Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Government Is Spying on College Football Games

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

FREE SPEECH FRIDAYSUPPORT ME ON PATREON!!!! Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co      The Department of Homeland Security has deployed a powerful surveillance tool at college football games, and that's not the only place where they're using it. If you were one of the thousands of people who attended the Old Miss vs Georgia game a few weeks ago, a DHS system could have been monitoring you. At that game and others schools have been using a little-known Department of Homeland Security platform called the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN). FOIAball, a newsletter reporting on college football and public records, got a hold of documents related to this surveillance effort.  All of this information and monitoring is now being fed into facial recognition systems, as those systems of surveillance expand. And, HSIN isn't just being used at concerts and game days, it's not being deployed against protesters, activists, and peaceful crowds. Story on FOIAball: https://www.foiaball.com/p/dhs-college-football-hsin-surveillance-ole-miss-ohio-stateFollow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz       https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0      https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz 

The Department of Homeland Security has deployed a powerful surveillance tool, and they're using college football games to trial a bunch of really scary surveillance tech, all without you knowing. Welcome back to Free Speech Friday, my series covering the fight for free speech, free expression, and civil liberties online. It's fall, which means everyone's watching college football. I'm not really a sports fan myself, but it's always fun to take in a game. I'm from Colorado.

I went to state school, so when I go back home, I'll catch a CU football game now and then. But nowhere is college football bigger than in the South. And if you were one of the thousands of people who attended the Old Miss First Georgia football game a few weeks ago, a Department of Homeland Security system was monitoring you. At that game and others at it this season, schools have started to use a little known Department of Homeland Security Information Sharing Platform called H-S-I-N, which stands for the Homeland Security Information Network. It's basically one big centralized hub for a slew of long. enforcement agencies. Foya Ball, a newsletter reporting on college football and public records, got a hold of documents related to this surveillance effort. According to an event action plan obtained by Foyaball, HSIN was working with at least 11 different law enforcement departments

on the ground during the Old Miss Georgia football game. HSIN is not new. It's an integral part of the vast surveillance arm of the U.S. government. Foyaball writes, quote, left unchecked since 9-11, supercharged by technological innovation, HSIN can subject any crowd to almost constant monitoring, looping in live footage from CCTV cameras, from drones overhead, and from police body cams and cell phones. HSIN has worked with private businesses

to ensure access to cameras across cities. They collect store and mine vast amounts of personal data, and they have been used to facilitate facial recognition searches from companies like Clearview AI. It's one of the least reported surveillance networks in the country, and it's been building this platform on the back of college football. According to a DHS report from 2006, HSIN maintained databases of suspicious activities

and then mine those databases for patterns. Quote, the HSIN database can be mined in a manner that identifies potential threats to homeland or trends requiring further analysis, the report said. In another memo from 20, talking about the type of personal information that HSIN can collect and disseminate, the report says that they can essentially collect information on any, quote, individuals who may pose a threat to the United States, which is what, like everyone now?

And the system is not some niche thing. A 2023 DHS Year in Review report disclosed that there was an average of over 150,000 logins to HSIN per month from law enforcement and others with access. And while they're rolling out the system at college football, games this season, it doesn't stop there. Hs. I.N. operated at the Boston Marathon, Lala Palooza, the World Series, the Super Bowl, and even the presidential primary debates last year. And while this tech is starting out at these major events, especially sports events, it's also being used to monitor pro-Palestinian protests on campuses. In November 2023, students at Ohio State University were protesting Israel's genocide in Gaza when over 100 protesters blocked the entrance to the school president's

office for a short period of time. Well, it turns out now that all of those protesters were being watched and monitored in real time through HSIN, a DHS report revealed. The school was using HSIN to surveil all active protesters on campus and even integrated the school's CCTV cameras to live stream footage of the protests while it was happening to HSIN Connect. Even as far back in 2019, Georgia Tech began leveraging HSIN. A 2019 newsletter quoted a Georgia Tech police officer on the use of real-time video surveillance on game dates. They were gathering all this surveillance footage from both stationary cameras and cell phones throughout these football games. Foya Ball also discovered that in 2023, HSIN Connect operated during University of Central Florida's home football games throughout that entire season. In that case, both security camera and drone detection system feeds were looped.

into the platform for real-time monitoring. And of course, all of this information collected at all these football games is now being fed into facial recognition systems as those systems of surveillance expand. A 2024 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that was obtained by Foyabal discovered that U.S. Marshals were granted access to HSIN for football games, where they requested, quote, indirect facial recognition searches through state and local entities,

all using Clearview AI. And while it would be normal to assume that these feeds and this level of monitoring, exists only during these football events, like, you know, during the game, DHS can easily continue to access and tap into the live feeds the HSIN provides after the game is over, since they seemingly don't ever go dark. Matthew Gori Glea, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Boyabal, quote, I'm worried about mission creep. These arrangements are made for a very specific purpose, but they could become the apparatus

of much greater state surveillance. This pipeline of surveillance technology being trialed at football games and sporting events or even concerts before being rolled out against the public more broadly is not new. Long before HSIN showed up at all of these college football games this year, law enforcement and private security were already treating pretty much any stadium event, especially sporting events, as laboratories for new surveillance systems. They basically use these events to see what they can get away with. and they like to trial their systems on these crowds who think that they're just there for a show or a game and they're not thinking that much about surveillance since they're doing a leisure activity. For instance, back in 2001, fans walked into the Super Bowl in Tampa that year, thinking that they were just going through a normal security checkpoint.

But they were actually walking into one of the earliest mass facial recognition experiments in the United States. Hidden cameras at the turnstiles scanned the faces of around 100,000, and ran them against databases from local police, the FBI, and state agencies. Most of the people in that stadium had no idea that they had been entered into this face scanning system until reporters and groups like the ACLU exposed it. Activists called this system, quote, a computerized police lineup imposed on everyone who wanted to just watch the big game that day. The Olympics have worked the same way at a bigger scale.

For the 2012 London Games, officials openly described the security plan at a security plan as the largest peacetime security operation in modern UK history, with tens of thousands of police, soldiers, and private security staff backed by an enormous CCTV and data infrastructure, blanketing the entire city. Biometric systems helped control access to the Olympic Park, with specialized contractors installing what amounted to one of the largest secure access and identity systems

in the country at that time. And this pattern extends beyond sports into concerts and other entertainment events as well. Pretty much any big event at a stadium now is a test case for the surveillance state. For instance, in 2018, Taylor Swift's security team installed a kiosk at her Rose Bowl show that played a bunch of rehearsal clips. Fans lined up to watch the videos of Taylor rehearsing and they were smiling at the screen. At the same time, a hidden camera in the kiosk snapped their faces and piped their images

to a command center in Nashville where they were checked against police databases of of problematic individuals or alleged stalkers. This means that once again, thousands of people had their biometric data harvested without meaningful notice, thinking that it was just some fun fan engagement experience. Madison Square Garden venues went even further. They built a facial recognition system allegedly

for security threats, but they used it to literally ban the owner of Madison Square Garden's enemies, which is so crazy. This is like one of the craziest stories. Their facial recognition systems were used to enforce an attorney exclusion list that literally just blocked any lawyers whose law firms were suing Madison Square Garden from attending events at Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, and other affiliated venues. This same system flagged and banned a fan who was wearing a t-shirt that was critical of the team's owner. When the fan tried to enter the venue wearing this t-shirt, security intercepted him at Radio City Music Hall and informed him that he was barred from every Madison Square Garden property.

So I hope you can see how these systems can be weaponized and used to punish people and enforce corporate grudges or viewpoint discrimination. In the past couple years, especially, biometric systems are just becoming more and more normal as part of the stadium experience. Major U.S. venues now use facial recognition or facial authentication for ticketing lines and even concession payments. It's all sold to people as a way to move fans in and out of gates and make checkout lines faster. And again, because all of this technology is presented to people, through the lens of consumerism and leisure, people are willing to go along with this tech. I went to an event recently that had this checkout system

where you could. I think it was scan your face or scan your palm. And it drove my friends crazy because I refused to do it. I was like, no, I don't want to scan my face to skip the line. These systems link your biometric identity to your seat location,

your purchases, your movements, and every action you take with systems like HSIN. And none of this data stays contained inside these stadiums. Once facial recognition and live feed aggregation systems are tested and normalized on fans and concert goers, the same tools are then used in city streets or in political spaces. Police already deploy live facial recognition tools and similar systems at large public gatherings like festivals and parades. They scan crowds in real time and compare that data to watch lists. And we all know now how loose those watch lists are. Things as benign as retweeting the wrong Charlie Kirk meme or criticizing capitalism can get you.

on one of these watch lists. If you haven't, please watch my video on NSPM 7. I'm going to link it here. Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and their surveillance technology oversight project have spent years documenting how government face recognition databases are growing and how those systems get hooked into other surveillance infrastructure. HsIN plugging college football cameras into a national surveillance platform is just the latest development. Proponents of these police systems always claim that this is all just for safety. But they ignore the very real harm that these systems already cause. Facial recognition is not some neutral, flawless technology.

Studies from NIST and other academic research centers have shown how major facial recognition algorithms have significantly higher error rates for people of color, women, and disabled people. In some cases, giving false positive rates 10 to 100 times higher than for cisgender white men. The ACLU of Minnesota and others reported error rates for dark, skinned women that hit double digits, while error rates for light-skinned men remained under 1%. When you drop these deeply biased and flawed tools into high-pressure policing context, these error rates can have devastating consequences. A recent Washington Post investigation documented at least eight known cases in the U.S. where facial recognition matches led to wrongful arrests.

People jailed for days or in some cases months based on bad facial recognition matches from surveillance footage now have permanent records. The Washington Post noted that most of these people were black. Police departments told the public that facial recognition hits were just investigative leads, but officers treated them as irrefutable proof. For instance, if some facial recognition system mislabeled you at a stadium environment that's super packed and crowded and chaotic, that data can then be piped into a national system alongside suspicious activity reports, and the stakes become very high. You can see how this stuff can spiral out of control and you could end up arrested for something that you never did. And if you aren't a person with a lot of means to get out

of that, you could literally end up in jail or at least losing your job because you end up locked up in the process. Companies like Clearview AI have already scraped tens of billions of photos from social media and the public web to build their facial recognition databases that they market to law enforcement and government clients. Clearview AI just reached a nationwide class action settlement over alleged violations of Illinois' biometric privacy law. I think the case shows that these companies will do anything to build their facial recognition databases without consent. And again, a face scan captured when you walk into a football game

can easily be cross-referenced against these kinds of flawed databases. And when we don't fight back against these systems, there's literally no meaningful or comprehensive way to opt out of any of it. And I don't think most football fans or concert goers even realize this is happening. One recent survey found that nearly half of people had no idea that major sports and music venues were using facial recognition at entry points, even after their faces were scanned. They learned about it through news coverage instead of clear disclosures. Also, it's not really the point, but I can't explain how dystopian and dark all of this stuff is. Like, concerts and sporting events are supposed to be these spaces where people can let loose and cheer and you're hanging out with your friends and, I don't know, getting excited about your favorite teams.

Like they're meant to be these spaces for collective joy and self-expression and I don't know, maybe getting a little too drunk and I'm not excusing any bad behavior. But I think just constant facial tracking and surveillance pushes people to censor themselves and feel like they're watched or just stay home. So I think there's this just broader chilling effect. And I can't stress enough how none of this stuff is keeping us safer. Big events somehow managed to operate safely long before live face tracking and 24-7 federal data. access became normalized. Even now, police and venue operators rarely produce transparent evidence that facial recognition at the gate is what stopped some sort of real-time attack. While we already have detailed reporting on the ways that these systems generate false accusations and rights

violations. So all of this is to say that, you know, when the DHS is sort of building this HSIN system on the back of college football, or when these concert venues hide their facial recognition cameras inside fan kiosks or you know when arenas start to use biometric scans to ban critics or lawyers we really need to fight back and start talking about this stuff these major cultural and sporting events are being used to normalize this world where showing your face in public means automatic consent to a massive biased surveillance apparatus so we all really need to start advocating for our privacy and demanding transparency into these systems i'd love to see all of these systems like HSIN completely banned, but at the very least, we should force the government and

these corporate entities to enact strict limits on facial and biometric surveillance. A good place, if you want to start to get involved in this stuff, is to support organizations like the surveillance technology oversight project. And of course, I will be keeping you guys in the loop on all of this stuff as well as I continue this series. One great initiative that I want to point out right now is actually happening in New York City, which you should support this initiative, even if you don't live in New York,

because New York is such a test ground for all of this horrible dystopian tech. And it's called Ban the Scan. You can go to ban the scan.org. It's this effort to get a slew of laws. I think it's like seven or eight laws passed that would ban this type of technology in schools at sports games

and just give people back their privacy. So definitely check that out. Also, as I'm sure you can imagine, doing this work and covering these issues is not something the advertisers like to support. So my entire livelihood and my ability to produce content and videos like this is thanks to you. If you want me to be able to continue to call these things out, please buy a paid subscription to my Patreon linked below or my substack newsletter, usermag.com.

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