Nothing to Hide (from James Dolan)?

Last month’s revelation that James Dolan has been using facial recognition software to ban people from his arenas almost sounds like a parody of Dolan’s infamous brand of power-hungry petulance. If you missed it: Back in December, a mom chaperoning her daughter’s Girl Scout troop to see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall was turned away at the door. The facial recognition technology had identified her as an attorney who worked at Davis, Saperstein, & Solomon, a New Jersey-based law firm that is engaged in a case against Dolan’s company. Even though the woman was not involved in that case — and doesn’t even practice law in New York — her place of employment was still enough to get her banned from Radio City for incurring the wrath of James Dolan.

Dolan, who has owned the Knicks, Rangers, and Liberty since 1999, is known to feud with fans and the media and even former players for every petty slight, even kicking people out of the arena for telling him to sell the team. So this story is certainly in character for Dolan, and while the technology employed certainly adds a dystopian tinge, he still defended it: “Facial recognition has been going on for the last 10,000 years*… When you go home and your family sees you, they recognize your face. So this is just the electronic version of it. It’s technology.” But clearly we’ve reached a new frontier when we’re turning away Girl Scout troop leaders because a computer knows where you work.

*What does Dolan think was happening 10,001 years ago???

Whenever surveillance technology is debated, whether it’s the National Security Agency’s collection of vast troves of metadata, or a major technology platform recording users keystrokes, or the rise of facial recognition in public places, you hear people talking about having “nothing to hide.” Sometimes it’s people in charge saying some version of “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” from these new technologies. But even more disconcerting is how often you will hear ordinary people say versions of the same thing: “I have nothing to hide, so who cares if they wanna look at my emails?”

Hopefully a story like this exposes how absurd that sentiment is. The woman in this story didn’t do anything wrong — she didn’t do anything at all! She just happens to work at a law firm representing someone Dolan doesn’t like, so Dolan decided to punish her. He is trying to discourage law firms from taking cases that might oppose him, and he made his intent quite explicit: “You should stay away until we settle the argument we have, because you’re confrontational with your suit.”

It’s not hard to imagine this being a pretty effective deterrent. Any lawyer who happens to be a Knicks or Rangers or Liberty, or someone who might just want to attend an event with their family at Madison Square Garden or Radio City Music Hall, or someone who might just work at the same firm as someone who might, will likely think twice before taking on a case against Dolan now. 

When people say they have “nothing to hide,” they are usually imagining trained spies looking for threats to national security or corporate espionage. I’m not involved in anything like that, they think, so this really doesn’t concern me.

But it’s often much, much stupider than that. Often it’s just some rich idiot who’s mad about a lawsuit. Facial recognition software and mass data collection and other forms of technological surveillance are inevitably going to be wielded by capitalists in power, which means that petty, insecure rich people will use them to settle whatever silly personal grievances they have. It’s all just bullying, often over the stupidest stuff imaginable. We saw this with the way Daniel Snyder used his employees’ emails to embarrass his enemies; we saw this when Amazon tried to smear the employees who were organizing a union; and now we’re seeing this with Dolan deploying facial recognition to ban Girl Scout moms from his venues.

This is not to downplay the threat the surveillance state poses to political radicals. Clearly the people most often targeted by these technologies are politically unpopular, or of marginalized identities. Think of COINTELPRO’s war on Black radicals, or the NSA’s targeting of Muslim groups. Obviously abuses like these are the main reasons to oppose the use of surveillance technology.

But I worry that by focusing on these stories we create the false impression that ordinary people — who usually just mind their own business and stay away from fringe political groups — are protected from the damage wrought by these technologies. And this James Dolan story shows that you can never really be sure you won’t end up on the hit list of some rich asshole. So even if you have no sympathy for the typical targets of surveillance technology, we should still be wary of their uses, and how much power they give to rich assholes.