LifeSiteNews – by Emily Mangiaracina
NEW YORK (LifeSiteNews) — An attorney was kicked out of Radio City Music Hall last month when facial recognition technology identified her employer as among several banned from the venue owner’s holdings, eliciting privacy concerns.
Kelly Conlon had already had her ticket scanned and had cleared a metal detector when she was stopped inside the New York City hall, where she was chaperoning her 9-year-old daughter’s Girl Scout troop trip to see the Radio City Christmas Spectacular.
“They said my firm was on the attorney exclusion list and escorted me out,” Conlon told the New York Post, which reported that she was then “forced to spend 90 minutes wandering around outside in the rain” as her daughter watched the show with her troop.
Conlon told NBC 4 News that she remembers hearing “woman with long dark hair and a gray scarf” over a loudspeaker about the time she walked through the metal detector.
Shortly afterward, security staff stopped Conlon to ask her to verify her name and show her identification before escorting her out.
Conlon works for the New Jersey law firm Davis, Saperstein and Salomon, which is among several firms whose employees have been banned from Madison Square Garden (MSG) Entertainment venues due to their litigation against the holding company, of which James Dolan is executive chairman.
Conlon herself is not involved in any lawsuits against Dolan’s company, although her firm is engaged in personal injury litigation against a restaurant owned by MSG Entertainment.
She is not the only lawyer to have been ousted from one of the company’s venues. The New York Post reported Wednesday that attorney Alexis Majano, who works for a firm that recently sued MSG Entertainment, was stopped on an escalator on his way into a Knicks game. Like Conlon, Majano was not involved in his firm’s lawsuit against the company.
Majano was also detected with facial recognition and forced to leave after confirming his employer and identity.
MSG quietly began implementing facial recognition technology years ago, ostensibly for security reasons, and it is unclear when the tech was installed, according to The New York Times. Its algorithm compares images captured by cameras to “a database of photographs” to identify visitors, raising concerns about the security of such stored images and how they are used.
“In a lot of places, we will see facial recognition framed positively as just an extension of video surveillance,” Clare Garvie, an associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law Center, said in 2018. “But the reality is it is a way to require, or in secret, have everyone in a crowd show their papers, essentially, to compare them to a big enough database.”
MSG has argued that its facial recognition screening is designed to prevent antagonism in its venues, saying in a Tuesday statement that “attorneys from firms pursuing active litigation against the company” are banned from attending events at its venues “until that litigation has been resolved,” adding that such “litigation creates an inherently adversarial environment.”
However, Sam Davis, a partner at Conlon’s law firm, slammed MSG’s policy as “absurd.”
“This whole scheme is a pretext for doing collective punishment on adversaries who would dare sue MSG,” Davis told NBC 4 News.
He pointed out that the company’s license with a liquor authority “requires them to admit members of the public unless they’re people who would be disruptive, who constitute a security threat.”
“Separating a mother from her daughter and Girl Scouts that she was watching over and to do it under the pretext of protecting any disclosure of litigation information is absolutely absurd,” Davis continued.
“The fact that they’re using facial recognition technology to do this is frightening. It’s just un-American to do this,” Davis said.
The attorney has argued that MSG’s facial image database is a violation of privacy that may be grounds for a lawsuit.
“If we do sue, we’re going to sue to prevent [MSG CEO James Dolan] from using this weapon against the public. It would be a privacy cause of action,” Davis told the New York Post on Wednesday.
“I think the public should know what [Dolan] does with those images once he captures them,” Davis added. “[The suit] would get to the bottom of that because someone with his motives should not be the flag bearer for this new era of privacy invasion.”
Not only private venues, but governments are ramping up the use of facial recognition technology across the world under security pretexts. For example, Spanish police announced implementation of an automatic facial recognition tool, dubbed ABIS (automatic biometric identification system), that uses AI to identify suspects from a database currently under development.
Earlier this year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that his government hopes to mandate all travelers use a form of “digital identity documents” complete with facial recognition biometric data for pre-boarding flights.
Miami International Airport (MIA) also announced this year that it will equip all of its boarding gates with biometric facial recognition technology by 2023 in what will be “the largest implementation of biometrics in any U.S. airport.”
Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute and a leading expert on China, told LifeSiteNews that the intrusive biometric screening technology on its way to MIA is reminiscent of similar tools widely in use by China’s Communist regime.
“I, for one, do not want to live in a hi[gh]-tech digital dictatorship of the kind that we see in China, where everyone is tracked throughout the day on surveillance cameras, not to mention on their own phones,” Mosher said.
“We are perilously close to that already,” he added, arguing that the U.S. needs to implement “robust privacy laws” in order “to protect us from this kind of intrusive government surveillance.”