"Our Olympic Hell: A Militarised, Corporate, Jingoistic Disgrace" -- Andy Worthington

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EXCERPTS:

In Athens, the $300m "super-panopticon" CCTV and information system built for the Games following intense US pressure remained after the event, along with the disused sports facilities. In fact, the system has been used by Greek police trying in vain to control the mass uprisings responding to the crash and savage austerity measures in the country.

It is important to remember that all this is ostensibly designed to secure the spectacle of 17,000 athletes competing for 17 days. Even if London’s overall security budget remains similar to that of Athens, that works out at the startling figure of £59,000 of public money to secure each competitor or £3,500 per competitor per day. In 2004, the cost in now-bankrupt Athens was £90,000 per competitor (for a smaller number of athletes than are likely to attend London). This was a major contributor, as part of the overall £10bn costs, to Greece’s subsequent debt crisis.  How can we make sense of this situation? Four connected points need emphasis here. The first is that, amid a global economic crash, so-called "homeland security" industries — a loose confederation of defence, IT and biotechnology industries — are in bonanza mode. As this post-9/11 paradigm is being diffused around the world, the industry — worth $142bn in 2009 — is expected to be worth a staggering $2.7tn globally between 2010 and 2020. Growth rates are between 5% and 12% a year.

The UK, long an exemplar "surveillance society", is especially attractive to these industries, especially when hosting the Olympics. Recent security industry magazines have been full of articles excitedly extolling the Olympics as a "key driver of the industry" or as "keeping the market buoyant".

Nation states, and the EU, are struggling to ensure that their corporations get a piece of the action in markets long dominated by US and Israeli firms. Ramping up surveillance is thus now as much a part of economic policy as a response to purported threats.

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Crucially, though, as Naomi Klein points out in her book The Shock Doctrine, the security boom also involves attempts to diffuse the technologies honed in counter-insurgency and colonial war in places such as Gaza, Kabul and Baghdad — drones, helicopters, data mining, biometrics, security zones, so-called "non-lethal weapons" (devices used to disperse crowds) — to the domestic "global" cities of Asia and the west.

Particular glee that Israeli-style security arrangements are now being widely implemented is evident among the CEOs of large Israeli security and defence contractors, which are doing especially well in the security boom. Leo Gleser is president of ISDS, a company that proudly proclaims that it was established by ex-Mossad agents and which was involved in £200m worth of security contracts for the Athens Games. He talks of "growing tsunamis of violence, criminal acts, and global insecurity triggered by the 9/11 events" which made the "the western world finally understand that measures had to be taken".

Olympics are especially important opportunities to cement the security boom still further. They are the ultimate global security shop windows through which states and corporations can advertise their latest high-tech wares to burgeoning global markets while making massive profits.