Part V of DeFIFA, a series on sports, policing, & incarceration
There’s only one MWC game left to play in the Seattle Stadium, so is the second-to-last section of DeFIFA, the zine created by Cameron Michels, Leslie McCallum, and me! Make sure to stick with this post until the end, where we offer some free and easy ways to act against the harms caused by the MWC.
Upon crossing the nebulous expanse of the stadium’s border, the fans become subject to further surveillance. Entering stadiums requires fans who want to watch games in-person to explicitly share their identity with stadium ownership groups and their partners. All tickets must be purchased through FIFA, and the FIFA mobile app is required for entry, which, depending on individual phone settings, can then become a way to physically track attendees long after they’ve left the game. Lumen, like Seattle’s other major sports venues, is also cashless, requiring all in-stadium purchases to be through credit cards and apps. This provides another source of tracking – and future marketing – to which fans must acquiesce just to buy a hot dog.
That’s only the start to the digital surveillance at the matches. And to better understand the threat of such surveillance, it’s useful to refer to the concept of the panopticon, which was originally a prison design thought up by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. Bentham posited that if a prison were built with the cells in a rotunda that could all be seen from a central watch tower, then, even though one guard could not actually watch all cells at once, the incarcerated people would not know when the guard was looking towards their cell, meaning that they would have to be on good behavior all the time. In the 20th century, social theorists like Michel Foucault used the panopticon as a metaphor for the ways that modern disciplinary society lead people to police themselves and their communities. And 21st century sociologists have pointed out that constant digital surveillance situates us in a new kind of panopticon.
The digital panopticon at Lumen begins with cameras. It’s unclear what kind of CCTV system Lumen has for the inside areas of the stadium, but they proudly advertise cameras that can take pictures of every section of the outdoor seats. Teams that work with the company Momento, which include the Seattle Seahawks, the Seattle Mariners, and the Seattle Kraken, allow Momento to take multiple photos of each section in the relevant stadiums during their games. This is ostensibly to supplement the fan experience, allowing fans to download photos of themselves at live games through the company’s website or mobile app. In reality, their purpose is to give participating sports teams even more data on their fanbase to increase sales.
The Momento photos raise massive privacy concerns. The teams retain the rights to your likeness – always a scary proposition in this world of deepfakes – but even worse, anyone can access the photos on their website or app, not only the teams and their fans. Unlike almost every other tech product out there, you don’t have to create an account with Momento, nor do you have to provide proof that you were at a game to see the photos from it. We tested it out: to find photos from a match, all they ask for is your date of birth, the game you want to search through, and the seat numbers. You can also search through multiple games and multiple seats.
Momento’s CEO claims that they are honoring privacy concerns by limiting fans from accessing the platform too many times to download photos, but it’s not clear what “too many times” actually means or how it is enforced. Fans can also opt out of having their seat photographed, but that requires them to know that there are photos being taken in the first place, and when you go to Memento’s fan access page (here’s the page for the Seattle Seahawks, for example), the button to opt out has been made so tiny that it’s near-invisible. There appears to be nothing to stop police or ICE from accessing these photos either. And as we highlighted in a previous post, stadium cameras have already been used for anti-trans discrimination by an owner in New York City.
All of these measures already existed at Lumen Field prior to this year, but with the MWC comes another surveillance tool: drones, which are “unmanned” aerial aircraft that can be used for anything from videography to warfare. For the MWC, the King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) has trained 50 deputies over the past two years to work with drones that will be used during matches. The escalation in drone use during the MWC is ostensibly to counter possible threats from other drones. In the past, only federal law enforcement could employ counter-drone measures, but thanks to the Safer Skies Act, which President Trump signed into law in December 2025, local law enforcement can now be cross-deputized to disable unauthorized drones. The law also made $500 million available to World Cup host cities for counter-drone security, with at least $19 million of that going to Seattle.
While KCSO claims that the drones will only be sent to active threats, not hovering over the stadiums just for surveillance, it’s unclear where the line is for that either, especially since drones are often used alongside “predictive” policing and AI that relies on algorithms to forecast where crimes are expected to be committed. Such algorithms not only violate individual privacy; they also exacerbate and reinforce racism and the other systemic biases that are already at the core of the prison-industrial complex.
For our last part of DeFIFA, we’ll imagine a world where sports don’t have to be so closely tied to carcerality. Until then, please take whatever actions you can listed below to help mitigate the harms of the MWC!
What You Can Do
Actions to Take
Organizations to Follow and Support
If we missed other organizations or collectives that are organizing and providing community care around the MWC in Seattle, email me at sivarajan [dot] deepa [at] gmail [com] and we’ll add them to the online version of this zine!
