dolan's deep state.

• 4:44Pablo Torre?

  And I think the first time that sports fans realized that the owner of the Knicks might be allowing for a kind of surveillance state inside the actual arena was... February 2017, when this happened.

• 4:59Speaker 06

  Former NBA player Charles Oakley was dragged away from the Knicks Clippers game Wednesday night after he got into an argument with a security guard at Madison Square Garden.

• 5:07Speaker 07

  Eventually, it gets physical and Oakley starts shoving the guards. The guards have to take him out physically. There you see it escalating. That is bizarre. And Ben Higgins, our sports director.

• 5:17Pablo Torre?

  I mean, Charles Oakley, one of the most curmudgeonly people that's ever played sports, who also is quite combative.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:24Pablo Torre?

  I mean, this is him getting kicked out of the Garden in 2017 on national television amid the escalation of a deeply personal battle with James Dolan himself. This still makes me sad to see.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, me too.

• 5:41Pablo Torre?

  This is Charles Oakley. I would say the patron saint of the security guard as athletes are concerned, the protector of the star players.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  Certainly good at defense.

• 5:51Pablo Torre?

  A local hero who is swarmed by dudes wearing suits.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  Now, look, he's a big guy. You're gonna need a lot of people in suits.

• 5:59Pablo Torre?

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven suits that are like laying hands upon him to escort him out.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Did you say anything to James Dolan? He was in front of you.

• 6:10Speaker 08

  Four rows from Dolan. No, I didn't. I didn't say nothing to him.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Why? Why did they approach you then?

• 6:18Speaker 08

  Why?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 08

  I don't know.

• 6:26Pablo Torre?

  And so something I've always wondered is like what it felt like to be one of these security guards at the Garden, one of the security employees. Truly, part of the impetus for a story like this is what are these people thinking?

• 6:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:38Pablo Torre?

  Who is ordering this? How does it work? Where does he go? And what I saw from afar at the time was Charles Oakley getting cuffed and arrested and then winding up on the front page of the Daily News under. An admittedly good headline. Charles is charged.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  That's excellent.

• 6:53Pablo Torre?

  And James Dolan, meanwhile, to ESPN says, quote, "He may have a problem with alcohol. We don't know." End quote. But the thing we know now, thanks to your reporting here, is some of what happened in the aftermath of that incident at the Garden.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  So what Oakley didn't know, and what I was shocked to find out, was after talking to one of the security sources for this story, and this is a direct quote, "They wanted to have us doing covert surveillance operations on him just to see where he was at, what he was doing at the time, to try to dig up something to use."

• 7:28Pablo Torre?

  End quotes.

• 7:29Speaker 04

  Yep. Not just in the Garden, but outside the Garden. Like, way outside the Garden. Outside of New York. Hundreds of miles away.

• 7:39Pablo Torre?

  I cannot imagine that Charles Oakley appreciated the idea of being tailed all across America.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  He did not appreciate that, no.

• 7:46Pablo Torre?

  And so what we did here at Pablo Torre Finds Out is call up Charles Oakley ourselves to ask him about this allegation.

• 7:54Speaker 08

  Whatever he was looking for, it was just, it's insane. But people got money, they can do a lot of things. And you hear more and more every year about what he had done to fans, people who pay their money to come to the game. He shouldn't be able to dictate the way he dictating stuff, you know? And other owners of the NBA, it's embarrassing to hear that they let him do stuff and the commissioner over and over, and no penalty. It's just, it's just not right.

• 8:24Pablo Torre?

  And we should be very clear that Charles Oakley, at this point, has been a longtime critic of Jim Dolan.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:30Pablo Torre?

  And his defamation claim against Dolan and his companies, that has been dismissed, although the legal battles, those still continue to this day. But one part of this story that we wanted to hear for ourselves here on this show, from Oakley personally, has to do with a night at the Garden, and he's with the guy he used to protect on the court.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:51Pablo Torre?

  Patrick Ewing, the Hall of Famer, the sweatiest, most glorious figure in my childhood. And at the time of this story, Patrick Ewing was an assistant coach for visiting Charlotte. Here they are back in the building together.

• 9:04Speaker 08

  I was in the garden, me and a friend of mine, Mac. And we just sitting behind the basket. And Patrick was out there on the court working guys out. And he came over, you know, he's had his suit on, gave us dap, this and that. So we was just sitting there watching the game. Had time come, I get up and go to the bathroom. And I see like guys following me. I'm like, what is this? And after the game, we're in the back, you know, Patrick was there, what's up and this and that. We started talking and he was saying like, don't talk too loud. But you know, it's mic'd up. I said, what you mean about mic'd up? He said, they got the whole building like mic'd up. And like, it was just crazy. And I was just so shocked to hear that from him saying that.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  If you've lived in New York, if you're a basketball fan of the last 10, 15 years, you've heard some version of the story of James Dolan is super paranoid.

• 9:58Pablo Torre?

  Controlling.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  Controlling, has a vast enemies list.

• 10:01Pablo Torre?

  But the thing that you've been digging into, that's the [BLEEP] that kind of blew my mind.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, this goes way beyond what happened to Oak. What happened to Oak started way before the Garden went high tech in its security pursuits and surveillance pursuits before it really fully developed this deep state.

• 10:23Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  But what shocked me as I learned this was just how relentless the pursuit of that enemies list was and how sophisticated that pursuit could be at times. And I think to me, like the even scarier notion, right? Is like Dolan is kind of a test case for this.

• 10:45Pablo Torre?

  Which is to say that James Dolan, as the NBA is concerned, as pro sports is concerned, is something of a pioneer.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  Yes, he's the future.

• 10:54Pablo Torre?

  And frankly, I did not think I would live to see the day where we had the proof from the inside of what these people are telling each other and how they're operating, given the tools now available to them.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:06Pablo Torre?

  To execute a deeply personal agenda.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  Honestly, I didn't either. When I got started on this, I didn't think we'd get this deep, but we did.

• 11:33Pablo Torre?

  It's funny to get to introduce James Dolan as a character to someone for the first time, potentially.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  I know.

• 11:38Pablo Torre?

  But like, when you say that name, what does come to mind immediately?

• 11:41Speaker 04

  I think what comes to mind immediately is the fedora.

• 11:47Pablo Torre?

  His music career, as well.

• 11:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, his band was called JD and the Straight Shot.

• 11:52Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  They were sort of an Americana band, there was a fiddle involved, there was an upright bass involved.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  And, you know, because of Dolan's many connections in the music and entertainment businesses, they would like go on the road and open up for the Doobie Brothers and Don Henley.

• 12:19Pablo Torre?

  Oh, I mean, Jim Dolan, for those not familiar with from whence he comes, I mean, this is the son of Charles Dolan, this cable television tycoon who built an empire, a sports and television empire.

• 12:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is a sprawling media empire that James Dolan came into. And, you know, for a lot of years in New York was kind of like a punchline.

• 12:42Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, here's the nepo baby fail son that fans chant about.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:54Pablo Torre?

  Sell the team, you know, asking for him to somehow be fired, which is functionally impossible because he is, again, the owner of the team. I do also need to say, we are talking in the year 2026, we just say that the James Dolan we've just described is currently living some version of the dream.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  No, he's winning, he's winning. He may have started out. With this image of a fedora wearing nepo baby fail son, but he has really come into his own.

• 13:25Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I mean, the Knicks are about to be in the postseason again.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  Again, right, for the third or fourth year in a row.

• 13:30Pablo Torre?

  They're a top three seed, and meanwhile, the Sphere.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:34Pablo Torre?

  Speaking of entertainment products.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Which very few people thought he could actually pull off, has become a huge, instantly iconic part of the American entertainment landscape. He now sits as the CEO, or chairman, or both, of I think four different companies. And I think their collective valuation is now in the 14, 15 billion dollar range. You know, he has become a genuine tech mogul in a lot of ways.

• 14:01Pablo Torre?

  Sphere Entertainment alone is valued at like $4 billion.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:05Pablo Torre?

  Which is to say, as Charles Oakley once put it.

• 14:09Speaker 08

  When people got money, they can do a lot of things.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, and that's particularly true in Dolan's case.

• 14:14Pablo Torre?

  And so in some ways, it's been a long time coming. And in other ways, what we're here to talk about is how he's gone from nepo baby fail son to big brother.

• 14:25Speaker 09

  Madison Square Garden, nice to have you here.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Thanks, Rosanna.

• 14:28Speaker 09

  So what is going on with facial recognition and the policy that you have?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Well, look, facial recognition, right, is just a technology, right? I mean, when I walked into the, into the studio, right, did you recognize my face?

• 14:41Speaker 09

  I did.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Facial recognition, right, the, so, I mean, technology just makes you better at it, right? The real issue that's going on.

• 14:48Pablo Torre?

  I just love that as a summary.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  It's incredible.

• 14:51Pablo Torre?

  AI could never give you what James Dolan just gave you. Do you recognize this face?

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Uh, hey.

• 14:56Pablo Torre?

  Boom, facial recognition.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, also, does AI wear a scarf like that? No.

• 14:59Pablo Torre?

  Never. Could AI ever look like Doris Costanza at a flea market? Uh, no.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  Come on.

• 15:05Pablo Torre?

  But look, that clip, which is embedded into my brain, that was January 2023, local Fox station, Rosanna Scotto, another local legend.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 15:14Pablo Torre?

  Trying to understand exactly what everyone else is trying to understand, which is, what is happening with this story in which James Dolan has banned, literally entire law firms, from entering his buildings?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  The real issue that's going on here is our policy of not letting attorneys, right, and who are suing us into, into our building until they're done, right, suing us. When they're done, they're very much welcome back.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, there'd be a suit against him. And so, everybody associated would all of a sudden get banned from the Garden. You had a case where one of those lawyers was trying to bring her nine-year-old daughter, a Girl Scout.

• 15:55Pablo Torre?

  An actual Girl Scout.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  An actual Girl Scout to Radio City Music Hall, which Dolan also owns.

• 16:00Pablo Torre?

  Of course.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  To see the Christmas show, to see the Rockettes. And the mom was blocked from Radio City. Her legal partners were in some kind of dispute with Dolan.

• 16:11Pablo Torre?

  So the coworkers of that lawyer in litigation, they got, yeah, banned.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  Banned. At one point at least, the total number of banned lawyers was estimated at 1,500 people.

• 16:23Pablo Torre?

  Right, although one of Dolan's attorneys estimated that the ban might affect something more like 900 lawyers who are living in and around the city here.

• 16:34Pablo Torre?

  And on that note, James Dolan was not exactly shy in saying why he was using facial recognition technology. He was saying, "We are doing this to basically ban our enemies."

• 16:47Speaker 09

  You're not gonna back down because, I mean- Not at all.

• 16:50Pablo Torre?

  Some of the attorneys tried to sue to get back in. A judge tossed that suit. Some of the bans have been lifted, but for the ongoing cases, his legal bans persist.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:01Pablo Torre?

  We should also point out that James Dolan and his security force had also blocked a graphic designer from seeing a concert because that graphic designer, Noah, had committed a heinous crime.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  Ah, the worst. He had sold exactly six copies of a t-shirt that said "Ban Dolan." And so, this guy was later on, he was bringing his parents to a concert, and he got banned from that concert.

• 17:25Pablo Torre?

  And so, all of this speaks to, I think, not simply paranoia, and not simply to sensitivity, and not simply to vengeance, these words we've all sort of been using to describe how James Dolan operates for years in this city. It also speaks to how quote unquote self-defense is something a billionaire would cite to create this private surveillance state while also receiving public money without, of course, the public fully appreciating what's happening behind the scenes.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  The garden has to defend itself, right? This is why I say, people say, you know, you're too sensitive, you shouldn't defend yourself. You know, it's like something out of The Godfather, you know? It's like, hey, it's only business. It's not only business, right?

• 18:08Speaker 04

  You know, he's talking about to defend itself against its enemies. And he's got this growing enemies list.

• 18:14Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 18:15Speaker 04

  And so since 2018, he's been putting in place a network of surveillance cameras, an increasingly sophisticated software to enforce that enemies list, to use biometrics, to use facial recognition, to keep people out of Radio City, out of the Beacon Theater, out of the garden.

• 18:37Pablo Torre?

  That clip that we just played happens. And since then, the rise of this surveillance state kind of fades into something like normalcy.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's normalized. It fades into the background. It becomes, I don't know, just another way in which our privacy is thrown out the window.

• 18:56Pablo Torre?

  And so a really crucial piece of documentation that I think is essential to understanding this story is a document that The Athletic originally reported on. This is a civil complaint filed against MSG Entertainment and its security boss last September. Who filed this civil complaint?

• 19:13Speaker 04

  It's a former member of the garden's security staff. It's saying that he was forced into doing work that he was not physically able to do and shouldn't have been asked to do.

• 19:24Pablo Torre?

  Allegedly.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  But as soon as you get beneath that one thin layer, you get into some really wild stuff. And just to be clear, this guy, this litigant, he didn't want to talk to us on or off the record. The guy that filed an affidavit in support of this lawsuit, a former New York City cop who worked for the garden, he didn't want to talk to us on or off the record. But all of our other sources within the garden's security apparatus, they started mentioning to me this one name over and over again, this one case over and over again.

• 19:54Pablo Torre?

  What was the one name that your current and former security sources at the garden kept bringing up?

• 20:00Speaker 04

  We're talking about a fan here. We're gonna call her Nina Richards to protect her privacy. She didn't respond to request to comment for my story about how she was treated by the Garden. But she did ask that we not use her real name, and so we're gonna respect that. But this is a transgender woman, went to a lot of games. She, you know, was friendly with a number of staffers at the Garden, you know, was a known figure there.

• 20:29Pablo Torre?

  And this story continues beyond the 60 pages in the civil complaint to this other document, Noah, that you exclusively obtained.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:37Pablo Torre?

  I'm holding it. This is 18 pages. It is an internal document that has my favorite kind of watermark, because it says confidential all over it. And it has Madison Square Garden letterhead at the very top. It says the Madison Square Garden Company. And it looks like a spreadsheet. It has time codes down to the very second. One column list is just the list of the surveillance camera the information is coming from. It has descriptions, detailed logs, tracking this particular fan, Nina Richards, her every move. And when I say every move, I am not exaggerating, as we will see, because all 18 pages are devoted to this one person at one game.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Even though, to be clear, none of the sources that we talked to said that Nina Richard presented a threat in this moment in any way, shape, or form. This is a fan.

• 21:30Pablo Torre?

  And so now I just want to read from it. To quote the top, "She attended the New York Knicks versus San Antonio Spurs game on January 10th, 2022, and CCTV, closed circuit television, confirmed she was in attendance."

• 21:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, in fact, it was Pride Night.

• 21:54Pablo Torre?

  7:09 PM and 40 seconds, Cam 0174, Nina Richards, again using that name as a stand-in for the redacted name, enters from the South concourse.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  7:10 and 20 seconds, Cam 0241 spots Nina Richards scanning her ticket to Section 102, Row 8, Seat 5.

• 22:16Pablo Torre?

  For those who are not familiar with the Garden's seat map from StubHub or elsewhere, this is the main bowl, it's behind the basket, and in fact, if you skip now 7 spreadsheet cells down, which takes us a whole 4 minutes and 33 seconds later in time, you get to Nina, quote, "sitting in her correct seat", and you get corresponding images in Appendix C, because of course there are appendices. And there it is, a printout of, yeah, a pretty sparsely occupied section with a big red circle around the target in question.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's creepy.

• 22:50Pablo Torre?

  We're getting to a red-colored block. The terror alert scale has ramped up at 8:27 and 24 seconds.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  Hugging the security officer?

• 23:02Pablo Torre?

  8:28 and 9 seconds, escorted by the same security officer. And look, there it is, Appendix I. 8:28 and 20 seconds, the security officer enters the Level 6 elevator with Nina Richards and a female guest.

• 23:19Pablo Torre?

  This is a photo from inside of the Garden elevator. And what is happening in Nina Richards' evening here?

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Nina Richards is living the dream. I mean, all of us that are Knicks fans have a dream, right? That we can know a guy who knows a guy who can get us better seats in the third quarter. And that's what's happening here.

• 23:39Pablo Torre?

  Nina Richards is getting upgraded.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  Is getting upgraded.

• 23:43Pablo Torre?

  And so, 8:43 and 40 seconds, the description reads, "Guy with an orange fedora hat speaks with Nina Richards briefly." It's important to point out that despite the previous mention of a fedora, this guy is absolutely not James Dolan.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  This is not James Dolan, but at 8:48 and 22 seconds, dun dun dun, there's another hug.

• 24:06Pablo Torre?

  Another hug, same camera. And then, 2 minutes and 2 seconds after that, again, same camera. Nina enters women's bathroom.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  They're following this person into the bathroom.

• 24:20Pablo Torre?

  And 2 minutes and 5 seconds later, Nina Richards exits women's bathroom.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  It's like, what is the point of this?

• 24:30Pablo Torre?

  And the red alert returns at 9:06 and 26 seconds. Now headed courtside.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, the same security officer is seen speaking to her.

• 24:40Pablo Torre?

  Appendix Q gives us the picture of that. 9:07 and 33 seconds, a security officer walks over to section 1 and row 1 and speaks with guests. And then at 9:08 and 7 seconds, at last, Nina and female guest take a seat at section 1 and row 1. Appendix T providing the proof and scene.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  Again, this is not somebody threatening anyone at the Garden. This is not anybody violating any security policies or procedures. This is a transgender woman on Pride Night getting a good seat.

• 25:18Pablo Torre?

  And so, your security sources, when it comes to the people who are not involved again in the filing of the civil suit, but spoke to some of the allegations involved, what do they say about the Garden wanting just this granular, literally second-by-second level of surveillance?

• 25:36Speaker 04

  People were baffled. The lawsuit alleges that this was an act of gender profiling. And source after source said some variation of this was harassment, this was not okay, posed no threat.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  This was just a transgender woman being a fan walking around.

• 25:58Pablo Torre?

  The lawsuit, which is again filed by this former MSG security staffer, it alleges that the Garden's security boss believed that Nina's quote, "presence as an openly transgender woman could quote, 'damage MSG's reputation,' end quote.

• 26:13Speaker 04

  And in fact, the lawsuit claimed that people that did pose actual threats, that actually had much more, you know, criminal background or what have you, didn't get this kind of surveillance. One fan, one night, 18 pages. And this wasn't the only time that Nina Richards was surveilled. She was tracked over a series of months and maybe even years.

• 26:38Pablo Torre?

  We should say that Wired did send a detailed list of questions to Madison Square Garden about your reporting, about James Dolan, about his chief of security, who we will absolutely get to in a bit here. And you gave them a long time to respond.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  Really long.

• 26:50Pablo Torre?

  And how many of your specific questions did they ultimately answer?

• 26:53Speaker 04

  Zero.

• 26:55Pablo Torre?

  And what did they write back, if anything?

• 26:58Speaker 04

  We got a brief letter from their legal team, and we got a two-sentence response from their spokesperson. "This story is built on false, misleading, and unverified allegations, including claims drawn from lawsuits filed by rapacious litigators. We categorically reject such reckless reporting and are actively evaluating our legal options against Wired."

• 27:25Pablo Torre?

  We sent our own request for comment here at Pablo finds out to MSG. They referred to the same statement. It is interesting. In its own court filing in the civil case, that the Garden does acknowledge the monitoring of this woman, quote, "as being described in excessive, needless detail to garner attention for his," being the litigant's lawsuit, end quote. But it does not deny the surveillance, which is again, hard to, I suppose, refute based on what we're holding in our hands. And we've been talking, of course, about James Dolan being at the very top of this.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:59Pablo Torre?

  But in terms of whose eye is all seeing, whose personal perspective these cameras embody on a night like this, who was in charge that evening?

• 28:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, there's somebody in charge of that entire organization. The chief security officer of Madison Square Garden.

• 28:18Pablo Torre?

  The guy behind the eye.

• 28:21Speaker 04

  That's right. Behind all the eyes.

• 28:32Pablo Torre?

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• 30:39Pablo Torre?

  So the guy behind the eyes, you should say that there is not a lot about the chief security officer of the Madison Square Garden Company. We're not finding a ton on the internet, Noah?

• 30:51Speaker 04

  These security guys sort of are well-known for trying to keep their profile pretty low. But in that world, he's kind of a known figure.

• 31:01Pablo Torre?

  And his name is what?

• 31:03Speaker 04

  John C. Eversole.

• 31:05Pablo Torre?

  And it is kind of perfect that the guy who is watching everybody does not want to be watched by dint of his public profile, I suppose. But we did find this grainy photograph. This was taken at the Garden during Donald Trump's rally in October of 2024. He has a beard, he's standing in the tunnel, he is inches away from James Dolan, who has his hands in his pockets, right at the corner there, in front of that stanchion. And we did find one more close-up photograph.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, there he is. I gotta say, this guy in this field is a top player. When you're running security for the Knicks, for the Rangers, for Sphere, Madison Square Garden, that makes you one of the top, like, thought leaders in this industry. And I had one tech exec say to me that he was a quote-unquote badass, who could quote, "tell the NBA and the NHL what to do, not the other way around."

• 32:02Pablo Torre?

  He's the Jalen Brunson of the security state.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  Man, you really are gonna get us into trouble.

• 32:08Pablo Torre?

  Is he manufacturing files? Who's to say? That seems like a legal question.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  Oh, come on, no, no!

• 32:12Pablo Torre?

  A legal question we can't grapple with here at the moment.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  Now, listen, I don't know if he's the Jalen Brunson of the security state, or if he's even the Tyler Kolik of the security state. I don't know which, but he's certainly in the upper echelon.

• 32:26Pablo Torre?

  What we did in tribute to this reputation was keep searching. Keep searching the public record. Keep searching what's knowable about John C. Eversole. And we did eventually discover that he made kind of a key error in his personal security, in his OPSEC, because something we found... This is public Facebook profile. And then there's this.

• 32:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. So this is a black cat on a bed, it appears.

• 32:57Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  With bright, hot, pink nails.

• 33:02Pablo Torre?

  This luxurious black cat led me to another rabbit hole, which suggests that maybe these bright pink nails are stick-on colored claw covers. I was able to find other photos of cats with such hot pink nails. Not all of them are posing like Rose in Titanic being drawn by Leonardo DiCaprio. Nonetheless, if you zoom out, you find a more unique feature, I would say.

• 33:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a handgun on the bed, being pawed by the pink nails.

• 33:35Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 33:36Speaker 04

  And the black cat. And it's like, what is that? And why is that one of your three photos? Images on your Facebook? Um, that's quite the statement there. In comment to this photo, a member of Eversole's family says, "Best pick ever."

• 33:58Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, was there any comment from Eversole or MSG? And I suppose that will have to suffice.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, he didn't comment back to us. The Garden didn't respond to our detailed list of questions. He didn't respond to our detailed list of questions. But we are left with that enduring picture.

• 34:19Pablo Torre?

  And so the job in question here today, the job at The Garden, which he starts in 2018. Look, when I imagine the job description, like the listing for that position, what does a security team for a sports and entertainment company even do? I think about, you know, a guy who keeps thousands of fans safe. Person who keeps secrets.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you've been covering the gambling crisis that's going on in pro sports. Got to keep those secrets safe.

• 34:46Pablo Torre?

  Right? Um, you got to keep drunk fans from fighting each other.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. Look, this job is brutal, okay? In the craziest city, you've got to keep the craziest, drunkest, most rowdy fans from hurting each other or hurting the players, hurting anyone else. It is an incredibly tough job. You got to keep the fans safe. You got to keep the players safe. You got to keep your information safe.

• 35:11Pablo Torre?

  But the other job here, of course, is how closely is John Eversole? Securing James Dolan himself.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Right. Eversol is unusual in that he's both the chief security officer for this extensive security enterprise, and he's Dolan's body man for a lot of the time. He's near him all the time. He's got an office on the executive floor right near Dolan. That's incredibly unusual for a chief security officer.

• 35:39Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I just want to actually quote from your story, because you write that he was working as part of the CEO's personal protective detail and as the overseer of his vast security intelligence and surveillance enterprise.

• 35:51Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 35:52Pablo Torre?

  And the personal sorts of demands that Jim Dolan has about how he is to be served and protected, what are we talking about there?

• 36:01Speaker 04

  Well, the two things can kind of run in conflict with one another sometimes. For example, we've got this written affidavit from a former cop who was with MSG Security.

• 36:13Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, this is the written declaration in that aforementioned lawsuit.

• 36:17Speaker 04

  And he says that Eversol created a personal rule, quote unquote, that he and Dolan could never see canine units, could never see bomb sniffing dogs when they walk together near the venues.

• 36:28Pablo Torre?

  We're talking about the bomb sniffing dogs that you'd want to catch the terrorists.

• 36:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. What the affidavit says, quote, is that it was due to Mr. Dolan's disdain for dogs.

• 36:37Pablo Torre?

  Which is to say that the cat people are clearly in charge.

• 36:43Speaker 04

  So, look, the proximity that Eversol has, the proximity, you know, both in terms of the importance in the organization, the physical proximity to Dolan, that creates at the very least an impression of someone with enormous influence.

• 36:58Pablo Torre?

  But in terms of the guys with the earpieces who are taking orders from the top, how do we explain the mechanics of the security state in terms of Eversol and Dolan then telling these other employees what to do?

• 37:11Speaker 04

  To do that, we gotta talk some hockey.

• 37:19Speaker 04

  So five years ago, it's May 5th, 2021. Dolan fires the president and the GM of the Rangers. It had been a bad year for the team. Fans are getting restless.

• 37:30Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, around Seventh Avenue after Ranger games. Can feel the tension.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  Wasn't great. And so we got excerpts of an encrypted group chat of Madison Square Garden security and of Eversol and his team.

• 37:46Pablo Torre?

  And I would love to table read this with you. The name of this group chat is Top Flight Security.

• 37:54Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 37:55Pablo Torre?

  And I will be, I'll be playing the role tonight of the various MSG security officials who are not named John Eversol and will remain nameless for simplicity's sake.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  Okay, that makes me John Eversol.

• 38:07Pablo Torre?

  5:07 PM. All active N Y R players in. 5:18. Let's please meet at the Level 2 Commander Center. 5:30 for a full briefing on tonight's events.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  Then prep for One to depart.

• 38:22Pablo Torre?

  So at 5:33, they're saying prep for One. For the sake of clarity, One is what?

• 38:29Speaker 04

  I believe what he is referring to is quote unquote Executive One. That's how they refer to James Dolan.

• 38:37Pablo Torre?

  I remember Joe Biden, I believe his Secret Service code name was Celtic.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  They went a little bit more straight ahead.

• 38:45Pablo Torre?

  A little more, a little less creative.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. Also, it would be weird to call him Celtic since he owns the Knicks.

• 38:52Pablo Torre?

  It's, it's right there. You can go with Nick, but nonetheless, okay. Or Ranger.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  Could have called him Amari, you know, since he wore number one.

• 38:58Pablo Torre?

  That's right.

• 38:59Speaker 04

  So look, here's the thing you got to understand about this night. Like in particular, is like as soon as the game starts, like seconds into it, the game goes completely off the rails.

• 39:10Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, there's a fight one second into the game. There's a fight 50 seconds after that. There's another fight after that. There's another fight after that. There's another, I mean, first five minutes, it's pandemonium.

• 39:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's unbelievable.

• 39:21Pablo Torre?

  And just for the visuals here, what the MSG security crew on this group chat are concerned with is something quite different.

• 39:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:31Pablo Torre?

  It's what happens in the third period after the Capitals take a significant lead.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, okay, here's Eversol. 9:22, just heard a "Sell the team." Any idea who screamed it?

• 39:45Pablo Torre?

  I'm near 101. Didn't hear it.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  9:24 PM. Now Dolan sucks. Where is it?

• 39:53Pablo Torre?

  All of section 109 now. Section 110.

• 39:57Speaker 04

  So they are out.

• 39:58Pablo Torre?

  Started by two guys on far left. One blue Rangers jersey, one white shirt. Both sell the team and Dolan sucks. Another guy responds. Have, name redacted, and paid detail do it. No one else. Discreet and professional. Section 110.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  9:30 PM. Moving back to suite. Be ready. Get those guys out.

• 40:23Pablo Torre?

  What's so illuminating about this group chat is what really gets these guys sent into what feels like red alert status.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:34Pablo Torre?

  I mean, they have something like a protocol for when they hear sell the team or Dolan sucks.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, which is you're supposed to forward the suck chanters information to the intelligence team for what are called workups.

• 40:49Pablo Torre?

  So we should say the group chat continues. We're now 11 minutes later.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:54Pablo Torre?

  And a member of top flight security writes forwarded the IDs to the intel team for workups.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  Then Eversol says, thankin?

• 41:02Pablo Torre?

  That is seemingly a typo or again, a sophisticated code name.

• 41:05Speaker 04

  Or thank you. And then load in facial.

• 41:10Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, load in facial in this particular context presumably refers to the security team now using the facial recognition technology to flag the fans in question.

• 41:20Speaker 04

  And then we can do the workups during business hours. So this was a big part of the Madison Square Garden security operation, which is anybody that was on a perceived enemies list would get sort of a open source dossier built on them, would get their social media postings scraped. There's a number of databases that can do criminal records checks, that can do property records checks, that can see what they've said in the media, and they would get what was called a quote unquote workup.

• 41:49Pablo Torre?

  But the threshold for who gets a workup, okay, we got the chanters. What else rises to that level of concern?

• 41:57Speaker 04

  The threshold they claimed was threats, credible threats. But the threshold of credible seems, I don't know, not what you and I would describe as credible. So for one example, back in 2021, there was this one teenager in Colorado who said something on Twitter and Eversole and the Madison Square Garden security staff went into freak out mode and they actually called the local cops on this kid.

• 42:32Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  But when that happened, according to one of our sources, here's a quote, "They would quote, freak the [bleep] out."

• 42:39Pablo Torre?

  And so top flight security, this team of people, they're trying to hunt down critics of James Dolan all across America.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. We even got another text message about this.

• 42:49Pablo Torre?

  From the same group chat?

• 42:51Speaker 04

  Nah, different one. We can't show it on screen. That's part of what I have agreed to. But the text reads, and I'm quoting here, "At least they scared the crap." Poop emoji out of some 14-year-old kid in Colorado.

• 43:07Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  One veteran of Madison Square Garden security told me that Dolan would quote, "Come in and he and Eversole would pore over all these social media comments about the Knicks and the Rangers."

• 43:20Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. And look, I think that everyone on the NBA internet, on NBA Twitter, has joked about that. But what you're saying is that James Dolan and his security guys, John C. Eversole, what they were doing was actually watching and reading and maybe constructing a dossier with your tweets in it to then make sure that you got put on a list.

• 43:43Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 43:45Pablo Torre?

  And this is where I feel obliged to point out that you've been reporting this story for Wired magazine, which chronicles the cutting edge of technology, and this seems not very sophisticated.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  Look, the garden's security systems have started out janky, but they've grown more sophisticated over time. And weirdly, they got more sophisticated because of a dude who used to run a QuickLube shop in Montana. I'm totally serious.

• 44:13Pablo Torre?

  Yes, please introduce formally the character of Henry Valentino.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  He had, back in the day, back in the 90s, he had run a telecom company. After Montana, he'd found himself in Vegas. And when he was in Vegas, he used some of his technological know-how to help out a buddy of his at the McCarran Airport in Vegas. We've all been through it if you've been through Vegas. There was like a series of fast food places. I think there was a Gordon Bierisch, and there was a Burger King. And his buddy was having a problem with employee theft. And so he set up a little system to monitor the employees, to set up cameras and to spot what the employees were doing, to see if they were, I don't know, you know, giving out free Whoppers or whatever. While all this is happening, okay, facial recognition as a technology is getting exponentially

• 45:00Speaker 04

  more sophisticated and easier to implement. Like, I talked to one security guy, who was like, "Oh yeah, I've got a facial recognition system set up in my home, no big deal." Why is it no big deal? For the same, you know, kind of like AI craziness that's going on throughout the country right now. Like, it used to be that you had to do these very, very specific guidelines about, "You must look in this area of the face and that area of the face," and you had to really tell the algorithm what you wanted to see. These days, you just kind of let the algorithms do their thing and scan on their own. And so that, like, everything in Vegas, obviously led to casino work, right?

• 45:41Speaker 04

  Because Valentino realized that if he could spot the BK thieves, that he could then do more sophisticated facial recognition.

• 45:49Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 45:50Speaker 04

  That led to a gig at a nightclub at the MGM Grand, a nightclub that, at that time... Dolan owned a piece of.

• 45:58Pablo Torre?

  Yes, I know Hakasan.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  So they got a facial recognition system set up at Hakasan. And eventually that led to a gig with the Nascent Sphere. And also a gig in Madison Square Garden.

• 46:13Pablo Torre?

  Which is all to say that the Garden, MSG, Jim Dolan, is in business with this technology.

• 46:19Speaker 04

  They've invested in a company called Extract One. That's Extract with an X. And they do those kind of new jack metal detectors. They can now see at a lot of different arenas, right? They've got cameras implemented in their metal detection apparatus. And those cameras then run the E-Connect, the Burger King, the Hakasan nightclub algorithms. And they're able to do it incredibly fast. Some are bragging that they could do it like 40 people a minute. That 40 faces a minute they can spot, identify, and then send on to MSG security.

• 46:58Pablo Torre?

  This is what the modern contemporary surveillance state at MSG looks like.

• 47:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's it this season. But there is a real movement afoot in pro sports and entertainment to use your face for everything, right? We went from paper tickets to digital tickets. Now they want to go from digital tickets to faces for everything. To get into an arena, to buy your booze. If maybe you're a VIP, you get an upgrade.

• 47:22Pablo Torre?

  That's being used at the Intuit Dome, Steve Ballmer's Palace in Los Angeles, of course. It's being used at Citi Field where the New York Mets play baseball games. This is the stuff that's also helping secure the World Cup this summer at SoFi Stadium.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  At SoFi, for example, according to the E-Connect website, they say that, quote, "Every face that enters is automatically enrolled, allowing for historical search, alert triggers, and association tracking."

• 47:48Pablo Torre?

  And so that presumably is how these buildings will catch the bad guys, will catch terrorists?

• 47:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Dolan claims this is all about terrorism.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  What facial recognition does is looks at your, you recognize your face and says, "Are you, right, you know, someone who's on this list?" Right? So if you're a terrorist, right, it will say, "That's a terrorist." Right? And then, you know, appropriate action can be taken. It's very, very useful for security.

• 48:19Pablo Torre?

  Well, okay, so let's talk about the law enforcement angle then.

• 48:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 48:23Pablo Torre?

  So how does that work with the Garden specifically?

• 48:28Speaker 04

  So, I mean, they may talk a lot about stopping terrorism, but multiple MSG insiders that I talked to said that they tried to incorporate in information from the FBI's Most Wanted list and what have you.

• 48:41Pablo Torre?

  And the thing your article is saying is that, quote, "There were discussions about incorporating the FBI's Most Wanted list, but the notion fizzled out," end quote.

• 48:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:52Pablo Torre?

  Why?

• 48:53Speaker 04

  Because, look, the Garden staff, like the guys that were going to tackle Charles Oakley, they're not trained to stop, you know, Osama bin Laden. One source told me, quote, "If you upload the list, what's the protocol? You're gonna ask your union security guards to go after the guy? If you get a hit, the FBI will shut down the whole arena."

• 49:10Pablo Torre?

  So if the FBI isn't involved here, the NYPD as the other department that might be of use here, they're involved how?

• 49:19Speaker 04

  They're not. And NYPD representative told me the department doesn't send any facial recognition data, any data, to the Garden for this purpose.

• 49:29Pablo Torre?

  What you've just established is surprising to me.

• 49:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, to me too.

• 49:34Pablo Torre?

  Because the whole point here is, think about what Jim Dolan said on Fox 5 with Rosanna Scato. "We're here to stop terrorists."

• 49:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:42Pablo Torre?

  "We're here to stop the bad guys."

• 49:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:44Pablo Torre?

  And the question is always is, who are the guys that these guys are actually stopping?

• 49:50Speaker 04

  Right. According to the NYPD, it's nobody on their list. And look, I'm not saying that the Garden is unsafe. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that they're not using NYPD data.

• 50:01Pablo Torre?

  And so just so I understand then, the jurisdiction here. So the Garden, their security force worries about inside the Garden, outside, we're talking, we're back in the real world, talking about, again, the NYPD.

• 50:14Speaker 04

  Not exactly.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  According to our sources, the MSG security staff has decided that outside The Garden and outside the Beacon Theater and their Radio City Music Hall, that's their jurisdiction too. And so they have functionally started cosplaying as cops in their neighborhoods.

• 50:36Pablo Torre?

  But what does that mean in terms of like, what can they do if you're just like a fan who dares to say Jim Dolan should be fired and forced to sell the team?

• 50:46Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, I just have to say, the NYPD was like, we don't have anything to do with this. We don't know what those guys are up to, which is weird. But secondly, I don't know what they're allowed to do, like legally, but here's what the lawsuit says. They go after like those guys that sell merch, unauthorized merch, outside of concerts and outside of The Garden, they will go and bust those people. They will go after scalpers who might be still trying to do their hustle. But they'll do more than that. What the lawsuit says and what we had Garden staffers confirm to us was that if a protest happened to go by The Garden or one of the other venues, that they'd kind of wiggle their

• 51:29Speaker 04

  way into the protest and maybe do a little observations on the people protesting.

• 51:35Pablo Torre?

  And there are some security sources in your article that say that they were not ordered to insert themselves into any demonstrations, but they confirm, according to the reporting, that they were asked to observe protests that went anywhere near a Dolan venue. But the point is that there's a non-zero chance that they're listening and watching to make sure that what is being done at a gathering like that is of their liking.

• 52:03Speaker 04

  They at least have that capability. There's at least the motivation and the precedent to keep watch and to listen in as people move in and around the neighborhoods. I even talked to some sources, some people who worked for The Garden, who say that they're afraid or they've got to be very careful when they go to like local bars because they're worried that Jim Dolan is watching.

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• 54:49Pablo Torre?

  So before we let you go, obviously, we need to get back to this list. And whether or not I personally am on it, which is actually news I can use, and I genuinely, once again, do not know the answer to this question, which happens to impact directly my personal schedule and interests as a guy who loves going to concerts and games and events at various James Dolan properties, while simultaneously exercising my First Amendment rights as a journalist and guy who has been furious about how various things, institutions may or may not be operating. So how is it decided who gets to be on the list?

• 55:28Speaker 04

  According to our sources, it's up to a group called The Council.

• 55:34Pablo Torre?

  Who's on, you know, who's on The Council?

• 55:37Speaker 04

  Look, I think it's just a fancy way of saying there's a bunch of Gordon Security executives who nominate which faces go on the watch list, and each of those faces then gets a kind of score assigned to it. I think there's been different scoring mechanisms over the years. Sometimes it's a one to 10 or a one to five. Sometimes high number is bad, sometimes low number is bad. But, you know, this council kind of nominates faces and then you're on the list.

• 56:05Pablo Torre?

  So what's the type of person who's in the system being watched?

• 56:09Speaker 04

  We do have some screenshots of people who are on the list.

• 56:14Pablo Torre?

  Perfect.

• 56:15Speaker 04

  And here's someone who is described as being flagged as priority eight.

• 56:19Pablo Torre?

  Again, we're blurring out the face, I presume, for understandable privacy reasons, especially because this seems to be a small child.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is a kid. This is from the Sphere in October of 2023, like maybe hugging a parent.

• 56:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not great.

• 56:39Pablo Torre?

  What in the does this little girl have in her dossier that would cause her to be flagged by the system as an eight, priority eight?

• 56:49Speaker 04

  Why does a little girl get into the system at all? Why is this person in Jim Dolan's biometric DriftNet? I like, I don't, I don't know the answer.

• 56:59Pablo Torre?

  Knowing that your child might be in this surveillance system.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  Right, and who knows how long the data is being retained for?

• 57:06Pablo Torre?

  Genuinely unsettling as, as the father of a daughter and also a person who did not know any of this was happening, all kind of terrifying. Um, but let's say this is a low level potential threat. Who would be on the other end of that scale?

• 57:21Speaker 04

  Well, then, as you move up the scale, right? Um, you might get approached by garden security officers while you're in the building and you might get a, you know, just a little talking to or just a warning that, hey, we're keeping an eye on you and don't you try anything. And then at the very highest level, it's your band, you're not even allowed in the building. Now, here's somebody else who triggered an alert. This is a priority two, so this probably isn't the very top, but this is someone higher up, one would assume.

• 57:55Pablo Torre?

  This is a photo of a police officer, it seems.

• 57:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's nuts, man. This is from 2024 and this cop was in the facial recognition system and this system has him in full dress.

• 58:10Pablo Torre?

  Why, why is he in the system at all?

• 58:12Speaker 04

  It's not clear, although we do know that this guy was a former employee of the garden security staff.

• 58:20Pablo Torre?

  Someone that they had worked with at some point.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, and now he's in the system. So we've got a little girl and we've got a cop.

• 58:29Pablo Torre?

  But in your reporting and in your view now, having done, you know, five months of research into this, how representative is the system that we've now chronicled? How representative is Jim Dolan? As a stand-in for what is happening across the sports industry. Is he the future?

• 58:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I kind of think he's emblematic of what's going on right now. I mean, look, there's a grocery store that opened up around the corner from me that wants to run facial recognition on me while I'm picking up Cheetos. You know, there are executives at every industry running private intelligence shops and running private security shops, and they're becoming more and more important. Every company has sort of gotten in in one way or the other into this surveillance capitalism model where they take your information, they take your fingerprint, they take your face, and then they either try to sell that data to someone else or they use that data to kind of micro-target you.

• 59:34Speaker 04

  And so, in a lot of ways, I think Dolan may be a very particular character. He may be a man with a very particular set of grievances and history, but I think he's kind of the future.

• 59:50Pablo Torre?

  I am now realizing that, in some ways, James Dolan is also the perfect face for this problem because we've already sort of tested how much people give a [BLEEP].

• 1:00:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:00:01Pablo Torre?

  If the guy with the pettiest grievances and the longest memory and the most desire to follow people, not around his building simply, but also around the country, is now in control of a database of children's faces and police officers' faces and fans' faces, and none of us really know what they're doing or why we're there, or how long we'll be there, or what we did to deserve it.

• 1:00:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, and he's not the only one.

• 1:00:27Pablo Torre?

  And so, how did the counsel rule in my case?

• 1:00:34Speaker 04

  Pablo?

• 1:00:35Pablo Torre?

  Am I on the watch list?

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  I regret to inform you that, at least as of the other day...

• 1:00:43Speaker 04

  Neither you, nor I, nor my co-writer are on the list.

• 1:00:48Speaker 12

  Oh, man.

• 1:00:50Pablo Torre?

  That is, I gotta say, that is a profound relief as somebody who wants to attend Filipino Heritage Night at the Garden.

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Pablo Torre?

  And also a thing that I would not be surprised to, uh, not be true once this episode comes out.

• 1:01:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, one lesson that we've learned here, right, is that the list changes all the time. And it doesn't take much to put you on it.

• 1:01:15Pablo Torre?

  So, if you're watching, James, I guess we can say that into the camera, I guess, if you're watching, James, like and subscribe.

• 1:01:34Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metalark Media production. And for more, read the full digital cover story over at wired.com. We'll talk to you next time.