Pablo Torre Finds Out - "Did You Hear That, James?" We Survived MSG Surveillance... with Edward Snowden's Lawyer

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

The Knicks are surging. But politicians are condemning owner James Dolan and his tax breaks, after our investigation with WIRED. So Pablo tests the limits of facial recognition with his playoff ticket plug Ben Wizner, who just happens to be the Deputy Legal Director at the ACLU — and one of America's foremost experts on modern privacy. Which makes him uniquely (if begrudgingly) qualified to break down everything from spooked NBA journalists and a banned puppy, to Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein connections… to, yes, the Mount Rushmore of whistleblowers.• Previously on PTFO: We Got Inside Knicks Surveillance — and MSG's Deep State Is Stranger Than You Think• From WIRED: "The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine"• Watch "CITIZENFOUR" by Laura Poitras• Read "Permanent Record" by Edward Snowden• Read "Your Face Belongs to Us" by Kashmir Hill• PTFO Vault: We Found the Secret Rap Album That the NBA's Best Executive Doesn't Want You to Hear(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 for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. The person said to me, you know us, we're always watching. Right after this ad. I do like that any interview with you, Ben, must begin with you handing your phone to someone else. As I just did, and as I once did, when your fellow Pulitzer Prize winner, Laura Poitris, God. came to my office in January of 2013 and said, put your phone in your desk and lock it.

We've got to go talk somewhere else. I am not here to talk to you because you've represented Edward Snowden as his attorney for years now. That's not why also I've been going to mix games with you secretly. Why is that? Well, it's because you got me tickets. I consider you a friend, Weisner, and that is the ultimate, the ultimate reason. You're a fellow dad, and I just wanted to get you off the couch.

And you care about the Knicks. I'm a lifelong fan. This team is in the Eastern Conference semifinals. You legitimately and almost surprisingly insanely care about the Knicks. Are you talking about the attire that I wear to Knicks games, the Rashid Wallace, Ball Don't Lie, T-shirt that I wore when I went together? It's not even so much the shirt as it was, the standing up during free throws and celebrating.

I mean, look, you're the guy who was defended, famously, the most important whistleblower, arguably in American history, and you end up being the guy who is heckling literal whistleblowers, the referees on the court. That's nicely done. It's never occurred to you that you are both of these characters? Is why you get the prizes.

So we talk a lot about whistleblowers and basketball and secrets on this show, and I think there is no one more qualified to discuss the collision of all of these topics than Ben Wisner, who really did have to put his cell phone away when documentarian Laura Poitris first connected him to his future clients, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. All of this because the government itself might be listening in. But one of my favorite things about Ben is that he, like me, thinks a lot. about the unique power of sports.

The thing about fandom, and I'm going to be a little bit sincere right now, if your show can tolerate it, is that it is a place without class or politics where people meet on this common terrain, often with joy, sometimes with anger, sorrow. It's a place to really experience these emotions, intensely with strangers.

And that's why in the 1990s, I was sleeping on the sidewalk outside of Madden Square Garden to share season tickets with people. And it's why my disposable income goes to Nick's playoff tickets. And this fact, when I first found out about it, caught me by surprise.

Mostly, because I had only thought of been through the lens of his day job as the director of the American Civil Liberties unions Center for Democracy. And not through the lens of the team that is up to O'O on the Sixers' right now and whose players we will separate here for the purposes of this episode from Nick's owner James Dolan. But the thing that is so remarkable about the ACLU, in case you're

not familiar, is that it does not fear power. Then Wisner has literally sued the CIA. The ACLU does not abide by party politics, as you will see. Although Newsmax host Michael Savage may disagree. I can't take it any more. The country has been stolen from us by these effing lawyers. It's the lawyers of the ACLU who have destroyed this nation. They're always in the side of the criminal, not the cop. The criminal, not the victim. The illegal alien, not the legal citizen.

The ACLU is a gangster criminal organization. I love riffs about radical lawyers having power. The power that radical lawyers have is to connect. convince conservative federal judges that were right. That's it. That's it. The Supreme Court has been conservative every day of my life. I was born in 1971.

That was the last year there was a liberal majority on the Supreme Court. So whatever power I have derives from my ability to convince people, most of whom were appointed by Republican presidents, that my position is right and someone else's position is wrong, usually the government's position. If that's too much power, you're complaining about the wrong person. In fact, the full video and transcript of that riff from Michael's Savage, which went on to praise European Americans while discussing hellholes like China and India and the disloyalty of immigrants,

was reposted on truth social by at real Donald Trump himself, making news about two weeks ago. Which must have been fun, I thought, for the ACLU and a certain diehard Nix fan to see. I don't think it was fun for all of my colleagues, particularly the one who was named in that transcript, but I will say this, when Trump was kicked off the major platforms in 2021 following January 6th and his attempt to stay in office, we were critical of the platforms. We said he's the president. What he does is newsworthy. We're not better off if we get a sanitized version of him.

We're better off if we get the real version of him. This is information we need about him to make decisions, to make decisions a few years later about whether to elect him. Trump was de-platformed from these major platforms for years. and then he rode back into office. It didn't exactly work. So yes, I do think that on the whole, we're better off seeing the devil with his horns.

It's one of the more interesting and important parts of working for the ACLU, for people who are not familiar with your work. It's that Bill O'Reilly, on the one hand, will say in 2004 that you guys are, quote, the most dangerous organization in the United States of America right now, second next to Al-Qaeda,

which is an actual quote. He said on his radio show. And yet, you are the guys who will infuriate the left because you dare to say that freedom of speech as a principle must apply even to the people whose speech we find devastating and unconscionable on some personal level. In 2003, we represented the National Rifle Association in a First Amendment case in the U.S. Supreme Court, which we won nine to zero, by the way. But this was not a popular position among what you might say. call the progressive constituency and many of our members. But it's something that we need to do. I mean, we think these rights are indivisible.

If you won't defend them for everyone, they won't exist for everyone. And we genuinely believe in freedom of conscience. All of it is to say that your conscience has been consistent in ways that are, I think, unimpeachable, except for one topic. You have had the stones to go after everyone except for who then. Today I put some skin in the game. In 2022, the great New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill, who literally wrote the book on facial recognition, her book is called Your Face Belongs to Us and I recommend it. Yes.

She actually broke the story that Madison Square Garden, also Radio City Music Hall, the various properties owned by Dolan, were excluding not just the lawyers who brought lawsuits against them, but every. lawyer in their firm. And she called me up for comment. And this is where we get the headline Ben chickened out. That's right. I sued the CIA, the NSA. I traveled to Yemen to take on the case of Onwar Al-Laki's family. I've been to Guantanamo. I've been to Moscow. And I told Kashmir Hill she should call the Electronic Frontier Foundation because it's based in San Francisco and they're Warriors fans. They would get exactly the same quote and they'd get it from someone who didn't depend on going to the garden 12 times a year for happiness. Yes.

But you and Noah shamed me. Yeah. Noah Shackman, who we collaborated with on our investigation into Madison Square Garden, of course, with Wired Magazine three weeks ago now. We spotlit James Dolan, who, it turns out, is for you until today the figure you have most feared for entirely selfish reasons. Fear, but let's also give credit where to. grudgingly respected as well.

I actually think his band doesn't suck. We'll get to JD in the straight shot. I really do think some of those tunes are bangers. And look, I mean, so much respect to him. You are brandering. Hang on. For hiring the Great Leon Rose. You're the deputy legal director of the ACLU.

Fourth year in a row that we're in the second round of the playoffs, the only team in the NBA. Finally, a well-run team. And that's why it pains me. much to be here to talk about the surveillance empire that he is constructing at fans' expense. Walking into the garden with you, and we should reveal that we did not know what was going to happen when we went to game five of the Hawks series. We saw the Thunder play the next in the regular season, and that was so fun. Yeah, we got to meet Sam Presti. We got to meet Mike from Mike's Hot Honey.

Sam Presti, the president of the Thunder, who we had pretexty. previously featured on this show because he had recorded a jazz rap album that had been buried lost to the sands of time. He actually came up and acknowledged and finally spoke to me, which had never happened before. It was surreal. And the Mike's Hot Honey guy, if you're wondering, did he send me free Mike's Hot Honey? The answer is, I have so much free Mike's Hot Honey in my house now. I'm coming over. I am impartial in many regards, except for those who want to give me Mike's Hot Honey. But we walk in to Game 5 of the Hawks game, to Madison Square Garden.

And it's after the thing that we had published with Noah and with Wired. And it felt like a bit to walk in with Edward Snowden's attorney. Who could be a better witness if they actually did keep you out, Pablo? Well, for those who are not familiar, when you walk into the garden, right, what you see past the archways with the built-in cameras, which are linked up to this database built since 2018 at the Garden, which runs a facial recognition system. Remember the guy in front of us who, like, recognized, he said, like, are you allowed in here?

Yeah, I told you to wear a COVID mask up until the point so that we wouldn't create a scene before the entrance. But it was just that guy. That guy was like, he doubled-taked and was like, should I not be close to you? Was kind of the vibe I was getting from him? Like, should he separate himself so he can enter? And we had previously been told, you're not on the watch list. That was the finale. of the episode we lived with Noah.

And the question was, once that episode came out, how would the garden deal with anybody involved? We were just waved into the fast plane where we didn't even have to go through metal detectors. And at first, I was offended, I will admit, as the guy who wants to muckrake. But the garden security team, we are told, by the way, they're unbothered by the attention of this.

They're kind of taken it as a victory lap, is the word we're getting. The stuff we're talking about is stuff that we think the public should know, but they're kind of proud of, it seems. But one of the things about walking in to the garden is that you do get to find out who else got allowed in. And I want to actually show a photo of somebody that we spotted. This was from the Thunder game we attended.

This was recently. This is in March. Because we spotted this guy. This being the co-founder of Apollo Global Management. until he was forced out in 2021 due to his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Leon Black. Leon Black of the approximately $170 million he sent Jeffrey Epstein for what he called tax and estate planning advice. Oh, Leon Black's here.

I mean, the thing about this kind of facial recognition system is that it doesn't do much for actual security. If you were some malevolent entity that wanted to cause havoc in the garden, you would know that they have a facial recognition system and you would send someone who could not conceivably be on it in the same way that a terrorist organization would make sure that whoever they want to send onto a plane has pre-check and probably clear. They would pay the premium.

Yeah. These things are for convenience. They're not for security. In fact, they don't help security at all. They might harm it. So no, I mean, I think that the use case for facial recognition at the garden is the one that's being deployed. Right.

It's the question of who does James Dolan want in here because James Dolan has the ability as a proprietor of Madison Square Garden to have who he wants in his house. And for people who don't know about why all of this is doable, how a billionaire who owns a building that feels civic can simply operate it the way that he wants,

despite tax breaks granted by the public, by fans, by the way, who don't necessarily know at all that they're even being watched. How is all of this okay from a big picture perspective? I mean, I think you sort of put your finger on it. You said, his house. If this really were his house, if this were his home where he lived, we wouldn't object to whatever technology he wants to use

to admit the people who he wants in his house and to exclude the people he doesn't want to use in his house. We don't typically need high-tech surveillance to do that. We use invitations and locks and things like. that. The problem here is that we all have a sense that Madison Square Garden and the Nix don't belong to one person. He may be the owner of the team. He may be the owner of the building, but people have grown up fans of this organization since they were children. Remember the team when it belonged to others. Have real identity with being there and with participating in that

fandom. And so we recoil at the idea that someone, however wealthy, gets to treat this as if it is his own house. Yes. I mean, you pointed out things like tax breaks. There's all kinds of advantages that you get from being the steward of what I would say a public property. One of the happiest places on earth as well as what feels like a public space. Yeah, no, that's right. And that's why you're starting to see a fair amount of pushback. So where a lot of the activism has been, you know, this happens at music venues too, at rock concerts. And some of our fellow advocacy organizations have started campaigns to try to get bands, for example, to pledge not to play in places that use this kind of facial recognition technology

to screen their fans. And, you know, it's the usual suspects. You can get rage against the machine and others like that. I don't know that you're going to get Taylor Swift, who may have more legitimate concerns about her security. But I do think that there is a growing sense of unease among the fans and the public about this kind of technological gatekeeping. This is where it gets really interesting to me because what you've described is something that feels away.

But legally, that feeling is not codified, right? Like the idea that fans believe that these are civic trusts. And so the idea that we've been spied on and surveilled without our knowledge and are being kept out because we dare to exercise what feels like a protected right to free speech, the idea that James Dolan is targeting fans and banning them occasionally because they say sell the team, it turns out the First Amendment does not protect that. I can see about half of your fans saying, like, Pablo is making us eat our vegetables right now

and learn about the First Amendment from the ACLU. But let's do it, let's do it. Okay, yes, the First Amendment is a constraint on government, not on private individuals. You could say that James Dolan himself has a First Amendment right of association to decide who he wants to have in his building. There are some limitations on that. He could not keep you out of the building because you're a Filipino-American. So there are anti-discrimination laws that would protect you from being excluded based on your identity.

But based on your political views, no. Essentially, you have your First Amendment right against government interference. And he has his First Amendment right against government interference. And this is why people who are kicked off of Facebook or X or TikTok can complain about a lot of things, but they generally can't complain about the First Amendment. I say generally because if the government coerced a platform to remove somebody, the fact that it was the platform that did the removing would not insulate the government from First Amendment scrutiny. And similarly here, if you had the NYPD or if you had the Trump administration saying to Dolan, here are the people who should not be allowed in because of their speech criticizing the president. Then I think you would have a jawboning First Amendment claim, but it wouldn't be against Dolan.

It would be against the president. It would be against the NYPD. Right. Right. And I should clarify that one of the things that we discovered in the last episode was that this is not done in concert with the NYPD or the FBI. In fact, James Dolan will say... What facial recognition does is looks at your, you know, 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. But the NYPD told us,

your Apollo Tories finds out that the cops don't send any facial recognition data or any other kind of data to the garden. And as for the FBI, multiple MSG insiders tell Wired that there were discussions at one point about incorporating the most wanted lists, but that notion basically fizzled out. And so what we're dealing with is, what does this man, James Dolan, want to do with, again, the thing that feels to him like his house

and the thing that feels to the rest of us like also kind of ours. It's so recursive because the point of this activity is to insulate himself from criticism, which of course now generates our criticism, then we'll generate more exclusions and generate more criticism. So maybe Mr. Dolan, we could all just take a deep breath and pause. Maybe if you let it. up on these kinds of exclusions, people would praise you more and criticize you less.

So I just want to actually highlight a couple of examples. So then what is happening here mechanically inside the garden that we haven't reported yet, but we've been collecting because one of the things, when it comes to James Dolan's enemies list, of which I am for now, not a member, it does involve eavesdropping. It does involve the song that you were referencing before, a song that we've played previously in our coverage, certainly, of James Dolan. You believed and didn't see through the lies he told us all. And they led him to his endless fault. I should have known, I should have known.

You didn't play my favorite line. What's your favorite line? I should have thrown myself across the tracks, stopped him from these vile attacks. Yeah, it's a song about the difficulties of allyship for a man of his generation. You're raised to be loyal to your male friends, and then you're presented with these morally complex situations

where maybe he's not acting right? Right. What of my bro is Harvey Weinstein? He says he didn't know, but he should have known. And in fact, to the point of how careful is James Dolan around the discourse around him, the comments on the YouTube account for JD and the Straight Shot on that song have been disabled. I wish I'd seen them before they were disabled. I wish I could contribute to them, but it turns out abridging our freedom of speech

turns out to extend also to the comments of this video. I can report that we're still allowed to click a thumbs up on the video, which I have personally done, one of the 218 people so far who've done so. So this is the thing about Dolan, is that admittedly, that song is now going to be stuck in my head for the rest of the day. And it's not as bad as I thought it would be. No, it's good. And at the same time, this is the reason why I play it. It's because this is a lawsuit from last September. It was filed by a former Guard and Security Safer.

And the allegation here is related to the Tennessee masseuse who also sued James Dolan in federal court. in early 2024 for sex trafficking, for allegedly setting her up for an encounter with Harvey Weinstein, the subject of that song, and Dolan's lawyers, Ben, have said, quote, absolutely no merit to these claims about Dolan and the alleged encounter with Weinstein.

The accuser's federal appeal was dismissed in December, although she plans to refile. MSG says that WIRED's investigation is, quote, built on false misleading and unverified allegations, including claims drawn from lawsuits filed by rapacious litigators. But now we're in the first of the court.

inside again the personnel, the security personnel of the Garden. This is what the former garden staffer said about John Eversoll, who is the MSG security boss. He said that Eversole allegedly asked his deputy and the staff who filed a lawsuit, quote, to find methods to secretly tape conversations over cellular phones and find the ability to eavesdrop on the complainant slash victim, end quote, basically to bug Dolan's accuser. That could be illegal. It's only an allegation in a long But that could be a violation of the Wiretap Act and almost certainly would be if without the consent of either party to a phone call, someone just started eavesdropping or bugging it for sure. The reporting suggests that Eversole allegedly directed them, quote, to go to B&H Electronics, located at 429th Avenue, New York, New York, to purchase listening and recording devices for Mr. Eversoll and Mr. Dolan. And prior to leaving the office, another security staffer informed Mr. Eversoll, allegedly that they needed to be wary of potential witness tampering, to which Mr. Eversoll responded, quote, just get me the equipment and stop thinking, end quote.

And of course, I'm not here to have you litigate these allegations that you are not representing, but just the idea that surveillance is something that is being contemplated by sports owners in general. The genre we're describing is not surprising, given your understanding of how this stuff is being deployed. No, I mean, you probably read the New Yorker reporting about the surveillance companies that Harvey Weinstein hired to go after his critics. So this is something that the ultra-wealthy are doing right now, which is when people criticize them publicly worse, when people litigate against them, they will hire, you know, former intelligence agents from various. countries to deploy their dark arts and to find blackmail material on their accusers. This is the world we find ourselves in. Right. I mean, to quote Ronan Farrow's New Yorker's story about that case, Weinstein had the agency's target or collect information on dozens of individuals and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focused on their personal or sexual histories.

Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally. These are within the powers of people with disposable income at this point. in ways that I was naive to, frankly, until some of the reporting landed on my laptop screen and I was like, holy shit. And I think this is a sort of distilled version of what we're seeing on a much broader scale throughout the world. I mean, it points to the fact that the most substantial privacy protection that we had in the past didn't come from law.

It always came from cost. It was just too damn expensive to track people granularly. I mean, even if the police wanted to know where I was. was at all hours, and you see this from movies. They had to have teams of agents following me in shifts, sitting in vans with coffee, smoking cigarettes, peeing in jars. Holding like a giant satellite dish in their hand, right? Like listening in? Yeah, I mean, we're all carrying a tracker in our pocket. And so this information is available at scale, basically to any law enforcement agency, with various levels of suspicion that they need. But overall, I mean, we were talking the other

night about surveillance cameras. We don't usually think about walking past a surveillance camera, and for good reason. There's 70 million of them in the U.S., and no one's looking at the footage. It's just being stored somewhere. Yeah, you might collect it forensically. You know, you have the Boston Marathon bombing, and then the FBI can quickly go around to every private entity that has a camera and get their camera from the last 12 hours and use that to help identify who the bombers were. But in general, no one's really looking at it or reviewing it, and it's being taped over or deleted. Well, now we don't have to delete everything. It can be stored in a centralized way.

It could be searched with AI tools for suspicious characteristics. The cameras can be fitted with facial recognition that can be linked to identity databases. So you're basically walking past a digital checkpoint every time you walk past one of these cameras. The cameras can be tooled with video analytics that are trained to spot suspicious individual or group behavior and then report that to actual human beings. And again, all this will be stored forever and create a kind of surveillance time machine. So the world, the architecture of this world, this is what Snowden meant when he said in 2013 that we're sleepwalking into turnkey tyranny, that we're building this architecture of oppression. We haven't built the legal scaffolding that's necessary to protect us from the new ease of surveillance.

And so essentially wake up. Yeah. By the way, just the last check here, I'm getting the latest updates. An estimated 85 million surveillance cameras and counting in the United States is what the recent best estimate is. So one for every three and a half Americans. The question of, again, is this a story about the NICS? Is this a story about the larger surveillance state

that we are existing in without appreciating that we've been here for a while watched? The answer, I think, is a yes and. It is. And one of the things about the idiosyncrasies of the people who have the capacity to own a private surveillance state

that thousands, millions of fans will enter. It's that, yeah, the dude he chose to be his chief security officer who did not respond to detailed questions. This is the aforementioned John Eversoll. We did get to spot him on a more public feed, which is to say that CJ McComb at one point was doing the NBC Sports Postgame. And, oh, look, there he is right next to Jim Dolan over his left shoulder in case he wanted to know what his bearded mug looked like.

We had this moment where the curtain was pulled back during the Super Bowl, and Ring, this surveillance company, runs a Super Bowl ad, and they're proud of it. I thought of you when I saw that. We're going to help find your goddamn dog. And isn't this so cool? One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs.

Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. We can track it through all the kids. the various arts. And of course, they didn't stop for a second to think about how someone sitting at home would regard this. I'm the dog. They're tracking me as I go all around here. So this thing, suddenly this thing that's protecting my house is now linked to a network of everybody else's surveillance thing and searchable by someone sitting in an office who can press the buttons. That is a very creepy feeling for everyone. So like we kind of need these moments where people experience that tingly feeling and say, is this what I want? And we have had.

them. I mean, you know, Baltimore had an experiment, and they contracted with a company to fly surveillance planes over the city of Baltimore for 12 hours a day with the kind of wide area, high-resolution cameras that were used in Afghanistan to track down roadside bombers. And this was recorded 12 hours a day and fed into a database so that it could be rewound by the police every time there was a crime. And people freaked out. And we sued over this. we ultimately won under the Fourth Amendment in federal court. But it was eight to seven, right? This was a close Fourth Amendment case

about whether the government could, without any suspicion, just go up there and collect all this information. But an eye in the sky, I think people do have that visceral reaction to in a way that they don't when that eye is in their pocket. I love and am horrified that we're actively experimenting with what did the founders envision? What did the framers of the Constitution envision when it came to, should this protect something like what you just described, which they could not have imagined? There's a case in the Supreme Court last month where the court is deciding whether the police can get something called a geo-fence warrant.

A crime happened here. We don't have suspicion of any person. Could we go to Google or a phone company and get information about every person who was in that area during a certain period of time? I mean, to me, this is what the founders would have understood as a general warrant. The Fourth Amendment was written so that the King couldn't take all the mail and read it. read it and find the person who was disloyal to the king. That's what this is. Let's take everybody's identity and then sift through it until we find the bad one. And we'll see what the Supreme Court has to say about this.

I think the court has not been so predictable in these cases. And partly that's because the justices themselves carry these phones. And so they feel skid in the game in a way that maybe they didn't during the drug war because they don't ride Greyhound buses with duffel bags of marijuana in them. But they definitely do have phones. And so that's why we've won some pretty landmark cases even from this conservative court on digital privacy. But you're describing the recurring phenomenon

of something really does need to hit home. Yeah. For the justices, for fans, for this stuff to actually matter, have consequences. And so, by the way, on that note that you mentioned about the dogs, Rings Founder has since made an apology tour. Everyone's acknowledged, oh, my God, we spent so much money to get the biggest possible audience

for a thing that blew up in our own faces. and of course the question of pets brings me back to the garden. I believe that one of the more overlooked aspects of our collaboration with Wired is that MSG security boss John Eversoll, according to his own Facebook photos that we found, is a cat person, or at least a cat with hot pink paw covers on a handgun person. And also that his boss, Nixon Rangers owner James Dolan, has such, quote, disdain for dogs, according to a sworn affirmation by a former or VP of MSG security in a civil lawsuit against Eversoll and Dolan's company,

that Eversol allegedly kept canine bomb-sniffing dogs away from Dolan when he was walking around the garden. It brings us now to all-time rangers great Adam Graves in this team video from 2018. In my current role with the blue shirts, I help out on the hockey side, and I'm lucky enough to be a part of all of our community programs. With a smile on my face, I have the joy of introducing you to a new member of our Rangers town community. Ranger. Ranger is going to be training with the organization to become a professional service dog.

For those who cannot see Ranger, how would you describe visually Ranger the dog? I'm seeing an adorable golden laboratory puppy with a harness. Ranger was a thing on social media. Ranger went kind of viral at the time. This was 2018, 2019. Ranger was photographed with players, was on the Jumbotron, had the description,

team's best friend. And if you are now wondering how the team's best friend could have coexisted with the team's owner, good question. Because as one former garden official put it, quote,

there was definitely an effort to keep the dog away from James Dolan. Ranger would often stay beneath the desk of his handler in the office. According to our MSG sources, however, there was a tipping point, which is when a bunch of the models, who often sit in the vicinity of Dolanick games,

saw this adorable Labrador and started asking if they could bring their dogs. Now, MSG did not respond to our request for comment here, but former high-ranking guard and executives recall that right before they were going to introduce Ranger in person, at a game, the team's unofficial dog mascot, as one put it, was abruptly cancelled. Dolan, in other words, had effectively banished an autism service puppy from the arena, in addition to his human enemies. As one former high-level garden employee put it, quote,

remember how the Brady Bunch had a dog that just disappeared because the dog got killed in real life? That sort of what happened to Ranger. He just disappeared. end quote. Now, Ranger is on a farm, living his best life. Well, actually, the following summer, Ranger the Yellow Lab did find his quote, forever home. He was sent up to be a companion dog to a 16-year-old with autism. This is documented on NHL.com. And he stopped appearing.

Anywhere near James Dolan stopped showing up at the garden in general. Yeah, I think the risk here is that we treat this as, as one kind of oddball is idiosyncrasies. And it's kind of funny, hey, I'm not a lawyer who works for a law firm that sued the guard. Did you hear what he did? But on the other hand, your reporting goes a lot beyond that. I mean, the fact that they have people during the game communicating with each other about the fan's chance, going to those sections, taking pictures, doing profiles,

and then sitting around and deciding, is this person red, yellow, or green, essentially. Should we just keep an eye on the person when she's here? or should we keep her out altogether? Now we're getting closer to the ring creepiness. That's where I think every fan should have that tingly feeling and say, is this how we want life to feel? The security technologist, Bruce Schneier, has this great line. He says, think about how you feel

when a police car is driving right alongside you. And now imagine feeling that way all the time. And that's the reality of these systems that are putting different kinds of recording devices, different kinds of identity trackers, sort of surrounding us, again, with this invisible architecture. Now, we don't live in a repressive society like Western China where a whole population is being kept down using these technologies.

But the technologies are the same. And how secure do you feel when a dog-hating multi-billionaire is able to use those technologies to basically control something as civic and collective as our sports fandom. And so we have Zora Mamdani, the mayor of the city, calling our investigation, quote, a point of immense concern that is, quote, deeply troubling, and that his office will, quote, look into.

We're also talking about New York Attorney General, Leticia James, who tells us your Apollo Tori finds out, in an exclusive statement this week, quote, my office is closely reviewing the latest reporting on Madison Square Garden's surveillance tactics. End quote. Joining that chorus is Brad Lander, who is the former city council member,

the Democrat, who ran for mayor last year, currently running for U.S. Congress, who tells us, quote, while the Knicks battle for a championship, while Harry Stiles and Billy Joel played a sold-out crowds, James Dolan is running a private surveillance network at MSG to track, intimidate,

and silence anyone he considers an enemy. What's even more Orwellian, New Yorkers are subsidizing this billion-eastern, bully and his tech toys with a huge property tax break passed by state legislature in 1982. If they can't stop Dolan from spying on us, Governor Hockel and the state legislature should at least end his sweetheart deal from Albany. End quote.

If you could find a way to mobilize that constituency around any issue, it would be an incredibly powerful, you wouldn't even say special interest, because it cuts across so many different kinds of identities and ideologies. And so I do think I'm delighted to come onto this show to talk about this and not a show that's about politics or just aimed at a political audience because I think that sports fans have a huge amount of untapped power to change things. The feeling of what's it like when you know you're being watched. And in fact, they want you to know you're being watched. It brings us to, frankly, the population that has most acutely experienced at the Garden, which has been current and former Nick's beatwriters, you know, speaking of the ring cam

and speaking of having, you know, these eyes and ears in the sky, there is a working assumption in the media room where these reporters file their stories that it might be bucked and that there's the running joke of, you know, when they're criticizing a roster moves, something the team did. They point up at the ceiling and say, did you hear that, James, you know, and it's kind of a joke, it's kind of not. I think all the fans are doing that now. What one Knicks writer said to us, and they asked for remain anonymous for fear of retribution, they told us this story. So a few years back, I had a report, and I get a call from somebody with the Knicks shortly after that and know your sources.

And I'm like, I don't play guess the source. And the person says, no, I know this is your source. And I just say, where is this coming from? Why are you so certain on this? The person says, I know you had a conversation with this executive. I said when? And they said at MSG this time, that hits me what the conversation was. I said, do you know what that conversation was?

I was just offering condolences on the death in his family. And the person said to me, well, would you have offered condolences to that person if he wasn't your source? I said, yes, that's what being a human person. the hang is. I said, how did you know that I spoke to that person? There was nobody around. And the person said to me, you know us. We're always watching. These reporters, by the way, when active conversation is like, should we log into the garden's Wi-Fi? Because they fear all of that data being accessible by the people trying to know everything they can about who they're talking to. I mean, if someone works for the garden is using any kind

of device supplied by the Nix, then it's trivial for the, them to have the metadata, the metadata meaning the information about who you call when and for how long. It's how the government tracks down whistleblowers is by using that kind of metadata. And it's why they have been trying to get journalists metadata so they can find out who their sources are for various stories. It brings us back to that thing about speech of like journalists First Amendment seems obvious. You should be able to criticize and report however you see fit. When you walk into the garden, it speaks to.

to again, this sort of like unwritten detente in which billionaires tolerate journalists because that has been custom. But legally, do they have to? No, they really don't. I mean, the league has some leverage if it wants to use it. And so the NBA could say, you have to let journalists in or, and then they have a bunch of coercive measures that they could take, as with anything else, if they chose to. Of course, the NBA is made up of its owners. And if the owners all want to have these rules where they can keep journalists out, then they are in. able to do it. On the other hand, when the White House says to the AP, you can't come into the building unless you call the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America, the AP can go to court and say,

no, actually, we have a First Amendment right. If you're going to open up the White House to journalists, you can't keep us out on the basis of our speech or our viewpoints, and they can get a victory in that case. And so that's the difference here. The law gives private owners a huge amount of leeway. Now, again, there are other levers if you're a city council person. who's watching this. If you're a mayor, who happens to be a fan of Pablo, or if you're in the state legislature, think, does the garden do the Knicks belong solely to James Dolan? This is where we make this first take for a second. The Mount Rushmore of whistleblowers, you know, Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon papers. It's up there. But Snowden is as impactful, arguably the most impactful whistleblower of all time. Daniel Ellsberg thought that Snowden was a lot more impactful than he was. Ellsberg famously regretted that he waited years too long

before blowing the whistle on the lies that got us into the Vietnam War. In his view, Snowden was a much more consequential whistleblower than he was. The goat. Breaking details on that whistleblower who leaked top secret documents by the government surveillance of Americans. Edward Snowden revealed his identity to the Guardian. He knows he's a hunted man right now. He's trying to find a country that will give him asylum from prosecution.

I sitting my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email. And so look, with all due apologies to Deep Throat to Mark Felt and everyone else on the list, I do want to show a slide from a PowerPoint presentation because Pablo Tore finds out loves PowerPoint presentations, it turns out. This was originally published by The Guardian.

It was June 2013, you know, forever ago. Could you help us? describe, Ben, what we're seeing in this slide? So this was one of the first disclosures that was published in June of 2013. It describes a program called Prism. And this was the mechanism by which the NSA essentially cooperated with the world's major communications and technology companies. This was not the most controversial by any means.

This essentially described a program where the NSA would knock on the front door of these companies and say, pursuant to this authority, you need to turn over customer data. Now, it was very embarrassing for these companies who were global companies to be seen as the arm of the NSA in this way. But what the companies would later learn is that even as the NSA was knocking on the front door, it was breaking into the backdoor. And there are other slides where they show the data centers that connect each other

and circle the one place where data passed unencrypted and where they were siphoning it off and stealing it, which is why many of these big technology companies, at least temporarily, were radicalized against what the NSA was doing. And I want to list the ones, the current providers here. It's Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple. And that arrow just points in the direction of, by the way, email, chat, video, voice, videos, photos, store data, voice over IP, file transfers, video conferences. There's a famous slide from the Snowden Archive that has the motto, Collect It All.

And Collected All was the motto of General Keith Alexander, who was the director of the N. at the time. And really his goal was we are going to build the technology to collect and store the world's communications. The legal authorities will leave to someone else. We'll work that out later. It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Yeah. So let's just collect it all. We'll build massive data centers, the original data centers before it was all AI, and just build this surveillance time machine and store it. Surveillance time machine is a phrase that is just, again, great band name, haunting premise. Yeah, and then there's another slide, which we should look at. These are different mechanism. So Prism is the mechanism for going to the technology companies and demanding user data. Upstream

is something more comprehensive, where the NSA puts interception equipment onto the actual central arteries of the internet, onto the backbone of the internet, and makes a copy of everything that passes through. And so everything that passes in and out of the United States through these fiber optic cables is copied through upstream and then searched for a series of search terms that are never approved by any judge. And if there's a hit, if information that's passing through matches one of those search terms, then that information is redirected and stored in the NSA server. So Upstream really is collected all. Right.

So there's upstream at the top of this. There's Prism on the bottom. And in yellow in a circle, right to the left-hand side, it just says, in bold, you should use both. And it points to upstream and to Prism. In the spirit of, yeah, we want everything. Yeah. Because of course, I guess of course the government won everything. I mean, there is a scene, and I just watched, I rewatch Citizen 4 recently, and it's, for those who don't know, it's a documentary by Laura Poitris, who won the Academy Award for this, the best documentary. And this is a scene inside the hotel room in Hong Kong, where she and Glenn Greenwald and Ewan McAskill from The Guardian are reporting this story, and Edward Snowden, the aforementioned NSA whistleblower, hangs up the phone. Okay, great. Thank you so much. Have a good one. Bye. Let's fix that real quick.

So another fun thing I was telling Laura about this. All of these new VoIP phones, they have little computers in them, and you can hot mic these over the network all the time, even when the receivers down. So as long as this plugged in, it can be listening on you and I hadn't even considered that earlier. But yeah. Okay. There are so many ways.

This could be... Everything that's in here is pretty much going to be on the public record at some point. We should operate on that. The reason why your phone was taken when you show up in the movie, by the way, the reason why he is... I was about to say paranoid, but I think he's actually just aware. What did Joseph Heller say in Catch 22 just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not coming after you? But he's saying in general, unless you're using the most pristine security protocols, you can never assume that you're unwatched by a very well-resourced adversary.

And so I do have permanent record, which is the book, you worked on with Snowden. Another one we should recommend. Absolutely. In part because what you hear from him again, Ed Snowden, he's 30 years old that summer. He's born 83. I was born in 85.

What he articulates in this book, which is so, again, activating for me as a matter of like, should I think along these lines as well, is that he remembers the promise of internet connectivity. The promise of an internet in which it was meant to be a place

where you could speak and share thoughts and not feel like you were being actually watched and surveilled and having all of that information you dared to share used against you in some regard. And that was like a nostalgia that I had frankly forgotten until I revisited, oh, wait a minute, we did used to believe that in the book. Yeah, he talks about how clunky and individualistic

all the websites were because they were made by hobbyists and that how even anonymity wasn't used for abuse. It was used in a way for people just to try on different identities without having to be. So permanent record is this very chilling title for it in a world where nothing is deleted and not just nothing, but no version of your prior self is deleted. You know, in my childhood, the worst things that I ever said and did were observed or observable, if by anyone, only by the people immediately around me. And almost all of them were surely forgotten by now. But kids are growing up in a completely merciless world right now where the dumbest thing they say,

they probably sat on a social network, and it might get them kept out of college if someone digs it out years later. I say all of us to point out that this podcast, this episode is not intended to be a radical leftist terrorist plot to take that Madison Square Garden. In fact, for those who are not familiar with the timeline, when Edward Snowden was becoming the foremost whistleblower

in American history, the president, then was who? Was Barack Obama? And Barack Obama came forward when Snowden first a burge and said to the American people, nothing to worry about here. And the reason that's not how it works is because we've got congressional oversight

and judicial oversight. And if people can't trust not only the executive branch, but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we're a by. by the Constitution, due process, and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here. Now, that ended up being not a defense, but an indictment.

Because, of course, once the public was brought in to the conversation, all three branches of government reversed course. The courts that had approved things in secret struck them down in public. The Congress that had rubber-stamped or ignored passed a law to restrict rather than expand intelligence surveillance authority. Even the executive branch itself instituted a bunch of, of unilateral reforms that Obama had to appoint an expert panel. So again, once sunlight came in, the outcomes were radically different.

And look, as a matter of who should we be concerned about, I think what you're describing here, frankly, are the incentives of an apparatus as opposed to any individual. Absolutely right. And in some sense, you want the apparatus to have some of those incentives. I mean, I want them to care about safety and terrorism. Right. So the problem is not with the people in the intelligence community who want to be aggressive.

The problem is with the people of the other branches who have become so deferential that they're rubber stamps. A judge is the one who can say, I accept your security expertise. But you need to accept my expertise in proportionality because I also know that there's other values at stake. I also know that free speech and privacy are their values. I also know that even having courts give a resolution to this question is important. I mean, so much of what courts do. when it comes to national security is just say, we defer, we're not even going to decide whether this surveillance is legal. You don't even have a right to be in court, and so they

dismiss these cases. And that's what Snowden did. Snowden essentially gave us the evidence that we needed to get a ticket into federal court and get these important questions decided. But this is also, you know, a case of the past being prologged because just last week, Congress voted to extend the law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This is FISA. And for those not familiar, what should my audience know about that? I mean, Section 702 is the authority under which the NSA carried out those programs you put under Slide, prism and upstream surveillance.

The debate over Section 702 is what happens when you are targeting foreigners outside the country who don't have the same rights as people here, but in doing so, you sweep up the communications of people here. And according to the Snowden documents, A majority of the information that's swept up on these programs involves U.S. persons and Americans who do have constitutional rights against privacy. The debate in Congress right now is, you know, when the NSA has collected these hundreds of thousands or millions of records of U.S. citizens through targeting foreigners, should they have to get permission from a judge to look at the Americans' information? The position of the Trump administration, the Biden administration, the Obama administration was no. the position of a bipartisan coalition in Congress that includes some far-right Republicans

and liberal Democrats and groups like the ACLU is yes. And that's what's being debated as we speak in the House of Representatives right now. As of last week, are we where we started? Like, where are we? My view is we need a Snowden about once every decade. And that's because secrecy allows the government to do things that we can't ever know about.

Trump may be an exception. He seems to do everything out in the open. He illegally fires missiles at alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean and then tweets the images almost as a snuff film. Yeah, movie trailer style sometimes. Right. But in general, we depend on investigative journalists. And investigative journalists depend on sources or whistleblowers to compete with the government over its monopoly on what we get to know about the government's activities. And that is vital. Almost everything we know. about the government's misconduct in the post-9-11 War on Terror, we know because people inside government shared it with journalists, not because the Senate Intelligence Committee ferreted it out through hearings, not because a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought it from a court, although some of it, almost all of it, we know, because courageous whistleblowers shared it with intrepid reporters,

and they shared it with the public. And if that is the case, then we hear a Pablo Torre finds out, for the record, are interested. Well, now that you're Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalists, you might want to use a technology called SecureDrop that will allow people to make anonymous encrypted submissions to you. The New York Times uses it, the New Yorker uses it, and others. And I'm proud to announce that because Ben Weisner has just mentioned it,

of course we are also doing that. I've done my part. Now let me into the garden, Mr. Dolan. Well, let's get back to that. You know, when it comes to the Nix and comes to Madison Square Garden, And it is interesting, right? Because a similar dynamic is at play. Will the public give a shit about this case study

that seems to, if nothing else, condition us to some acceptance, to some inertia of political will when it comes to take our public money and spy on us because, God damn it, the Knicks might make the finals. Maybe the Knicks and I will be able to model constructive disagreement on this.

Ben? at the risk of jinxing everything, including your access to the garden, I don't think you can fix him. Then maybe we can just tolerate each other's differences. Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Walter Averoma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Loman, Rob McCray, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor,

and Chris Tuminello. Studio engineering by RG Systems, sound design by Andrew Bersick, Digital Strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern. Beam song, as always, by John Bravo. And we'll talk to you next time.