Madison Square Garden compiled a document titled "Facial Recognition Activists.docx" containing collected information on individuals who publicly opposed its facial recognition program, 404 Media reported on June 23, 2026. The file included specific comments and tweets posted by those critics — a surveillance operation directed not at event-goers but at the people arguing against the technology itself.

Among those profiled was Evan Greer, director of digital rights group Fight for the Future. Fight for the Future noted that MSG's dossier entry for Greer misgenders him — an error that also makes plain the document was assembled hastily or carelessly, rather than through any rigorous investigative process.

The dossier is a new disclosure in a controversy that has been accumulating for years. MSG's facial recognition infrastructure first drew sustained public attention in late 2022, when it emerged that the venue was using the system to bar entry to lawyers whose firms had active litigation pending against the company. The New York Times reported that MSG Entertainment had placed those attorneys on an exclusion list enforced biometrically at venue doors — meaning a ticketed concertgoer could be turned away at the gate because of the employer listed on their firm's court filings. New York State Attorney General Letitia James sought information from MSG about that practice in January 2023, and New York City Council members questioned MSG representatives about the technology's use at a February 2023 hearing.

None of those interventions produced a public rollback of the program. The dossier disclosure suggests the venue's posture toward critics hardened rather than softened in the years since.

The two behaviors — using facial recognition to exclude adversaries, and maintaining files on activists who object to that use — are legally and technically distinct. But together they sketch a consistent operational logic: the technology is treated as a tool of institutional self-interest rather than a security measure, and people who challenge that use are tracked and documented. Whether that documentation was intended to feed back into venue access decisions is not established by the available facts.

Worth flagging here is the structural dynamic at play. Facial recognition at privately operated venues sits in a regulatory gray zone in most U.S. jurisdictions, including New York. Operators can define their own exclusion criteria; biometric data collection at scale requires disclosure under New York's existing rules but not prior consent from attendees. That permissive environment creates conditions in which a venue can surveil entry, build exclusion lists based on professional affiliation, and — as the dossier suggests — extend monitoring to people who criticize those very choices, all without crossing a clear legal line. The attorney general's 2023 inquiry appears to have closed without public enforcement action.

For security and privacy professionals, the technical architecture here is less interesting than the governance failure it exposes. Deploying a one-to-many facial recognition system at high-throughput venue entry points is an engineering problem that has largely been solved at the commercial level — the vendors, the infrastructure, the match-threshold tuning are all mature. What the MSG episode keeps illustrating is that the harder unsolved problem is policy: who gets added to a watchlist, under what criteria, with what oversight, and with what accountability when the system is used for purposes beyond its stated safety rationale. The dossier on activists is a downstream consequence of an organization that answered those governance questions in ways that prioritized institutional control.

Fight for the Future and allied advocacy groups have been pushing for a federal moratorium on law enforcement and commercial facial recognition for several years. MSG's conduct gives that campaign a concrete, documented example of scope creep — a venue security tool migrating into what looks like political opposition research. Whether Congress or the relevant New York regulatory bodies treat this disclosure as an enforcement catalyst or a news cycle is a question without an answer yet. But the document exists. Its title is in the record.