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

Among those profiled was Evan Greer, director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future. Fight for the Future noted that MSG's dossier entry for Greer contains a misgendering error — a mistake that suggests the document was assembled quickly or without care, rather than through methodical research.

This disclosure extends a controversy that has accumulated over years. MSG's facial recognition system first gained sustained public attention in late 2022, when it emerged the venue was using it to exclude lawyers whose firms had active lawsuits against the company. The New York Times reported that MSG Entertainment had placed those attorneys on a biometric exclusion list enforced at venue doors — meaning a ticketed concertgoer could be denied entry because of their employer's legal filings against MSG. 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 at a February 2023 hearing.

None of those interventions produced a public shutdown of the program. The dossier disclosure indicates the venue's approach toward critics became more defensive rather than more transparent in the years that followed.

Using facial recognition to exclude adversaries and maintaining files on activists who object to that use are technically and legally separate actions. But together they suggest a consistent operational purpose: the technology functions as a tool for institutional control rather than safety, and people who challenge that use face tracking and documentation. Whether this documentation was intended to inform future venue access decisions remains unclear based on available information.

The structural dynamic here warrants attention. Facial recognition at privately operated venues operates in a regulatory gap in most U.S. jurisdictions, including New York. Venue operators can set their own exclusion criteria. Biometric data collection at scale requires disclosure under New York's existing rules but does not require prior consent from attendees. This permissive environment allows a venue to monitor entry, build exclusion lists based on professional affiliation, and — as the dossier reveals — extend monitoring to critics of those very practices, all without crossing a clear legal boundary. The attorney general's 2023 inquiry appears to have concluded without public enforcement action.

For professionals working in security and privacy, the technical architecture is less revealing than the governance failure it exposes. Installing a facial recognition system at high-throughput venue entry points is an engineering challenge largely solved at the commercial level — the vendors, infrastructure, and threshold settings are mature technology. What the MSG case continues to illustrate is that the harder unsolved problem is governance: who appears on a watchlist, under what rules, with what oversight, and with what accountability when the system extends beyond its stated security purpose. The dossier on activists reflects an organization that answered those governance questions in ways that prioritized institutional control over transparency.

Fight for the Future and allied advocacy groups have advocated for years for a federal moratorium on law enforcement and commercial facial recognition. MSG's conduct provides that campaign a concrete, documented case of mission creep — a venue security tool shifting into what resembles political opposition research. Whether Congress or New York's relevant regulatory bodies act on this disclosure as an enforcement trigger or treat it as a news story remains an open question. But the document exists, and its title is now in the public record.