- The U.S. Open golf tournament and the NBA’s new Intuit Dome are implementing facial recognition technology for “frictionless” entry and fan personalization, normalizing surveillance in public leisure spaces.
- Critics warn that marketing these systems as conveniences conceals deeper issues, including diminished privacy, lack of informed consent and the quiet expansion of biometric surveillance in everyday life.
- Taylor Swift’s concerts and Madison Square Garden used facial recognition to track or ban individuals without their knowledge, raising ethical and legal red flags about discrimination, targeting and lack of transparency.
- The U.S. lacks a federal biometric data law. While some states like Illinois and California have protections, others, including New York, have inconsistent or limited regulations, leaving gaps in consumer protection.
- A June article by the New York State Bar Association urges lawmakers to address these issues, warning that unchecked deployment of facial recognition poses serious risks to civil liberties and privacy.
(Natural News)—Biometric surveillance is no longer confined to airports, border checkpoints or high-security zones. Increasingly, it is being tested and normalized on fairways, courts and stadium concourses across the United States.
At this year’s U.S. Open in Oakmont, Pennsylvania, the United States Golf Association (USGA) has quietly expanded the use of facial recognition for event entry, once again partnering with British tech firm FortressGB and facial authentication company Wicket. Spectators now have the option to register their face ahead of time and glide through entry points without presenting a physical ticket for a “frictionless” experience.
However, critics warned that this framing, selling biometric scanning as a mere convenience, masks a more complex and unsettling shift: the normalization of facial surveillance in public leisure spaces, where expectations of anonymity and privacy have traditionally been higher.
The golf tournament isn’t alone in its embrace of this trend. On the other side of the country, the National Basketball Association’s (NBA’s) Los Angeles Clippers are preparing to open the doors of their futuristic new home, the Intuit Dome, with a more comprehensive data-driven approach.
Managed by Halo Sports and Entertainment, a company owned by former Microsoft CEO and Clippers chairman Steve Ballmer, the venue doesn’t just scan faces for entry. It tracks sound levels at individual seats to reward enthusiastic fans, uses facial recognition to personalize welcome screens and continuously gathers behavioral data under the promise of enhancing the fan experience.
Both cases reflect a growing pattern in American sports: venues are becoming testbeds for cutting-edge surveillance technologies, all under the guise of improving speed, security and personalization. Yet as these systems become more embedded, the long-term consequences, especially related to data privacy and civil liberties, remain unresolved.
NYSBA warns the public about facial recognition’s lack of regulation
An article published by the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) this June warned the public about the growing use of facial recognition technology at entertainment venues.
This piece, written by Kylie Ruff, a 2025 graduate from St. John’s University School of Law, explores how venues across the country are increasingly turning to facial recognition to streamline security and entry. However, he argued that it raises deep questions about privacy, fairness and the balance between safety and surveillance.
For instance, in 2019, pop star Taylor Swift’s security team used facial scanning kiosks at her concert venues to track known stalkers – a move that sparked alarm when it was revealed that the scans had been conducted without fans’ knowledge or consent.
Recently, Madison Square Garden (MSG) Entertainment faced backlash for using facial recognition to ban lawyers from firms engaged in litigation against the company. One mother was barred from seeing the Rockettes with her daughter solely because she worked at a law firm that had a pending case with MSG. None of these exclusions stemmed from criminal history, only affiliations and criticisms.
These practices, Ruff suggested, tread dangerously close to weaponizing surveillance tools for personal or corporate retaliation, without meaningful oversight or accountability. (Related: Malfunctioning facial recognition technology may put innocent individuals at risk.)
Moreover, the U.S. has no comprehensive regulation governing the collection, storage or use of biometric data, including facial recognition scans. Only a handful of states, including Illinois and California, have enacted laws requiring businesses to either obtain consent or offer opt-out mechanisms. While New York City has rules requiring biometric disclosure in commercial settings, the state lacks a uniform approach.
FutureTech.news has more stories on the dystopian measures of governments to surveil citizens. Watch the video below that talks about government agencies that were caught lying about the facial recognition program.
More related stories:
- Irish government to legalize retrospective facial recognition technology.
- Russia to launch nationwide facial recognition payment system this year.
- Mastercard rolls out payment system that uses FACIAL RECOGNITION technology.
- Half of America already in law enforcement’s facial recognition network.
- U.K.’s Crime and Policing Bill 2025 reignites facial recognition controversy.
Sources include:
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
