Madison Square Garden Bans Fan After Surveillance System IDs Him as a Critic of Its CEO

Madison Square Garden is home to the New York Knicks, one of the most storied performance venues in the country, and a surveillance state dystopia. Since 2018, the venue has been equipped with facial recognition tools used to identify people deemed to be potential security threats. But it also has seemingly become the go-to tool to keep anyone critical of MSG CEO James Dolan out of the space. The latest victim of MSG’s all-seeing eye is a person who made a t-shirt critical of Dolan years ago and never even wore it to the venue.

According to The Verge, a Seattle resident named Frank Miller was in New York earlier this week for his parents’ wedding anniversary, and the family planned to attend a show at Radio City Music Hall, a venue owned by MSG. Miller was immediately pulled aside by security after scanning his ticket, handed a document informing him that he’s banned, and asked to leave.

So, what did Miller do to get banned? According to the account that he was given by staff, as reported by The Verge, he was told that he was involved in an incident in 2021 that landed him on the do-not-enter list. The problem with that explanation, though, is that Miller says he hasn’t been to a Madison Square Garden venue in more than a decade.

Instead, it seems it was something he made that got him banned. Miller does graphic design, and after former Knicks staple Charles Oakley was forcibly removed from MSG in 2017—allegedly at the behest of Dolan, of whom Oakley had been publicly critical—Miller made a t-shirt that read “Ban Dolan” in the style of the Knicks logo. A friend of Miller’s wore that shirt to MSG in 2021 and very publicly got kicked out and banned from the venue for it.

The fact that Miller made the shirt was apparently enough to get him put on the venue’s ban list should he ever show up, which he finally did about four years after his friend got the boot. In a statement to The Verge, an MSG representative claimed that Miller had “made threats against an MSG executive on social media and produced and sold merchandise that was offensive in nature,” and that his behavior was “disrespectful and disruptive and in violation of our code of conduct.”

Miller is just the latest in a long line of people who have seemingly drawn the personal ire of Dolan and, as a result, been banned from the venues he owns. In 2023, New York Attorney General Letitia James opened an inquiry into Dolan’s alleged blacklist of enemies, which at the time reportedly included “thousands of lawyers” from as many as 90 firms who were involved in litigation against Dolan and MSG. There are also fans who have been critical of Dolan on social media who now have difficulty getting past security to attend shows and games.

Most of the enforcement of Dolan’s bans appears to stem from the facial recognition technology utilized by venue security, which helps ID people who are on the ban list. But based on Miller’s case, there seems to be some surveillance beyond that at play. It would seem that the only way Miller would even end up on MSG’s radar is if someone was scraping social media, keeping tabs on voices critical of Dolan, and putting them in the system to keep them out of future events. But surely a billionaire wouldn’t be so thin-skinned as to turn his venues into retribution machines against his critics… right?