The Human Cost of Surveillance

This show is supported by Outshift, Cisco's incubation enngine Today's AI agents operate in silos, limiting their true potential. We've been focused on building bigger, smarter models, but scaling up is just one approach to reach super intelligence together, we need to do more We need to scale out And we actually have a blueprint from seventy thousand years ago Humans didn't just get smarter individually, the cognitive revolution transformed society because we began sharing knowledge, goals, and innovation aggents are now at that same inflection point They can connect, but they can't think together. That's why Outshift by Cisco is building the internet of cognition. transforming AI from isolated systems into orchestrated superintelligence By creating an open, interoperable infrastructure, Outshift by Cisco is enabling agents and humans to share intent, context, and reasoning Cognitive evolution for agents is here Explore the internet of cognition at outshift. com Oshift. com Brian. Before we start, two quick things. If you've been enjoying listening to the show, we would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your podcast app of choice. It really helps us reach more people. And second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy or politics that you would like me, Zoe, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to uncannyvalley atwired. com It doesn't matter how big or how small We want to hear from you and get your answers Okay Oo the show I'm a little tired but it's because I got to see Leono Messi playlayed soccer last night and score a goal on a penalty kick. That's really fun It was a friendly of Argentina versus Iceland. You'll never guess who won. I literally won't. No. No it was Argentina, sorry. Got it. Okay. So is that an obvious thing? They're very good at soccer. Cool, that's so nice for them. happappy for them Welcome to Wired's Uncenny Valley. I'm Zoe Schaer, Director of Business and indndustry. And I'm Brian Barret, exxecutive editor On today's show, we're discussing Apple's key releases from their annual deeveloper conference, especially the company's long awaited AI makeover for Siri It's far from their first attempt, but Is it gonna to stick this time? We're also taking an early look at the SpaceX IPO this week, which is slated to become the world's largest IPO of all time We'll get into who is slated to benefit the most, Elon Musk, who is already the world's richest band, but on track to become even richer, and why you might find yourself among the investors without even realizing it And in case you missed it, Wired reporters recently uncovered that meteta had silently embedded code that would power a face recognition system for its smart classes in the MaAI app on millions of people's phones. A day after reported that story, better remove the code. We'll talk about how all that unfolded And later in the show, for all of the basketball fans who've been glued to the NBA finals, we have a special guest who will tell us about his investigation into Madison Square Garden's surveillance system. Zoe, another week that we get to talk about a developer conference. I know, Leah's away and wow, have you taken advantage of that situation? Oh yeah. no, yeah. I'm pushing through. You were so thrilled about Google IO This week we've got WWDC. I will say, slightly more excited because Apple, as you and I have discussed, many times, bit of a laggard in the AI race. and I feel like this was their opportunity to tell the world what has changed since the last developer confference For people who aren't familiar with WWDC, this is Apple's annual event where it gathers a bunch of developers from all over the world. and they announced upcoming releases and changes to their software for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch Mac this year, the biggest announcement which as we said, has been their biggest announcement for the last couple of years was around Siri. They're rebranding it as Siri AI Sir was always an AI product, but now they're for real serious about it And it's a ground up rebuild or so they're buildilling it of Apple's Voice assistant This version of Siri will be powered by the next generation of Apple Intelligence, which is Apple's personal AI system All of this probably sounds familiar. And that's because we've heard it before. Apple's Senior VP of software Egineering Craig Federigi We first announced Apple Intelligence back in twenty twenty four at the WWC keynote We are embarking on a new journey to bring you intelligence that understands you And there are already some really impressive chat tools out there that perform a vast array of tasks using world knowledge But these tools know very little about you or your needs And they would still not for some time. Again, in twenty twenty five More promises for even more powerful AI or really AI that was powerful at all and hinting at a rebirth for Siri continuing our work to deliver the features that make Siri even more personal We're making the generative models that power Apple intntelligence more capable and more efficient Zoe, this is so much like when you know you and I are both reporters and editors to a certain extent. But it's very familiar when you are in a situation where you're going to your editor and saying, I'm just going to do a little more reporting. I have made so much progress on this story. I just need like another week or two for more calls. Mayy bit more time, just a little more time. I will say, distracted by how smooth Craig's voice sounds, he must practice So much for that. Well, and this is an audio medium, but his hair is also famously, I think, the best hair in Silicon Valley. So Craig has a lot going for him., justust not Si capabilities But the changes brought by both of these announcements were underwhelming, to say the least. And to say the most, we should point out that about a month ago, Apple agreed to pay a settlement of two hundred fifty million dollars for a class action lawsuit that basically said that Apple Intelligence is not that intelligent. It's not living up to the promises that Apple made. So it's sort of a situation of, you know, fool me once, shame on me, Fool me twice, shame on you, Fool me three times. Go to Google and make a deal so you can actually be intelligent. Exactly. So yeah, that's what has happened. Now Apple is going to rely largely on Google Gemini to help power Apple intelligence under the hood. Ze, what do you make of that? Yeah, I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense, like frrontier models are really expensive and difficult to build. Google has already done it pretty successfully. I think if you look at say enterprise coding models, Gemini is not the best of the best, but in a lot of other ways, it is quite cutting edge And so yeah, it makes sense these two companies have worked together before to great effect for both of them. I was curious and have been kind of chatting with sources at both companies to see like is this partnership long term? Like H Apple kind of thrown in the towel permanently and just said like this is fine. We'll rely on it, or are they furiously working in the background to try and build up their frontier capabilities and eventually make Siri run on Apple technology start to finish People are, as you might expect, feel very tight liipped about that and they haven't really said like what the long term future of this product is going to be. I'll say two things that if you dig a little deeper, not that much deeper, but a little deeper into the documentation from the conference Two things really stand out to me about Apple's approach to AI in this snapshot moment One is a sort of relentless focus on on device AI. Yeah. So where Apple has been putting in time and work in a way that's showing publicly right now is findinding ways to make as much of the AI capabilities as possible happen on your device so that it doesn't go back to Apple. No one knows what you're doing or that there is a privacy angle to it The other thing that was interested to me, also privacy is that for the first time And the reason why Google makes a good partner is that Apple has something called Private Cloud compomute. They rolled it out two years ago. It is a fancy very technical way to be a privacy preserving AI service. It has made a deal and worked with Google and NVIidia to make private cloud compute work on Google Cloud So previously all of these things happened on Apple Cloud. now you've got the infrastructure to support as well, which I suspect Google was in a better position to provide than some of the other competitors that would have been on their radar. Yeah, so this was kind of my takeaway for what is their big value proposition. In addition to saying, this version of Syria is actually gonna to work and be intelligent. They're also saying in parentheses, unlike all the other companies, we are really focused on privacy. And I think in this moment where there's a lot of open questions around If you are a lawyer and you're speaking to a chatpot, are those conversations private or are they discoverable if there's a court case And by the way, they are discoverable they are. So that's not an open question. Yeah. But like basically, how private are your communications with chatbots? And the reason that this is so critical is people aren't just having work conversations. They're using the same technology to kind of help with their homework as they are to have very private, you mental health conversations or what have you. this idea that, you know if you're using an Apple device, you can trust a little more that it's just staying on your device. It's not bouncing around to different places. It can't be intercepted as easily. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I will say like Apple has gotten This is a stand that they have taken again and again. And I think that while it has gotten them in some hot water, for example, when they refused to put a back door on an iPone that would have allowed like the FBI to hack into the phone of someone who had committed a very serious crime, they've kind of stuck to their guns overall and been like, no, privacy is our differentior and I will say having talked to a lot of people at that company, they really seem to live it and believe it there, even though there are clearly trade offs at times. Yeah, it's definitely predated AI, the privacy focus. and it also A placeays of their strengths in other ways too are rather plays to their weaknesses in the ways like AI Siri AI is going to be better are reporters who have played with it a little bit have indicated, yeah, it can do things now. like you can actually have a back and forth conversation with it context from your emails and messages and photos and sort of know more about you again all than the context of your advice. but it It's really table steak stuff, right? It's series going from being annoying and bad to probably been basically usable So you need something else in there. Exactly. I was kind of curious about this decision to just stick with the Siri branding because I feel like Siri has been around for so long. It such a bad reputation at this point of just being not that useful. They have tried now multiple times to insert AI into it and been completely mocked and derided for their failures there I was like, at this point, I might just start fresh. say we have a completely new assistant. It'sot a new name, but no, they're sticking with the branding. Well, I wonder too, how much they need Siri AI Bhe that Like in my mind, if I'm Apple which I'm not But I think about this as The iPhone is going to be the AI device So we just need to experience that goodood enough for people who want the default. if you want to use open AI, if you want to use chat GPT, you got your iPhone. You're going to do that on your iPhone regardless of what device Johnny Ive and Sam M Altman are cooking up They own the main portal through which you're going to experience these things no matter what Okay, so we're going to see these changes roll out in the United States. They're not going to roll out in Europe or in China, is that right? That's right. And that's happened before either from delays or not rolling out at all, just because the European regulatory environment is a lot more strict than it is in the US. There are a few laws in there. There's the Digital Markets Act That requires large tech companies to make their products interoperable, which means they have to be able to work with other companies' products. Apple doesn't love doing that An EU spokesperson gave their perspective this week to reporters the decision not to roll out Siri AI Ind you is apples and apples only. Because absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits Apple from introducing new products in the EU What Apple is, however, not allowed to do justust like any other gatekeeper. is to close the market It is not for them to decide who gets to innovate in Europe And it's not for them to choose which AI tools our UU citizens get to use or not I have one thing to say, which is I think Europe needs to write better regulations. I have talked to many people who do legitimately feel like these are prohibitive to innovation and honestly, just very confusing. Yeah. It says a lot that Apple is just like, you know what Fine. Yeah. We're out. Yeah, you know, like that like that's a pretty high bar and You can have an inferior product Moving on to the tech reporting Super Bowl, which is on Friday, SpaceX is officially going public. Congratulations to all the newly minted billionaires. Thank you. just kidding. We're not among them, but many people are and we will get into. It is slated to become the largest IPO in history. It set its price at one hundred thirty five dollars a share, which would value the company at roughly One point seven trillion dollars. Yeah. That's that is that is trillion Yes. with a T and an R. So a lot of companies go public every single year, but SpaceX's debut marks the entrance of AI companies hitting the public markets. Anthropic is slated to go public as is openp AI. They've both confidentially filed their S on s and then announced those confidential filings very, very publicly. And so this is the first of a series of AI firms going public in a way that's going to really change the industry and also potentially the economy. It is a moment that we're going to look back on as being, oh, this is the moment that launched these AI companies into The strator in SpaceX' case literally Or this was the very height of the bubble that we've all been waiting to burst. And I don't know, Zoe, which is it? I honestly, it still feels like I'm not trying to hedge too much. if it does genuinely feel like it could go either way. Yeah, I mean, it could go a lot of different ways. We don't know how the IPO is going to be received. So far, demand seems really, really strong. Obviously, if the IPO unexpectedly flops, it could be pretty bad for the entire market It does seem like it is going to benefit Elon Musk quite a lot. It's already the world's richest man net worth around seven hundred billion, but he stands to earn quite a lot more due to his forty two percent stake in the company. and he could become the world's first trillionaire, We're saying that word quite a lot, if the IPGO goes well One other thing that I thought was really interesting is that SpaceX reserved an unusually high amount of the stock for retail investors thirty percent I thought this was interesting for a couple reasons, One of which was just that Tesla is one of the most widely held retail stocks on Robinhood and platforms like that. And I think that it has allowed Elon Musk to keep the company like the company does pretty well regardless of whether the kind of underlying business fundamentals are going exceptionally well because he has this very loyal fan base that is keeping the stock price really, really high. And so even when there's business issues, Tesla, you, continues to, at least in the United States, perform. I think it's signaling from the jump, hey We're very open to being in a meme stock Like we will' be a real stock But we will also be a meme stock. So come on in And it is sort of like building on this sort of cult of personality and trading on that, which I think It increasingly is going to have to And we've talked about this before, but I'll keep talking about it forever You know, SpaceX was such a like interesting company with good fundamentals and a real business model behind it and promising revenue growth and then it absorbed XAI became a much less stable company. I actually think that this is such an interesting part of like assessing Elon Musk as a business person because obviously as someone who reported on his Twitter takeover now exX for quite a while, it was so easy to look at that company and be like Advertising is way down. This company is entirely dependent on advertising. Like he has made very obvious messups in terms of the business. Like the business did not appear to be going well. But you can't really assess Elon Musk as the owner of a single company because he actually has an empire. So X isn't going well, Merge it with XAI. Those companies are spending a lot of money and not making as much SpaceX will buy them and suddenly you're looking at a very different company. And even on a more granular level than that, you can't sell any cybertrucks. Okay. SpaceX will buy cybertrucks.. It is this sort of I would say a shell game, but a shell game involves hiding the ball It's all out in the open. He's just doing it. but is this really circular And I'd say too In terms of that sort of circular logic of everything being interconnected within his own companies, He has now made SpaceX a nexus for other AI companies as well by selling compute. R. Now we're looking at a point where if SpaceX goes down at some point It's going to hit Anthropic and Google and other people who have bought into billions of dollars on compute through its C cololossus data center as well. So it's a fascinating Fascinating tapestry, Zoe. that he's woven. How about that It is a fascinating tapestry, but at the top, we kind of mentioned that a lot of people could end up owning a little slice of SpaceX stock, whether or not they want to. And that is because the NASAQ one hundred recently relaxed its rules to make it easier and faster for SpaceX to be included, which forces funds that track the index to invest in SpaceX prically overnight. So this is now kind of integrated in vast parts of the economy that people might not even necessarily know about Yeah, it's going to be in your four hundred one K. you have a four hundred one K all these places they can't really control I hope that There's not a big bubble burst systemic failure because if there is, again, it's going to it would take down Nvidia which is already such a huge portion of the stock market Google basically The systemic risks are already there, whether you're in SpaceX or not. Before we go to break, there's one more story that's been unfolding this past week that we'd like to talk about, and it directly involves Wired in a good way Last week, Wred reporters Drew Merotra and Dell Cameron reported that Meta quietly embedded an unreleased facial recognition system into the Meta AI app, which is installed in over fifty million devices And is what you use to control metaayan and other smart classes with metaAI They never publicly activated it, but they also never disclosed it Dreundel found it by looking at the code in the app. called metaAI. And that's when they confirmed that this code had been discretely added over multiple updates this year We'll get into more details about how it works, but here's the thing, one day after we publish this piece, Meta deleted nearly all the code from the app Impact journalism They won't say why. they won't say whether it' come back, but that is impact journalism. So great job, Drew Vindel and everyone else who worked on this story The system was designed and again, this is based on going through the code that was saving right there in the app, designed to capture faces through Rayban Smar glasses, convert them into biometric face prints Faceeprint is a word that I wish we didn't have to use just in general? I know and then match them against a local database on the user's device. So in other words It would People's faces them into a database and just let it sit there on device couldn't identify a face, it would just keep it there. for future processing, which is to say keepeep it in there until if and when you could actually assign a name to it It's really just capturing everyone's faces that you see. Oh my God. Publicly, Ma has said this is something that they're thinking through. Meta has acknowledged that face recognition is a thing that they are interested in potentially doing They said they would first take a very thoughtful approach, quote unquote before they did it, but Well they're saying that publicly The New York Times has reported on internal memos that show that Meta had planned time the rollout for a quote dynamic political environment waiting until people would be too distracted other stuff going on to give meaningful pushback to face recognition in their glasses. Apple said, we care about privacy. Meda said, how about this? How about that? Yeah, how about not? I mean This is really concerning to me for a few reasons. but The pushback that Ma seemed to give to this article was we haven't enabled the system yet, which seems like both acknowledging the reporting and completely beside the point. you are putting this code on these devices so that you can turn it on at any moment. You can like flip a switch and suddenly the glasses have facial recognition in them tied to that the direct response we got from Meta was we had Meta'ZP commommunications, Andy Stone said at first that the feature does not exist CTO Andrew Bosworth said that the reporting was, quote, absolutely dishonest And then within twenty four to thirty six hours of those comments meta p an update that got rid of all the code So if the future didn't exist and if it was halfullly dishonest, Why then rememove it. I think that that language is actually very, very sneaky. I think saying like the feature doesn't exist is basically trying to get around that like code was there but they haven't designed a fully fleshed out feature to go along with it, you know what I mean? It's sort of like if you have a jack in the box, but you haven't wound the arm yet saying the little guy inside does not exist. I love your No one has, Thankk you so much. They are strained they are convoluted, yeah Meta's interest like there's an obvious interest for meteta incorporating a feature like this, you know, I think I've heard some meta people say, This is for accessibility a lot of people have, you know, vision problems or whatever other issues that this could potentially help with I'll buy that there's a use case there, but I think the issue is you can't really just for those people You know what I mean? You have to sort of push it to everybody And the thing with face recognition glasses is you can't really opt out, right? Like you can't opt out of someone capturing your face and storing it on their on their glasses. Yeah, I mean, I will say this about meta The world that Meta is creating is just quite simply not the world that I want to live in. I do not think that their products reflect a vision of the future that feels exciting or inspiring to me versus companies where you are not fundamentally the product. they are in fact selling you a physical product or trying to enhance your real life in some way, which to me just feel much more aligned with my values, frankly Although you do love AI slop. I do. I do. That's an exception, and that is purely for entertainment and I'm not proud of that fact After the break, we're going all the way to New York to hear about an investigation into Madison Square Garden surveillance machine, and the man behind it all, James Dolan So you know the uneasy anxious feeling you get when you think about dealing with your insurance company Well, there's actually a term for that. It's called insureanoia And if that sounds like something you're way too familiar with, you should really think about getting NJM insurance They go to great lengths to do what's best for their policyholders by providing dedicated reps whose priority is you. And that means you'll find more peace of mind with them Relieve your insuranoia with NjM insurance by visiting njM. com for a quote today Economy never stops shifting Markets move, global trade gets disrupted, and policies shift All these factors have a tremendous influence on the ways we live and work I'm Kimber Lee Adams, host of Marketplace Morning Report, a daily ten minute podcast where a team of award winning reporters helps you make sense of our evolving economy Listen to Marketplace Morning Report on your favorite podcast app So chances are if you're based in the US. or at all an NBA fan, you've been following or at the very least aware of the NBA final series between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Surs, Championshipionss have gathering a lot of attention lately is the Nicks celebrate their first championship appearance in twenty seven years Massive crowds ofew Yorkers around the city have been gathering outdoors to watch the game the N next H home Mrena Madison Square Garden Garden has long been an iconic venue for concerts and events, but believe it or not, it's also one of the most aggressive corporate surveillance operations in the country Earlily this year, wired contributing editor Noah Shachman and reporter Robert Silverman published an investigation into how MSG owner and NX owner Jim Dolan has built an intricate system that surveills fans who attend the venue from using facial recognition cameras that process forty people per minute to compiling dossiers on transgender Nx fan The track record of this surveillance under Dolan's leadership is astonishing We' got Noah Shachman here to talk about it. Noah, thank you so much for coming on. thing This investigation from you and Robert Silverman, it was a long time in the making. You want to go back to what first tipp you off when you first became aware that MSG Was this panopticon this whole time? Right. So there have been reports leaking out since twenty eighteen that Madison Square Garden was using facial recognition technology of one sort or another in their venues. And I should add that the Chemistry Company both includes Madon Square Garden, the iconic Radio City Music Hall Beacon Theatater and moreore recently the sphere in Las Vegas Anyway Reports been going on for several years, but what really started to break things open was a lawsuit in September of twenty twenty five by a former Madison Square Garden security staffer who basically sued his bosses And so we use that opportunity to go start digging and take a look And we found some remarkable stuff I want to get into that lawsuit and I want to get into what you found when you started digging. But I want to step back first for folks who are not as familiar with MSG and moreore specifically with Jim Dolan, who is a real character, and I don't mean that in like a colorful fun kind of way. This guy's a big personality has a long sort of contentious track record. Could you catch us up on Jim Dolan and how his personality and what we know about him feeds into to what he's done here Right. Well, I think just the shorthand is that Jim Don is an incredibly wealthy, incredibly powerful media and sports executive And like the key thing, if you've just got to shorthand him, is he has a band called JD in the Straight Shot.. And their most famous tune is about his former friend Harvey Weinstein And it's called I should have known. Yeah. So that is what a shorthand. It's incredible. God help us if we can be described in one sentence that way. But yeah, and this is the guy, right? And he's also incredibly wealthy. Butudd he's with Donald Trump, as we saw at the recent Game three in the series, Donald T was sitting right next to Trump. Yeah, he got married at Mor a Lago He's known him forever. So Dolan is think you described him so well, has built this sort of surveillance Dragnet What has he used it for? L what is it made up of and how does he apply it? Like what's the upshot here? I'll talk about the current iteration of it because it's evolved over time. So the current iteration of it is that around Madison Square Garden to get into the venue you have to pass by these kind of new jack metal detectors byy a company called extxtract onene, that's extract with an X. Those have a series of cameras attached to them those cameras are running facial recognition algorithms And if there's a hit That's veted into a larger video management system that can either alert security right away or track person throughout. anywhere they go in the garden. Wh does he use this on Well Dolan would say it's to stop terrorists and to stop criminals or whatever But there's very little evidence of that, very little And in fact, we heard from the NYPD is that they don't supply any facial recognition or any other kind of data to Madison Square Garden for those purposes So who does he use it for instead? Who does he use this facial recognition for instead Instead, it's to track a series of People onn't less mostost famously on those lists are lawyers lawyers who have sued the garden in any way, shape or form. There's a famously there's a case of a lawyer who was taking her kid to see I think the roockettes it at Radio City Musical And just because someone else in her firm had sued Madison Square Garden. She was not allowed to bring her kid radio city. So it's not even precision targeting, right? It's sort of guilt by association and a ban for life based on whatever criteria Jim Dolan decides on. Yeah. and then there's accidents too. So for example, in our investigation, we found screenshots of a little girl, she couldn't have been more than I don't know. E years old got flagged by the facial recognition system. Now it's an accident, of course, but the fact that she got logged in at it all is a real problem This gets us into the lawsuit. Do you mind sort of setting us up with Who filed this suit? Why? what's the current status of it? Just to give us a little sense of, because I find it so interesting that it is from someone who is inside the system Right. So the lawsuit was filed by a guy named Donny in Grasalino who's a former New Jersey law enforcement professional who then went on to work for the Tao Group, which was a series of nightclubs and restaurants that was partially owned at the time by Jim Dalan, although he later divested it. And then he went on to work for Madison Square Garden proroper Now this lawsuit has all kinds of stuff in it but it also has couple of really shocking claims, including the surveillance of a trans woman whose only crimes quote unquote, seem to be that she'd gotten too close to players and to Medicine Square G staffers And so We went looking to try to track down that claim and others that are in the lawsuit Can we talk more about that? You reference Nina Richards, who' the Transnick fan who was tracked What was so striking to me was the detail in which Nina Richards was tracked and the dossiate that they put together. Do you want talking a little bit about that? like just because it feels very both in terms of the speiciousness of how they're deciding who they're tracking and also the level at which I think it goes beyond when you think of facial recognition, you think, well, okay, I do that at the airport It's way beyond that. and I think it's a very instructive case Yeah, me too. I mean, honestly, I gasped when I when I got a hold of this secret. interternal Madison Square Garden repeport, eighteen pages detailed literally second by second, Nina Richard's movements within the garden on a single day. So think about that, eighteen pages, second by second, single day. And so what did it track It tracked when she got in. it tracked which elevator she got into. It tracked when she bought a beverage. It tracked when she said hello to a Madison Square garden employee. It tracked when she sat down. It tracked when she got up to go to the bathroom. It tracked her going into the bathroom. It tracked her coming out of the bathroom O and on and on and it was a incredibly disturbing dystopian enemy of the state style. dossier on this one person One trans woman on Pride Night, I should add. over the course of a few hours. It was really shocking. No, you are a celebrated, venerated national security journalist. You are you have covered national security for a long time and you have covered, for lack of a better word, real spy stuff, you know you've been deep in it How does compare to this in terms of source handling in terms of the process here because it It really rhymes, right beyond. So look Be wired back in the day, I went to Iraq a couple of times. I went to Afghanistan for wired I, you know reported on all the intelligence agencies And I've never had a situation like this where people were so scared. and took such elaborate steps to avoid being outed as a source In spy movies There's this thing called a brush pass where're like, you know, Someone pretends to bump into you or pretends to give you a hug or whatever and slip some information in your pocket As far as I know that shit has never happened in real life, or at least not to me. It finally happened in real life during the story You know, you would have people that I'd reach out to They'd be like, sorry, wrong number. and then I'd like hear back from them on a different number two seconds later We had an incredibly cold winter here in New York, like the coldest in decades and yet Here I am like outside freezing my ass off with a source because the source will not Meet inside for fear of being And you think, well, wow, these people must be just paranoid. you know, they've seen too many spy movies themselves Well, not exactly famously And we kind of like captured this in our story is two N leegends met up one night in the garden One of whom was Charles Oakley, who who was a famous critic Jim Dawn. And he was told by his former teammate, Patrick Ewing, you know, one of the greatestnicks of all time down because they were listening devices everywhere So these people did more paranoid than spies But they had some reason to act this way Tell me more about the Charles Oakley of it all because that was a really fascinating part of the story. I thought, because here's a guy you would think, he's a Nick icon fan favorite, you would think he would be untouchable just because of his association with the franchise He's not, apparently. do you mind talking through his experience a little bit more and what you got from talking to You know, if you're looking into the finals right now You see during the broadcast that there are all these Nixed legends there. guysu like L Trell Spreewell, Patrick Ewing Alen Hst and John Stark, what have you Don't see there the one person you don't see like the It's really shocking not to see him there is Charles Oakley, who is kind of the Nick Brawniest enforce her during the nineties A great player Why is he not there? He's not there because For years, he was openly critical of Jim Dolins of stewardship of the team And then, um in the mid twenty ten s He got into An altercation. I mean, there's lots of different ways to spin it, but he got into an altercation with MSG security and was thrown out of the garden And He was banned from there on end And there's been a series of accusations back and forth. There's still all sorts of lawsuits going on Yeah, he's sort of the one guy that's been like ostracized And we've talked to some sources within The Mass and Square Garden, you know security community. Lets say there was orders put out to follow him to surveill him. So this is not just like a typical situation of like a a franchise kind of not getting along with a particular player. There hass been a long ugly legal battle There's been accusations of surveillance both digitally audio and physical, you tellailing of the guy. I feel like people listening to this and anyone who's read your story and I right now are probably thinking How? can they do this? How is it possible that this is legal And we say a lot of these are allegations, but your reporting has stood a lot of them up. Yes. But how What is the accountability? Is there any sort of measure that can say, hey, actually ntil an MSC knnock it off. It's like where is the line? whereere should the line be gally we all have our personal opinions and what can be done If they're over it So there have been some attempts to rein this in Oddly, one of them came from New York's state liquor authority because they were like Hey, hold on a second. You're discriminating against customers by putting on this Dystopian panelist. So they send an investigator, a former cop to to start asking around Mason Square Garden, then put another hired private investigators to h to tail the private investigator who' investigating the garden. Anyway The pointint being is when that happened Jim Dan also got on TV in New York hosted the head of the state liquor authorities phone number and email and told Nick fans You know to tell him to go, quote unquote, stick to his knitting So that was to mix sports metaphors, that was a real brushback pitch, and there hasn't been as much activity afterwards There has been a lot of talk in local political circles, however, about whether James Dolen deserves some of the special treatment he gets from New York City. and he does get special treatment Madison Square Garden doesn't pay property taxes. And it's a benefit that's over the years has been estimated to be worth over a billion dollars Should he continue to get that There's been a lot of questions about that Since our story has come out, the mors were Mum Dnie the atttorney general James have said they're going to, you know, Look into this further. We'll see if that goes anywhere No it You're in Ean I'm a Nick sicko It's like you're you're a Nickick. Yeah. It's like it look, I mean, this run of success regardless. L usually being a Kicks fan is more like an addiction Yeah than like an enjoyable experience I'm an Oris fan, so it's not quite the same, but I am familiar with long stretches of losing They have taken the series to New York playing an MSG. You've been watching, I assume