Pablo Torre Finds Out
"Did You Hear That, James?" We Survived MSG Surveillance... with Edward Snowden's Lawyer
08 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
The person said to me, you know us, we're always watching.
Right after this ad. I do like that any interview with you, Ben, must begin with you handing your phone to someone else.
As I just did, and as I once did, when your fellow Pulitzer Prize winner, Laura Poitras, came to my office in January of 2013 and said, put your phone in your desk and lock it. We've got to go talk somewhere else.
I am not here to talk to you because you've represented Edward Snowden as his attorney for years now. That's not why, also, I've been going to Knicks games with you secretly. Why's that? Well, it's because you got me tickets. I consider you a friend, Ben Wisner, and that is the ultimate reason. You're a fellow dad, and I just wanted to get you off the couch. And you care about the Knicks.
I'm a lifelong fan. This team is in the Eastern Conference semifinals. You legitimately, and almost surprisingly insanely... care about the Knicks.
Are you talking about the attire that I wear to Knicks games, the Rasheed Wallace ball don't lie t-shirt that I wore when we went together?
It's not even so much the shirt as it was the standing up during free throws and celebrating. I mean, look, you're the guy who was defended famously, the most important whistleblower arguably in American history. And you end up being the guy who is heckling literal whistleblowers, referees on the court. That's nicely done. It's never occurred to you that you are both of these characters?
Is why you get the prizes. So we talk a lot about whistleblowers and basketball and secrets on this show. And I think there is no one more qualified to discuss the collision of all of these topics. Then Ben Wisner, who really did have to put his cell phone away when documentarian Laura Poitras first connected him to his future client, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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Chapter 2: How does facial recognition technology impact fans at Madison Square Garden?
Trump was deplatformed from these major platforms for years. And then he rode back into office. It didn't exactly work. So yes, I do think that on the whole, we're better off seeing the devil with his horns.
It's one of the more interesting and important parts of working for the ACLU. For people who are not familiar with your work, it's that Bill O'Reilly, on the one hand, will say in 2004 that you guys are, quote, the most dangerous organization in the United States of America right now, second next to Al Qaeda, which is an actual quote he said on his radio show.
And yet, you are the guys who will infuriate the left because you dare to say that freedom of speech as a principle must apply even to the people whose speech we find devastating and unconscionable on some personal level.
In 2023, we represented the National Rifle Association in a First Amendment case in the U.S. Supreme Court, which we won 9-0, by the way. But this was not a popular position among what you might say, call the progressive constituency and many of our members. But it's something that we need to do. I mean, we think these rights are indivisible.
If you won't defend them for everyone, they won't exist for everyone. And we genuinely believe in freedom of conscience.
All of which is to say that your conscience has been consistent in ways that are, I think, unimpeachable, except for one topic. You have had the stones to go after everyone except for who then?
Today, I put some skin in the game. In 2022... the great New York Times journalist, Cashmere Hill, who literally wrote the book on facial recognition. Her book is called Your Face Belongs to Us, and I recommend it. Yes.
She actually broke the story that Madison Square Garden, also Radio City Music Hall, the various properties owned by Dolan, were excluding not just the lawyers who brought lawsuits against them, but every lawyer in their firm. And she called me up for comment. And this is where we get the headline, Ben chickened out. That's right. I sued the CIA, the NSA.
I traveled to Yemen to take on the case of Anwar al-Awlaki's family. I've been to Guantanamo. I've been to Moscow. And I told Kashmir Hill she should call the Electronic Frontier Foundation because it's based in San Francisco and they're Warriors fans. They would get exactly the same quote, and they'd get it from someone who didn't depend on going to the garden 12 times a year for happiness. Yes.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of surveillance in sports venues?
Remember the guy in front of us? who, like, recognized. He said, like, are you allowed in here?
Yeah, I told you to wear a COVID mask up until the point so that we wouldn't create a scene before the entrance. But it was just that guy.
That guy was like, he double-taped and was like, should I not be close to you? Was kind of the vibe I was getting from him. Like, should he separate himself so he can enter? And we'd previously been told... You're not on the watch list. That was the finale of the episode we did with Noah. And the question was, once that episode came out, how would the garden deal with anybody involved?
We were just waved into the fast lane where we didn't even have to go through metal detectors.
And at first I was offended, I will admit, as the guy who wants to muckrake. But... The garden security team, we are told, by the way, they're unbothered by the attention of this. They're kind of taking it as a victory lap, is the word we're getting. The stuff we're talking about is stuff that we think the public should know, but they're kind of proud of, it seems.
But one of the things about walking in to the garden is that you do get to find out who else got allowed in. And I want to actually show a photo of somebody that we spotted. This was from the Thunder game we attended. This was recently. This was in March. Because we spotted this guy. This being the co-founder of Apollo Global Management.
Until he was forced out in 2021 due to his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Leon Black. Leon Black, of the approximately $170 million he sent Jeffrey Epstein for what he called tax and estate planning advice. Oh, Leon Black's here.
I mean, the thing about this kind of facial recognition system is that it doesn't do much for actual security. If you were some malevolent entity that wanted to cause havoc in the garden,
you would know that they have a facial recognition system, and you would send someone who could not conceivably be on it, in the same way that a terrorist organization would make sure that whoever they want to send onto a plane has pre-check and probably clear. They would pay the premium. Yeah. These things are for convenience. They're not for security. In fact, they don't help security at all.
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Chapter 4: How does James Dolan's ownership affect Knicks fans and the public?
What you've described is something that feels a way, but legally, that feeling is not codified, right? Like the idea that fans believe that these are civic trusts. And so the idea that we've been spied on and surveilled without our knowledge and are being kept out because we dare to exercise what feels like a protected right to free speech,
The idea that James Dolan is targeting fans and banning them occasionally because they say sell the team, it turns out the First Amendment does not protect that.
I can see, like, about half of your fans saying, like, Pablo is making us eat our vegetables right now and learn about the First Amendment from the ACLU. But let's do it. Let's do it. Okay. Yes, the First Amendment is a constraint on government. not on private individuals.
You could say that James Dolan himself has a First Amendment right of association to decide who he wants to have in his building. Now, there are some limitations on that. He could not keep you out of the building because you're a Filipino-American. So there are anti-discrimination laws that would protect you from being excluded based on your identity. But based on your political views... No.
Essentially, you have your First Amendment right against government interference, and he has his First Amendment right against government interference. And this is why people who are kicked off of Facebook or X or TikTok can complain about a lot of things, but they generally can't complain about the First Amendment.
I say generally because if the government coerced a platform to remove somebody, the fact that it was the platform that did the removing would not insulate the government from First Amendment scrutiny. And similarly here.
If you had the NYPD or if you had the Trump administration saying to Dolan, here are the people who should not be allowed in because of their speech criticizing the president, then I think you would have a jawboning First Amendment claim. But it wouldn't be against Dolan. It would be against the president. It would be against the NYPD. Right.
Right. And I should clarify that one of the things that we discovered in the last episode was that this is not done in concert with the NYPD or the FBI.
In fact, James Dolan will say... What facial recognition does is looks at your, you know, recognizes your face and says, are you, right, you know, someone who's on this list, right? So if you're a terrorist, right, it will say, that's a terrorist, right? And then, you know, appropriate action can be taken. It's very, very useful for security.
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Chapter 5: What role do whistleblowers play in exposing surveillance practices?
It's only an allegation in a lawsuit, but that could be a violation of the Wiretap Act and almost certainly would be if without the consent of either party to a phone call, someone just started eavesdropping or bugging it for sure.
The reporting suggests that Eversol allegedly directed them, quote, to go to B&H Electronics, located at 429th Avenue, New York, New York, to purchase listening and recording devices for Mr. Eversol and Mr. Dolan.
And prior to leaving the office, another security staffer informed Mr. Eversol, allegedly, that they needed to be wary of potential witness tampering, to which Mr. Eversol responded, quote, just get me the equipment and stop thinking, end quote.
And of course, I'm not here to have you litigate these allegations that you are not representing, but just the idea that surveillance is something that is being contemplated by sports owners in general. The genre we're describing is not surprising given your understanding of how this stuff is being deployed.
No, I mean, you probably read the New Yorker reporting about the surveillance companies that Harvey Weinstein hired to go after his critics. So this is something that the ultra wealthy are doing right now, which is when people criticize them publicly worse when people litigate against them.
They will hire former intelligence agents from various countries to deploy their dark arts and to find blackmail material on their accusers. This is the world we find ourselves in.
Right. I mean, to quote Ronan Farrow's New Yorker story about that case, Weinstein had the agencies target or collect information on dozens of individuals and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focused on their personal or sexual histories. Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally.
These are within the powers of people with disposable income at this point in ways that I was naive to, frankly, until some of the reporting landed on my laptop screen.
And I was like, holy s**t. And I think this is a sort of distilled version of what we're seeing on a much broader scale throughout the world. I mean, it points to the fact that the most substantial privacy protection that we had in the past didn't come from law. It always came from cost. It was just too damn expensive to track people granularly.
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Chapter 6: How does the ACLU defend privacy rights in the digital age?
And this was recorded 12 hours a day and fed into a database so that it could be rewound by the police every time there was a crime. And people freaked out. And we sued over this. We ultimately won under the Fourth Amendment in federal court. But it was eight to seven, right?
This was a close Fourth Amendment case about whether the government could, without any suspicion, just go up there and collect all this information. But an eye in the sky, I think people do have that visceral reaction to in a way that they don't when that eye is in their pocket.
I love and am horrified that we're actively experimenting with what did the founders envision? What did the framers of the Constitution envision when it came to should this protect something like what you just described, which they could not have imagined?
There's a case in the Supreme Court last month where the court is... deciding whether the police can get something called a geofence warrant. A crime happened here. We don't have suspicion of any person. Could we go to Google or a phone company and get information about every person who was in that area during a certain period of time?
I mean, to me, this is what the founders would have understood as a general warrant. The Fourth Amendment was written so that the king couldn't take all the mail and read it and find the person who was disloyal to the king. That's what this is. Let's take everybody's identity and then sift through it until we find the bad one. And we'll see what the Supreme Court has to say about this.
I think the court has not been so predictable in these cases. And partly that's because the justices themselves carry these phones. And so they feel skid in the game in a way that maybe they didn't during the drug war because they don't ride Greyhound buses with duffel bags of marijuana in them, right? But they definitely do have phones.
And so that's why we've won some pretty landmark cases, even from this conservative court on digital privacy.
But you're describing the recurring phenomenon of something really does need to hit home. Yeah. For the justices, for fans, for this stuff to actually matter and have consequences. And so, by the way, on that note that you mentioned about the dogs, Rings founder has since made an apology tour.
Everyone's acknowledged, oh my God, we spent so much money to get the biggest possible audience for a thing that blew up in our own faces. And of course, the question of pets brings me back to the garden.
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Chapter 7: What are the legal challenges surrounding surveillance technology?
And now imagine feeling that way all the time. And that's the reality of these systems that are putting different kinds of recording devices, different kinds of identity trackers, sort of surrounding us, again, with this invisible architecture. Now, we don't live in a repressive society like Western China, where a whole population is being kept down using these technologies.
But the technologies are the same. And how secure do you feel when a dog-hating, multi-billionaire is able to use those technologies to basically control something as civic and collective as our sports fandom.
And so we have Zoram Amdani, the mayor of the city, calling our investigation, quote, a point of immense concern that is, quote, deeply troubling and that his office will, quote, look into.
We're also talking about New York Attorney General Letitia James, who tells us, here at Pablo Torre Finds Out, in an exclusive statement this week, quote, my office is closely reviewing the latest reporting on Madison Square Garden surveillance tactics, end quote.
Joining that chorus is Brad Lander, who is the former city council member, the Democrat, who ran for mayor last year, currently running for U.S.
Congress, who tells us, quote, while the Knicks battle for a championship, while Harry Styles and Billy Joel play to sold-out crowds, James Dolan is running a private surveillance network at MSG to track, intimidate, and silence anyone he considers an enemy. What's even more Orwellian... And quote, End quote.
If you could find a way to mobilize that constituency around any issue, it would be an incredibly powerful, you wouldn't even say special interest, because it cuts across so many different kinds of identities and ideologies. And so I do think I'm delighted to come onto this show.
to talk about this and not a show that's about politics or just aimed at a political audience, because I think that sports fans have a huge amount of untapped power to change things.
The feeling of what's it like when you know you're being watched, and in fact, they want you to know you're being watched. It brings us to, frankly, the population that has most acutely experienced that at the Garden, which has been current and former Knicks beat writers.
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Chapter 8: What is the future of privacy in the context of sports and surveillance?
It describes a program called PRISM. And this was the mechanism by which the NSA essentially cooperated with the world's major communications and technology companies. This was not the most controversial by any means. This essentially described a program where the NSA would knock on the front door of these companies and say, pursuant to this authority, you need to turn over customer data.
Now, it was very embarrassing for these companies, who were global companies, to be seen as the arm of the NSA in this way. But what the companies would later learn is that even as the NSA was knocking on the front door,
it was breaking into the back door and there are other slides where they show the data centers that connect each other and circle the one place where data passed unencrypted and where they were siphoning it off and stealing it which is why many of these big technology companies at least temporarily were radicalized against what the nsa was doing and i want to list the ones the current providers here it's microsoft google yahoo facebook pal talk youtube skype aol apple
And that arrow just points in the direction of, by the way, you know, email, chat, video, voice, videos, photos, store data, voice over IP, file transfers, video conferences.
There's a famous slide from the Snowden Archive that has the motto, collect it all. And Collect It All was the motto of General Keith Alexander, who was the director of the NSA at the time. And really his goal was, we are going to build the technology to collect and store the world's communications. The legal authorities will leave to someone else. We'll work that out later.
It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. So let's just collect it all. We'll build massive data centers, the original data centers before it was all AI, and just build this surveillance time machine and store it.
Surveillance time machine is a phrase that is just, again, great band name, haunting premise.
Yeah, and then there's another slide, which we should look at. These are different mechanisms. So Prism is the mechanism for going to the technology companies and demanding user data.
Upstream is something more comprehensive, where the NSA puts interception equipment onto the actual central arteries of the internet, onto the backbone of the internet, and makes a copy of everything that passes through.
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