Coming to a Mega Event Near You

University of Alberta sociologist Kevin Haggerty peaks through the blinds in a photo on his web page  (www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/sociology2/haggerty.cfm), just to emphasize the point that he is into surveillance.

Earlier this year, he produced a report for the privacy commissioner of his province that detailed how military style visualization technologies involving cameras, sensors and unmanned vehicles have filtered into the policing of mega events such as the Olympics, the World Cup and the Super Bowl.

The centrality of such sports events in terms of national pride and as vehicles for economic generation makes them an ideal setting for potential violence of some sort, whether it involves rogue political attacks or fights in the crowd in attendance.

Haggerty's central point is that the military style precision by which systems hardware and software have been applied by soldiers in information gathering to secure a battlefield or an urban population centre were replicated in recent Olympics' events in Athens, Sydney and Beijing. "These are being conceived as almost military type operations, in terms of the control of space, the flow of people, the use of documents and the control of documents."

He says the process began before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in New York and Washington and has intensified since then.

Security experts routinely gather at international conferences to share best practices and innovation for safety and protection at mega events, Haggerty states.

He spent time interviewing officials and investigating arrangements about security for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Here,  surveillance which involves all levels of policing in Canada will probably cost about $1-billion which is well beyond the originally estimated $175 million for the project. In addition, state US enforcement bodies on the other side of the international border will be actively consulted and involved because of their own security concerns.

Haggerty points to a raft of security measures that are designed "to make people, places and processes visible in new ways using diverse tactics and technologies."

The list is exhaustive but they include biometric identification cards, toxic material scanners and detectors, computerized background checks, CCTV cameras, magnetometers, satellite monitoring, cellular telephone monitoring (both legal and illegal), overhead communications/monitoring blimps, traveler profiling and the increased integration of artificial intelligence into a host of private and public sector databases.
 
Haggerty suggests that public officials may use the pretext of potential mega event security problems to introduce controversial or expensive surveillance technology that in normal times would not be adopted.  "[Authorities are] capitalizing on the fact that in anticipation of the Games citizens tend to be more tolerant of intrusive security measures."
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He cites the example of Chicago which is seeking to bolster its 2016 summer Olympics bid by investing in an elaborate network of integrated law enforcement and private sector surveillance cameras to potentially blanket everything inside the historical Loop city center and employ face recognition technology -- first developed by IBM for the 2008 summer Beijing Games.

Peter Ryan, a former chief of the New South Wales police force during the 2000 summer Sydney Games and current senior security advisor for the International Olympic Committee, has stated that Olympic security efforts can have a "huge and lasting impact on national security" and should be "preserved and absorbed and developed further."

However, Haggerty warns of surveillance overkill where Olympic style security can percolate into more mundane contexts in a relatively peaceful city like Vancouver. "The [Olympic] Games themselves provide a glimpse of a possible militarized surveilled urban future."

In interviews with officials organizing the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games, he faced an insurmountable brick wall in terms of getting a handle on security and surveillance strategies.

One item that Haggerty can confirm is that Winter Olympic officials plan to photograph Vancouver neighborhoods with high resolution satellite mounted cameras.

"Satellite imaging is a fairly new and intensive way for physically dispersed audiences to view phenomena that were previously more difficult to monitor," says Haggerty.

Also, the Vancouver Police Department is training its own counter terror unit, following in the path of other cities that have sponsored Olympic events including Beijing and Athens (Summer 2004)

At the same time Haggerty stresses that the security patterns in other Olympic venues will not necessarily be adopted in the same exact manner in Vancouver. 

We will probably not see the scale of intrusion attempted in Beijing where about 300,000 CCTV cameras were installed in the Chinese city for its Olympics in what was described as the largest CCTV network in existence.  These cameras were used to scan vehicles entering certain city areas for chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear substances. Also, taxis were individually fitted with listening devices and integrated global positioning locating systems in order that the authorities could monitor them from central command locations. Furthermore, suspicions remain that hotels were bugged by audio and video feeds.
 
London will be the place to follow by other Olympic venues because the Metropolitan Police plans to integrate the city's existing patchwork of public and privately operated CCTV systems for its 2012 Summer Olympics. Haggerty says that face and hand scanning technology is being used to identify construction workers entering and leaving the Docklands Olympics site. Also, if proven successful in testing this technology could be used to identify ticket holders coming into Games' venues.

The sociologist warns that total integration of surveillance systems "remains the stuff of Hollywood fiction." He points to two factors -- the proprietary nature of the existing products on the market and the fact that the amount of data collected at such events as mega sports could outpace the ability of systems to effectively integrate them.

"Ultimately, the only solution to the problem of system complexity is modularity. [That is] breaking down complex systems into manageable, fire walled parts [and] thereby reducing the complexity of the whole. Modularity is the exact opposite of where contemporary technologically‐driven security solutions are going."