"On the 6th of July 2005, it was announced that London had been successful in its bid for the 2012 Games. Just 24 hours later 52 people were murdered in four terrorist attacks in London, which changed the security landscape overnight."
These two stark sentences were penned by Tarique Ghaffur, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and security coordinator for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympics Games, in a written response to questions asked by a House of Lords select Committee. His words capture the central issue of this essay. In a post-9/11 world, what is the nature, scale, and scope of the security operations being developed to ensure the safety of the 2012 Olympics, and what will be the likely impact of these measures on the City of London and its citizens before, during, and after the Games?
The Olympic Games stand alone as the world's greatest sporting spectacle. While in terms of audience, both live and virtual, it may be outgunned by its nearest rival, the soccer World Cup, as a concentrated sporting spectacle it is peerless. World Cups are awarded to nations whereas the Olympics are hosted by cities. The Games bring together the widest range of sports in a central location and, unlike World Cups, they capture the attention and fire the imagination of the largest and most diverse world spectatorship.
Moreover, largely of its own making, the Olympics are rich in symbolism, rooted in largely Westernized, liberal democratic traditions but susceptible to manipulation by nationalist political ideologies. The Olympics are supposed to "stand for something" and as such they present something to stand against. In short, if you're an international terrorist with only one "dirty bomb" to detonate, you would target the Olympic Games and not the World Cup or any other global sports event. In doing so, it's likely that you would kill and maim more people, command the immediate attention of the widest possible global audience, and gain the maximum possible exposure for your cause and its followers. ;
While nothing is likely to happen on this scale, the violent targeting of the Olympic Games in the service of a political cause isn't without precedent. If there were ever any doubts that mega-sporting events can provide a stage for ruthless political exploitation, the hostage-taking and eventual killing of Israeli athletes and officials at the 1972 Munich Olympics removed them. In the intervening years, just as the old East versus West conflict, the Cold War, has receded, the confrontation between the West and a significant proportion of the Arab/Islamic world has intensified. So too has watchfulness around major sporting events.
In the 1977 film Black Sunday – in which a deranged Vietnam veteran teams up with Palestinian terrorists and attempts to crash an airship full of high explosives into a packed stadium holding America's biggest single sporting event, the Super Bowl – Hollywood provided what seemed then to be a fanciful glimpse of what might be. Today it may be more prescient. The events of September 11th, 2001, made Black Sunday appear less far-fetched. Since then, mixed with the memory of the 1972 Munich Games and the bombing in Atlanta in 1996, surveillance and security at major sporting events has been given maximum priority.
Supersized Security
Only months after 9/11, the public was introduced to supersized security for sporting events. The 2006 Super Bowl in Detroit involved one of the largest security operations in U.S. history. Inside and outside the stadium, 10,000 police and private security guards combined muscle and high-visibility weaponry with the most sophisticated high-tech screening and closed-circuit TV (CCTV) systems to provide a virtual "ring of steel" around the City's Ford Field. Surveillance and security around a single sporting event on this scale was unthinkable before 9/11.
The impact of 9/11 on sporting security is illustrated most starkly by looking at the massive increases in the security budgets for the Summer Olympic Games since 1984.
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| Sources: Sophie Hayward, "$142,857 Security Cost per Athlete in Greece," Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2008; Dexter Roberts, "Olympics Security Is No Game," BusinessWeek, August 7, 2008. |
In Los Angeles in 1984, the average security cost was $11,627 per athlete, or $14 per ticket. Two decades later in Athens, where there were an estimated 10,500 participants, the average cost was $142,857 per athlete or $283 per ticket. Taking account of the increased number of participants this still represents an almost tenfold increase in security costs in only 20 years. It can be seen clearly from the above graph there was an extremely sharp increase from Sydney 2000 to Athens 2004, when post-9/11 the security budget leaps a staggering 800%. The numbers have reached new peaks in Beijing where the costs are estimated at $6.5 billion for a seven-year program dubbed the Grand Beijing Safeguard Sphere.
But what do these security measures look like on the ground? To answer this, it is illustrative to consider the full details of the actual hardware and software deployed in and around Athens in the summer of 2004, turning it, according to Minas Samatas, into a "panoptic urban fortress." Reflecting on Athens, Samatas wrote:
Hundreds of CCTV cameras swept the main avenues and squares of Athens, whereas three police helicopters and a Zeppelin, equipped with more surveillance cameras hovered overhead. Dozens of new PAC 3 (Patriot Advanced Capability) missiles were armed and in position at three locations around the capital, including the Tatio Military Base near the athletes' Olympic Village, to provide a full defense umbrella over Athens. Security forces also received 11 state-of-the –art surveillance vans that received and monitored images from around the city. Authorities also got two mobile truck screening systems capable of locating explosives, weapons, or drugs in trucks and other large cargo vehicles and by August 13th they had installed thousands of CCTV cameras and deployed all over Greece more than 70,000 military staff on patrol the first Summer Games since the September 11th attacks on the United States.
At the centre of the "superpanoptic" monitoring of the Olympic City was a highly complex and web-like, interconnected network of electronic surveillance gadgetry and attendant software. Most of the technology was provided by the United States and Israel. This impressive inventory does not take account of the NATO AWACS surveillance airplanes circling high in Greek air space or NATO naval vessels patrolling shipping lanes in the nearby Mediterranean Sea off the port of Piraeus.
Samatas' analysis draws upon the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who himself raided 18th century political thinker Jeremy Bentham's innovative, concentric, and observatory-like prison design, the Panopticon,1 to develop a metaphor for the saturating and omnipotent nature of state-sponsored surveillance and social control in modern and postmodern societies. The security regime for Athens 2004 epitomized if not exceeded the logic of Foucault's vision by putting in place a "Superpanopticon" with the intention of exerting total control over the Athenian metropolis. Whether in the public sphere or undercover, Samatas shows how the major powers in the international community – Australia, France, Germany, Israel, Spain, the United Kingdom and, most importantly, the United States – were instrumental in making the Olympic Games in Athens 2004 a test-bed for a Superpanopticonic approach to mega-event security in the post-9/11 world. This proved to be a bonanza not only for the corporate interests of the electronic surveillance industry, but also for the U.S. military and secret service agencies with which that industry is so interdependent.2 Reminiscent of C. Wright Mills' central notion of the "military and industrial complex" that sits at the apex political power in his analysis of power relations in the United States in the 1950s, Samatas refers to this alliance as "the security and surveillance industrial complex," a conjunction of an immense security establishment and a large high-tech surveillance and data industry.
There may also have been other, more shadowy, forms of scrutiny and surveillance that put in place by groups and organizations not directly connected to the Athens Olympic Organizing Committee (OOC). In The New York Times, on the eve of the 2004 Athens Olympics, journalist Raymond Bonner commented,
Athenians hope that thoughts of running diving and setting new world records will overtake worries about security, which are driven in large part by U.S. fears of a new al-Qaeda attack. At the moment, there are more spies than athletes at the Olympic site, and the only record set has been the cost of security – more than $1.4 billion and rising – even though no intelligence agency has reported picking up any signal that al-Qaeda is planning to ruin the Games.
If accounts in the Greek and American press can be believed, the United States didn't fully trust the security regimes of Athens's OOC or the Greek Government. In February 2006, the Greek authorities revealed that a year earlier, a sophisticated bugging device capable of recording the mobile phone conversations of dozens of targeted people had been discovered. The list of those who had their conversations bugged reads like a who's who of the Greek political elite and includes the prime minister, minister of defense, mayor of Athens and all of the senior police and army personnel who had anything to do with Olympic security. The complex phone tap had been activated shortly before the Olympics until March 2005 when it was discovered and removed.
The same month Costas Tsalikidis, a network manager from the communications technology company Vodafone and one of the few technicians with the access and capacity to plant such a device, was found hanged in his home. Although his death has been officially confirmed as a suicide, there are those who are still deeply suspicious of the whole affair, especially when it was reported that "the intercept calls were forwarded from four cellular antennas – their coverage circles overlapped atop the U.S. Embassy." The inference here is that the phone tapping was put in place at the behest of the CIA without the knowledge of the Greek authorities.
The fact that, through a series of technological disasters and failings, the super-sophisticated "Superpanopticon" actually did not work very well during the Olympics, causing the Greek authorities to rely on more traditional methods of policing to secure the Games, is only one of the conclusions to be drawn from Samatas' analysis. Of equal if not greater concern is that while the 2004 Olympics are long gone, the surveillance infrastructure that was developed to help to secure the Games mostly remains in place and is still fully operational. It's in use by the Greek authorities in and around Athens with cameras rolling, pointed largely at its own citizens.
As we look towards London 2012, this raises very serious questions about the legacy of post-9/11 Olympic security on civil liberties. Oscar Reyes, writing for the British leftist journal Red Pepper after visiting the Athens Olympiad, observed, "huge amounts of money were spent on equipment that didn't work. But the part that did work is now used for the surveillance of Greek society." Then, turning his attention to London 2012, he stated, "the Greatest Show on Earth, it seems, would be accompanied by one of the largest security operations ever mounted in the UK. Long after the TV cameras have moved on, the CCTV would still be watching. And that's a spectre we would be foolish to ignore."
While official figures are yet to be released, Geoff Newton, director of Olympic Opportunity at the London Development Agency, confirmed at a 2008 conference in Manchester that the security budget for London 2012 would be at least that of Athens and probably larger. When asked about this in relation to civil rights and civil liberties Newton suggested that they will be looking and learning from what happens in Beijing in 2008.
Beijing and Beyond
Through the murk that shrouded the Chinese capital during the Olympics, it's virtually impossible to ascertain the full facts regarding surveillance and security. We do know that the overall budget for the 2008 Games was more than three times that of Athens and the security budget would have been at least proportionate to that. It's widely reported that in addition to overt security measures, Beijing was subject to saturation levels of state-sponsored spying, not just aimed at countering the threat of terrorism, but also to garner the technical and tactical intelligence of competing national Olympic teams as well as steal state and industrial secrets from the thousands of government and business personnel who attended the Games. Of even greater concern there is a view that China has used the Olympics and the accompanying "threat of terrorism" as a pretext for cracking down on civil rights protesters and ethnic minority groups, particularly with regard to Tibet and in the Muslim-dominated far western region of Xinjiang.
Between them, Athens and Beijing have set new records and set new standards for security and surveillance for mega-sporting events. Because of the UK's friendly relations with the United States, its interventionist roles in the wider Middle East and Afghanistan, and a significant new immigrant population, these records are almost certain to be broken in 2012. London, with its long history of security development linked to the "Irish Question," the experience of stadia security born from decades of dealing with soccer hooliganism, and lessons learned from Athens and Beijing, may be better placed than most other cities to cope with the post-9/11 security demands that come with hosting the Olympic Games.
Whether or not this can be achieved within a tradition of liberal democracy and tolerance, without seriously compromising the civil rights and liberties of the citizens of London and its Olympic visitors, is a much more challenging enterprise. There is genuine concern that the UK will indeed learn from China, in that an event like the 2012 Olympics may be used by government and security-related interest groups to magnify in the public mind the terrorist threat and construct a "climate of fear" to justify technologically driven control strategies, to counter anti-social behaviour and democratic protest, to exclude the dangerous "others" from public space, and to introduce identity cards that link citizens to state held databases. When it comes to human rights and civil liberties, as London plans for 2012, China is the last place on Earth that the world's oldest democracy should be looking towards for guidance.
John Sugden, Professor Sociology of Sport, University of Brighton, is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.
