Image Credit: Alexi Rosenfeld / Contributor / Getty 
New York City’s famous event center Radio City Music Hall made headlines this week after the venue’s facial recognition cameras led to a mom being kicked out.
A mother named Kelly Conlon took her daughter to see the Rockettes Christmas show the weekend after Thanksgiving as part of a Girl Scout field trip to NYC and was shocked to be stopped by Radio City security.
Madison Square Garden Entertainment, which runs Radio City Music Hall, marked Conlon as a threat via facial recognition cameras because the devices knew she works at a law firm currently in litigation against a restaurant under the MSG umbrella.
The mother told NBC New York, “It was pretty simultaneous, I think, to me, going through the metal detector, that I heard over an intercom or loudspeaker. I heard them say woman with long dark hair and a grey scarf.”
The security workers stopped Conlon and asked for her identification as the recognition software had picked her up.
“They knew my name before I told them. They knew the firm I was associated with before I told them. And they told me I was not allowed to be there,” she said.
The mother doesn’t even practice law in New York state and explained that she’s not involved in any lawsuit against MSG.
Eventually, she was escorted out of the building while her daughter and other Girl Scout moms were able to enter and see the show.
“I was caught off-guard – I just complied with what they asked me to do and I left my daughter inside the venue with her troops. I had driven multiple people in my car so I couldn’t leave to go home,” Conlon told the NY Post.
A statement by a Madison Square Garden Entertainment spokesperson said:
“MSG instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the Company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved. While we understand this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation creates an inherently adverse environment. All impacted attorneys were notified of the policy, including Davis, Saperstein and Salomon, which was notified twice.”
In response, a partner at the firm where Conlon works claimed the MSG bans are “a pretext for doing collective punishment on adversaries who would dare sue MSG in their multi-billion dollar network.”
The partner, Sam Davis, suggested the venue’s liquor license prohibits them from removing Conlon over her workplace affiliation and said the use of facial recognition “is frightening,” adding, “It’s un-American to do this.”
Infowars and other outlets have been warning about this type of technocratic spy state for decades now, and it is becoming more powerful by the day.
Will Americans stand up against this 1984-style dystopia or will we soon resemble communist China where this type of software is being used to round up political dissidents and anti-lockdown activists?