The New Transparency is associated with The Surveillance Studies Centre.
Abe, Kiyoshi
Baasch, Stephanie
Bajc, Vida
Bernhard, Daniel
Boyle, Philip
Eick, Volker
Fonio, Chiara
French, Martin
Fussey, Pete
Gillham, Patrick
Hagemann, Anke
Klauser, Francisco
Martin, Aaron K.
Marx, Gary
Molnar, Adam
Murakami Wood, David
Noakes, John
Pisapia, Giovanni
Salter, Mark
Samatas, Minas
Shaw, Christopher
Snider, Laureen
van Brakel, Rosamunde
Westergard-Thorpe, Alissa
Event driven security policies and spatial control: The World Cup 2006 in Hamburg
Stephanie Baasch
Do big events have an influence on control and security politics by using the particular dynamics within the preparation of these events? The presentation refers to the main findings of a study which searched for answers to this question by analysing whether and to what extent the WC 2006 was used for legitimating security politics.
The theoretical background is based upon the ideas of disciplinary society (Foucault 1975) and control society (Deleuze 1993). This draws the attention to an increase of urban surveillance and its effects on self regulation behaviour as well as the exclusion of marginalized groups of inner cities. The presentation integrates interdisciplinary perspectives of urban development, big events and urban security. The own approach is built on two areas of urban research: First, it based on the idea of event driven urban policies, which refers to the work of the urban researchers Häußermann und Siebel (1993). They identified the implementation of big events as an important measure to speed up city development policies and labelled this neoliberal policy type as “the policy of the big events“. Until now, research in this field focuses mainly on economic, infrastructural and image factors but not on its effects of urban security policies. Second, the own approach considers the intensive research in the field of urban security and control in general, especially triggered by urban politics which were heavily influenced by the broken windows paradigm not only in the USA but also in Europe. The main research question focuses on event driven security policies in the context of the WC 2006, their main actors, the legitimating processes and strategies within these policies and spatial effects on different levels. Regarding the methodology, the study follows a qualitative approach by using methods like expert interviews and qualitative content analysis of press articles and documents, supplemented by frequency-based quantitative analysis.
The presentation discusses the discursive production of risks and security demands. Further, it identifies legitimating strategies and processes of security politics. In sum, the empirical results elucidate event driven effects on security politics and they identify the construction of areas under control as one important strategy for security production.
Biography:
Stephanie Baasch was born in 1972 in Hamburg, Germany. She has aPhD in Geography, a Masters Degree in Social Behaviour Science and History, and a Diploma in public administration economy. Her PhD thesis was on security impacts of the FIFA World Cup 2006 in Germany. A German version is available for download here:
http://www.sub.uni-hamburg.de/opus/volltexte/2009/4023/pdf/Dissertation__Baasch.pdf
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Munich 1972: In the Shadows of Berlin 1936 and in the Spotlight of Global Terrorism
Vida Bajc
Methodist University, NC
One of the factors related to the emergence of surveillance as a response to security concerns in the Olympics is the use of the Games as a platform to gain world‐wide attention to specific causes. In this sense, the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics are the most notable example of how a political issue is pushed on the global agenda and how collective memories that result from such crisis serve as ‘lessons learned’ in the planning for security and surveillance in subsequent events.
There were early examples of politicization of the Games. At the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin, Adolf Hitler sought to showcase the glorification of the Aryan race and Nazism. In the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico, Black American athletes used their medal platform to demonstrate their views against racism in the United States and in South Africa. In both cases, these activities were under intense media spotlight.
Just how important the media attention is in this case can be learned from the events which preceded the Games in Mexico that summer of 1968. Weeks before these Games began there were demonstrations by Mexican students to protest the huge expenditures by the Mexican government in the midst of widespread poverty. The Mexican government responded brutally, killing over 300 demonstrators. And yet, these events received little attention of the audiences worldwide because the media began to broadcast the Games when they actually started.
Indeed, organizers of the Munich Olympics in 1972 seemed oblivious to the Mexican demonstrations. Rather, they were haunted by different collective memories. The plan of the Committee was to have the minimum amount of security necessary so as not to have comparisons made to the Gestapo image of the Berlin Games under Hitler. Everything was avoided which would allow the Olympic Village to resemble an armed fortress. The city of Munich had a regular police force of 4000 and this was supplemented by an extra 6000 police brought into the city for the Games. The Olympic Village had only a 2m high fence without barbed wire, a staff of security personnel with no police privileges, and only the night patrol carrying guns. These preparations left the Village an easy target.
At the height of the world’s attention and less than a week before the medal awarding ceremony, members of the Black September Organization (BSO) made their way into the Olympic Village apartments where the Israeli athletes resided. On the premises, the BSO captured nine Israeli team members and issued a set of demands written in English, including the release of 241 prisoners held in Israel and West Germany and a jet to transport the released prisoners and the BSO members to Cairo. The government of Egypt refused to provide assistance and the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir refused to negotiate. This left the German police to opt for a rescue operation at the airport in Munich. Israel insisted that its specially trained commandos conduct the hostage rescue. The local state officials, however, refused the Israeli intervention on their territory, citing the German federal constitution. The crisis ended with the death of eleven Israeli hostages, five Black September operatives, and one West German policeman. Nevertheless, the BSO reached it ultimate purpose, namely, to raise the plight of the Palestinian issue back on the world stage.
In this paper, I analyze what I see as one of the major lessons of Munich 1972 for the study of security and surveillance in the Olympics. What tends to follow after any such crisis is, on the one hand, an intense attention to its details, endlessly labored over through televisions discussions, popular press analysis, as well as academic research, and on the other hand, the pointing of fingers. All help to keep such an event in collective memories of various constituencies. In light of this, the host country which lobbied intensively to stage the Games, as much as the International Olympics Committee, are both eager to demonstrate to the global audiences that their surveillance procedures and technologies can bring about a secure space where the Games can take place uninterrupted. As I also demonstrate in my analysis of the US presidential inauguration and the Pope’s visit to Jerusalem, there is a logic built in this pursuit. This logic assumes that a secure space can be achieved with the use of ever more improved surveillance technologies and ever more perfected surveillance procedures.
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The ‘Olympic difference’: securitisation expressions of mega-events as a pathway to first-class global citizenship
Daniel J. Bernhard & Aaron K. Martin
London School of Economics and Political Science
Though it claimed remarkably few lives, the PLO attack on the Israeli delegation at the Munich Olympics of 1972 has come to define the security profile of the Games. The Olympics have become a point of security exceptionalism, wherein the normal means of policing and public security provision are deemed inadequate and are thus greatly expanded. But the instruments employed – anti-aircraft weaponry, deployment of naval resources and special forces, closing off whole parts of cities as security zones, and, of course, a ramped-up surveillance apparatus – are only loosely directed at preventing another Munich, or for that matter, another Atlanta pipe-bombing, from taking place. Further, public terrorist acts that take place outside of the Olympic window – 9/11, 3/11 and 7/7, to name a few – attract a lot of attention on their own and are equally destructive objective terms. In this paper we ask why security officials worry so much more about the Olympics than other large public gatherings, sporting events or points of assembly where the material risk to the public is the same as, if not greater than, the Olympics.
We use a securitisation analysis (Buzan, Waever and de Wilde, 1998) to interrogate the nature of perceived threats to the Games, as detailed in declassified intelligence estimates, and the relationship between the designation of security priorities and the means selected to combat them. Viewing security developments as policy artefacts, we explore the archaeology of Olympic insecurity and find that grandiose security plans correlate to low-priority threats as defined by the intelligence community. They seek to deter traditional military unlikely attacks from other states and they reduce vulnerabilities that do not correlate to the ‘lone wolf attacker’ threat, which intelligence assessments identify as the most likely risk to the Games. Further, the disparity between an Olympic security event and the normal security measures deployed against threats to equally vulnerable assemblies of large numbers of people – professional sports matches, large concerts, religious festivals, gay-pride parades, etc. – connotes an ‘Olympic difference’, the social designation of the Olympic Games as a special event that transcends the material parity of that event with other human security vulnerabilities.
We conclude that hosting the Olympics is one of several pathways towards first-class citizenship in international society, especially in cases where the material cost of organising the games outweighs the objective benefits of doing so. Like membership in prominent and exclusive clubs like the EU, WTO, or the development of nuclear weapons (also a club, cf. Bracken, 2003), hosting the Olympics is an affirmation of one’s place in the modern, developed world. On one hand, then, extreme security measures exist to protect the Games as a symbol of prestige - these measures protect the Games more than they protect the people attending them. We also suggest that dramatic displays of military hardware, operational readiness and organisational expertise are additional expressions of first-class global citizenship that compliment the incentives of holding the Games in the first place.
Bracken, P. (2003). “The Structure of the Second Nuclear Age”, Oribis 47:3, pp. 399-413. In particular, see his thoughts on “nuclear weapons and the state”, p. 405.
Buzan, B., O. Waever and J. de Wilde, (1998), Security: A New Framework for Analysis. London, Lynne Rienner.
Biography:
Daniel's principal research focuses on the relationship between historical consciousness, historical processes of collective valuation and the logic of security. Current projects include an analysis of how international relations shape economic identities, and how a given model of economic organisation can become and symbolic boundary object that links individuals to the international political life of the state in a meaningful way. Recent surveillance studies publications include: Martin, Aaron K., Rosamunde Van Brakel and Daniel Bernhard. 2009. Understanding resistance to digital surveillance: Towards a multi-disciplinary, multi-actor framework. Surveillance & Society 6(3): 213-232.
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Knowledge transfer and mega-event security
Philip J. Boyle
PhD Candidate
Department of Sociology
University of Alberta
This paper draws on research conducted in the past three years on dynamics pertaining to the provision of security at the Olympic Games and the lasting legacies of these security efforts at urban, national, and global scales. The aspect of this research that will be developed for The Surveillance Games workshop is the governmental problem of knowledge transfer and the networks of knowledge mobilities mobilized in response.
The problem of knowledge transfer arises from the scale, complexity, and non‐recurring nature (from the point of view of the host city) of the Olympic Games. These factors necessitate appropriating specialized knowledge and expertise developed in other times and places and assembling this expertise in new locales. This movement of knowledge, or knowledge mobilities, is facilitated by shifting and often temporary lash‐ups between state, corporate, and non‐governmental actors configured in context‐dependent ways that include, amongst other elements, the standardized major event templates of policing agencies, formal and informal observation programs between policing agencies, international intelligence sharing, the movement of individuals between government and private sector consultancy firms, epistemic communities of experts, the knowledge transfer programs of sport governing bodies, and temporary and/or permanent international institutions. Factors inhibiting knowledge mobilities include divergent legal regimes, the inherent friction encountered when attempting to transfer tacit or context dependant knowledge (‘sticky’ knowledge), and organizational cultures resistant to outside influences. Examining these networks and dynamics reveals the knowledge infrastructure that underpins Olympic security efforts as opposed to the technological ways that the Olympics are made secure, an analysis that has not, to my knowledge, been undertaken before.
Biography:
Philip Boyle's publications include:
Boyle, P. and K. Haggerty. (accepted, forthcoming Fall 2009). Spectacular Security: Mega-Events and the Security Complex. International Political Sociology.
Boyle, P., and Haggerty, K. 2009. The Privacy Games: The Vancouver Olympics, Privacy and Surveillance. Ottawa, ON: Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
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Human-, Soft-, and Hard Ware Wars: The FIFA World Cup in Germany 2006 as a neoliberal sport event
Volker Eick
Freie Universität Berlin
John F. Kennedy Institute, Department of Politics
The FIFA World Cup in Germany 2006 has seen the largest display of domestic security strength since 1945: More than 220,000 police officers from the 16 states (Länder), 30,000 from the Federal Police, an unknown number of the secret service officers, 7,000 military guards, and more than 20,000 rent-a-cops were in operation during the World Cup. In addition, more than 20,000 volunteers took part in security and safety measures. The NATO assisted with the airborne surveillance system AWACS to control air space over the host cities. A vivid exchange of German police officers with their neighboring nation states' colleagues emerged, cutting across national borders and, thereby, neglecting any constitutional restraints in the respective countries. Tournament venues and their vicinity as well as "public viewing" locations in downtown areas were converted into high-security zones with access limited to registered persons and pacified crowds only; in addition, measures were taken to allow business only for those multinationals which subsidized the event. About 100,000 persons, successfully applying for jobs during the tournament, got security-screened by secret service officers and the respective computer systems: All in all, selling sausages became a security issue. The overall effort was supported and mediated by sophisticated surveillance, information and communication technologies. What remained in operation even after the event was over, were new laws that extended executive power and sophisticated surveillance technologies ("counter-laws", in terms of Ericson, 2007), an exceptional experience in comprehensive training for ›national security‹ (in order to be prepared for "transnational protest", della Porta, Peterson, & Reiter, 2006), enduring fragments of meant-to-be temporary surveillance networks (as described by Aas, Gundhus, & Lomell, 2009), the normalization of permanent emergency (Coaffee, Wood, & Rogers, 2009), and the privatization and militarization of urban public space (Graham, 2009; Eick, Töpfer, & Sambale, 2007).
The paper focuses on the role of state police, army, private security companies and the nonprofit "volunteers" as human ware and of CCTV as hard- and software in establishing a neoliberal agenda for regulating sports events and urban space in terms of safety, order, and security (SOS). Therefore, the study of the security architectures and strategies tested and implemented at the FIFA World Cup in Germany is also a way to look into a prism which bundles and locally mediates global trends in contemporary policing and criminal policies.
The paper shows how strategies of neostatism, neocorporatism, and neocommunitarianism in the field of public safety/Homeland Security/European Homeland Defense interact in establishing the (post)neoliberal agenda. Comparable insights from the UEFA Championship 2008 in Austria and Switzerland, the Beijing Summer Olympics 2008 and the forthcoming FIFA South Africa 2010 will be integrated.
Aas, K.F.; H.O. Gundhus; H.M. Lomell (eds., 2009): Technologies of (In)security. The surveillance of everyday life, Routledge.
Coaffee, J.; D. M. Wood; P. Rogers (2009): The Everyday Resilience of the City, Palgrave/MacMillan.
della Porta, D.; A. Peterson; H. Reiter (eds., 2006): The Policing of Transnational Protest, Ashgate.
Eick, V./J. Sambale/E. Töpfer (eds., 2007): Kontrollierte Urbanität. Zur Neoliberalisierung städtischer Sicherheitspolitik. transcript.
Ericson, R. (2007): Crime in an Insecure World, Polity Press.
Graham, S. (2009): "Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism", Verso (in print).
Biography:
Volker Eick is a political scientist at Freie Unversität Berlin, John F. Kennedy Institute, Department of Politics. He is currently finishing his PhD thesis on "New Security Concepts in the Changing Welfare State. Policing Between Commercialization and Community".
Recent publications: Kontrollierte Urbanität. Zur Neoliberalisierung städtischer Sicherheitspolitik (Eds., with J. Sambale; E. Töpfer). Bielefeld 2007; "Space Patrols. The New Peace-keeping Functions of Nonprofits". In: H. Leitner, J. Peck, E. Sheppard (Eds.): Contesting Neoliberalism. The Urban Frontier. New York 2007; "Neoliberalism and Urban Space: Activism, Atavism, and Aspiration". In: Ehituskunst. Estonian Architectural Review, 49/50 (2008). See also: http://workfare-city.org, http://www.policing-crowds.org/
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The XX Winter Olympic Games: Torino 2006
Chiara Fonio and Giovanni Pisapia
This paper seeks to examine the Integrated Security System (ISS) that was developed for and implemented at the venues of the XX Winter Olympic Games, which took place in Torino, Italy, from the 10th to the 26th of February 2006.
The venues of the XX Winter Olympic Games were divided into competitive venues (14 in total) and non competitive venues (17 in total). The three Olympic villages were considered and included into the “non competitive” venues category. During the XX Winter Olympic Games, the Security Department of the Olympic Organizing Committee (TOROC) and the Italian law enforcement agencies developed and employed the Integrated Security System (ISS) at the Olympic venues. The Integrated Security System (ISS) consisted of a combination of three different typologies of components: security polices, procedures, and contingency plans; security personnel; and security technology. This paper will focus on a comprehensive analysis of the latter.
This sophisticated technology system used in the XX Winter Olympic Games venues consisted of the following components: the TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (Tetra) System (in total, 684 Tetra radios for TOROC staff where used during the Olympic Games), Magnetometers (in total 460), Hand Wands (in total 948), X-Ray machines (in total 202) and surveillance system (including 546 fixed cameras and 126 dome cameras).
This paper, in addition to analyzing the above-mentioned Integrated Security System (ISS) will place a particular emphasis on the analysis of security equipment (e.g. surveillance technologies) that has been retained in Torino after the Olympic Games. Moreover, it will focus on the surveillance practices employed for the ISS, analysing the technical context and the “social frame” (such as the operators’ training and the target of surveillance), and on the general issue of policy implications on security and privacy concerns.
Methodologically, the paper will draw its information from various documents of the Security Department of the Olympic Organizing Committee (TOROC) and from in-depth interviews with, as an example, ELSAG Datamat engineers who designed the ISS for the twenty-one Olympic sites across the Piemonte region and to the Chief of Police of the Torino Metropolitan Department who has inherited some of the above-mentioned technologies employed during the Olympic Games.
During the XX Winter Olympic Games in the Susa Valley citizens organized a strong resistance. It seems thus crucial to address also the issue of resistance in order to offer a comprehensive overview of the Olympic. Besides security and surveillance practices, in fact, either the environmental impact or the struggles against 2006 Torino Olympic need to be taken into account.
The Anti-Olympic opposition will be described in relation to costs and environmental impact. The paper will illustrate to what extent the aforementioned aspects are linked and will look at resistance from a social science perspective.
Biography:
Chiara Fonio holds a Ph.D in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research. Her main research areas are surveillance studies, security and terrorism, and ICTs. As part of her doctoral thesis, she carried out the first Italian qualitative research focused on CCTV in the city of Milan. The book Videosorveglianza, uno sguardo senza volto (Video surveillance. A faceless gaze) originated from her thesis and was released in February 2007. After her empirical research, she was in charge of the CCTV operators’ training as far social aspects and privacy implications are concerned. Currently, she is senior researcher of ITSTIME (Italian Team for Security, Terroristic Issue and Managing Emergencies (http://www.itstime.it). ITSTIME is based at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy), Department of Sociology. She has been a teaching assistant in Sociology and Mass Communication theory since 2005.
Giovanni Pisapia graduated in 2002 from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy) in Political Science with a thesis on "Crime in the Republic of South Africa: Reasons, Current Situation and Possible Future Solutions". In 2008 he obtained a Ph.D. in Criminology from the same university with a thesis on “The Development of a Terrorism Risk Management Framework (TRMF)”.
As a Consultant for UNICRI (United Nations Interregional Crime & Justice Research Institute) he designed and implemented training activities on crime prevention and justice administration. As a Security Manager at TOROC (Olympic Organizing Committee XX Olympic Winter Games) he was in charge of the co-ordination and co-operation between the organizing committee and Italian law enforcement agencies for the development of the venues security plans, the security policies, procedures and contingency plans, as well as the security transfer of knowledge document for the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Currently, as the Project Manager for the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department (JMPD), he is in charge of developing the safety and security general strategy and operational plans of the City of Johannesburg 2010 FIFA World CupTM venues.
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Gaming the ‘State of Exception’: V2010 ISU Interprets the Fair Information Principles
Martin French, University of Toronto
In February 2009, with momentum building towards the operationalization of its security plans, the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit (V2010 ISU) released a statement on privacy and its approach to the Fair Information Principles. It noted:
The Privacy Act of Canada governs all work done by Federal Government institutions inside the V2010 ISU. […] Security planning for the 2010 Winter Games respects Canadian laws and values. In relation to personal information, the V2010 Integrated Security Unit follows the “Code of Fair Information Practices” that is reflected in the Privacy Act of Canada and similar principles in BC’s provincial legislation.
The Code of Fair Information Practices requires the V2010 Integrated Security Unit to:
This paper considers the V2010 ISU version of the Fair Information Principles in relation to both The Privacy Act of Canada and the 1980 OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data.
By charting the evolution of the Fair Information Principles, especially as these have evolved from international norm, to national law, to the ‘local’ statement quoted above, this paper highlights a specific way in which planned exceptional events (so-called) can transform law. In order to undertake this work, Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the ‘state of exception’ is explored in relation to planned exceptional events, such as the Olympics. “In truth,” Agamben writes, “the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other”. As a planned exceptional event, the Olympics stand out as a zone of indifference between juridical order and exceptional circumstance. This paper will analyze how the Olympics operate as a zone of indifference to prepare privacy principles for police appropriation.
Biography:
Publications include:
French, Martin (2009), "Woven of War-Time Fabrics: The Globalization of Public Health Surveillance", Surveillance & Society, vol. 6(2): 101-115.
French, Martin (2007), "In the Shadow of Canada's Camps", Social & Legal Studies, vol. 16(1):
49-69.
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Surveillance, Sustainability and the Spectacle: constructing security for the London 2012 Olympics
Pete Fussey (University of East London, UK) and Jon Coaffee (Manchester University, UK)
This paper examines the form, function and impact of London’s 2012 security strategy, identifies and critiques the role of surveillance as one of its central features and examines the operation’s relationship with prevailing trends evident in previous Olympic and other mega-sporting event security practices.
First, the paper examines the evolution of Olympic and major event security since 1972. Of note here is the way Olympic security planning can be seen as an exemplar of increasingly standardised approaches to protecting major sporting events (see Coaffee and Johnstone, 2007). Drawing on Beck’s (1999: 153) conceptualisation of a ‘protectionist reflex’ in response to generalised late-modern fears, the key role of ‘total security’ in protecting mega sporting events is identified. Such post-millennium tensions can be seen to further inform and shape more generalised paradigms of security, which, in turn, raise questions over the impermanence of ‘states of exception’ (Agamben, 2005). The paper further argues that the IOC’s stated aim of accenting the Games as an athletic event and not an exercise in security is readily discarded in favour of creating fortified urban enclaves.
The central feature such security planning is identified as the deployment of technological surveillance. This paper charts its institution at the 1976 Montreal Games to its particular primacy in the post 9/11 era and its purported connection with the aforementioned IOC demands for distanciated security. Moreover, this intensified strategic direction has driven exponential increases in the costs of Olympic security – as evinced by the elaborate and expensive ‘Olympic superpanopticon’ (Samatas, 2007) deployed during the Athens Games in 2004.
At the same time, topographies of risk are continually shifting. Aside from the prominent events in 1972 and 1996, terrorist groups have consistently used the Olympics to aggrandise themselves and their causes. In contrast to contemporary emphases on violent Jihadi extremism, since 1988 terrorist threats to the Olympics can be identified from ethno-separatists, state-sponsored proxies, left-wing groups, right-wing extremists, and environmentalists. For London, this diversity is compounded by both the continual evolution of Al Qaeda-inspired threats and the resurgence of Irish Republicanism during 2009. Given the disparities in the effectiveness of surveillance strategies depending on the composition, action and ideology of different terrorist groups (Fussey, 2007), important questions are raised over whether such standardised responses provide the protection that they promise.
The second area of discussion analyses the London 2012 security operation in detail. Drawing on initial findings from ongoing empirical fieldwork examining the 2012 security operation, an assessment is made of how the security operation has developed and the projected shape of its final format. Moreover, this analysis is considered in relation to the previous areas of discussion – in the ways the 2012 security operation has been shaped by the standardised and transferable motifs of major event security outlined above and whether these orthodoxies of security planning are able to respond to the continually shifting threats and diverse social harms that accompany the staging of such events.
The final area of discussion assesses the practical and social impact of the 2012 security operation. The central theme concerns the contested nature of security, defined here as ‘the social construction of security’. Here, questions are asked concerning what is being secured, where the site of security resides and for what period is it applied. Policy discourses on the terrorist threat are contrasted with other social harms traditionally accompanying such events (including routine crime (Decker et al., 2007) and organised crime (Fussey and Rawlinson, 2009)). Displacement and the diffusion of surveillance and other security measures beyond the fortified Olympic Park (via new commercial developments and, also, securitised ‘buffer zones’) are also points of debate. Despite London’s unprepossessing status as the most intensively observed city on the planet, the Games are likely to bring further innovations in the form of second-generation technologies. Against a historical backdrop of such measures repeatedly pioneered on East Londoners, these mechanisms may invest new meaning to the ‘community focused’ discourse surrounding the 2012 Games.
Regarding temporality, terrorist attacks during the Games are extremely rare, with a far greater prevalence occurring prior to these events, as highlighted by the events preceding the 1988 and 1992 Games. Additionally, current tenders for 2012 security suppliers encourage companies to embed a ‘security legacy’ into their plans, thus bequeathing substantial mechanisms and technologies of control to the post-event site. This inheritance of security infrastructures is a common feature of the Olympics and includes examples of a private policing legacy following the Tokyo (1964) and Seoul (1988) Olympiads and the continuation of zero-tolerance style exclusion laws after the Sydney (2000) Games. Key to this discussion are the critical themes of legitimacy and control ‘creep’ as they apply to the post-event site in London – calling into question issues of citizenship and community – affecting those populations continually cited by the ODA as the main benefactors of the Games.
References:
Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception, Chicago: Chicago University Press
Beck, U. (1999) World Risk Society, London: Polity Press
Coaffee, J., and Johnstone, L. (2007) ‘Accommodating the Spectacle’, in J. Gold, M. and Gold (eds.) Olympic Cities: City Agendas, Planning, and the World's Games, 1896 to 2012, London: Routledge
Decker, S., Varano, S., and Greene, J. (2007) ‘Routine crime in exceptional times: The impact of the 2002 Winter Olympics on citizen demand for police services’, in Journal of Criminal Justice, Vol. 35(1) pp. 89-103
Fussey, P. (2007) ‘Observing Potentiality in the Global City: Surveillance and Counterterrorism in London’, in International Criminal Justice Review, vol.17(3) pp.171-192
Fussey, P., and Rawlinson, P. (2009) ‘Winners and Losers: Post Communist Populations and Organised Crime in East London’s Olympic Regeneration Game’ presented at the 2nd Annual European Organised Crime Conference, Liverpool, UK, 9th March
Samatas, M. (2007) ‘Security and Surveillance in the Athens 2004 Olympics: Some lessons from a troubled story’, in International Criminal Justice Review, vol. 17(3) pp. 220-238
Biography:
Dr Fussey lectures in Criminology and Terrorism Studies at the University of East London. His main research interests concern the dissemination and application of camera surveillance to tackle crime and terrorism. He is also researching the form and impact of London's 2012 security operation and also conducting ethnographic research around organized criminality in East London's Olympic market place.
Relevant recent and forthcoming work includes:
Fussey, P., Coaffee, J., Armstrong, G., and Hobbs, R. (forthcoming 2010) Sustaining and Securing the Olympic Neighbourhood: Reconfiguring the city for 2012 and beyond Aldershot: Ashgate
Richards, A., Fussey, P. and Silke, A. (eds) (forthcoming 2010) Terrorism and the Olympics: Lessons for 2012 and beyond, London: Routledge
Fussey, P. (2007) "Observing Potentiality in the Global City: Surveillance and Counterterrorism in London", in International Criminal Justice Review, vol.17(3) pp.171-192
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From Stadium to Fanzone: Host Cities in a State of Emergency
Anke Hagemann
Within the last ten years, international football tournaments have evolved into urban mass events: By the creation of official “public viewing” areas, the city is becoming a major arena for the event, and public spaces are temporarily transformed into well-secured experience zones. In the course of these mega-events – although completely foreseen and planned in advance – the rhetoric of exceptional conditions or a "state of emergency“ is increasingly instrumentalized to accomplish measures that would not be agreeable under “normal” circumstances:
This contribution is going to describe the urban effects of the European Championship 2008 by the example of Zurich. It is based on observations and spatial mappings during the event, interviews with local protagonists, official documents and local newspaper articles.
CV:
Anke Hagemann, *1974, studied Architecture at the TU Berlin. She is a founding member of the critical magazine An Architektur and worked as a researcher in the exhibition project Shrinking Cities; until January 2009 she taught Architecture Theory at the ETH Zurich; currently she is teaching Urban Design at the HafenCity University in Hamburg. Anke graduated with an analysis of access regulation in football stadia; in cooperation with the Rote Fabrik Zurich she organized a public program on the urban impacts of football mega events in 2008 (www.fancity2008.ch).
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Securitisation and Branding of the Event City: the Example of the European Football Championships 2008 in Austria and Switzerland
Dr. Francisco R. Klauser
Institute of Hazard and Risk Research
Department of Geography
Durham University
Concerned with the interdependences between the event city’s economic potential on the one hand and its securitisation strategies on the other, the paper aims at critically investigating the corresponding relationships between securitisation and branding strategies of public space during the European Football Championships 2008 in Switzerland and Austria.
To address this problematic, the paper places particular attention on the implications of the officially organised ‘fan zones’ in the eight Swiss and Austrian Euro 2008 host cities. The paper’s central thesis is that fan zones – as the territorial framework for the concentration of fans on specific, and clearly separated, parts of the city centre – followed not only the need to monitor and to regulate public life during the tournament, but also to enhance UEFA’s and its sponsors’ branding opportunities within the event cities of the Euro 2008.
Yet, based on numerous interviews with key actors involved in planning the security arrangements for the Euro 2008, the paper shows that the ‘fan zone-model’ was not developed for the Euro 2008 specifically. Rather, fan zones must be understood as previously tested and subsequently standardised and reapplied answer to the problem of crowd management in the event city. Following from this, the paper concludes by pointing towards some of the main issues involved in the exemplification-processes of specific ‘security models’ through sports mega-events.
Biography:
Francisco Klauser is RCUK research fellow in the Institute of Hazard and Risk Research at Durham University. Having initiated and lead two research projects on the socio-spatial implications of CCTV in Switzerland, his current work focuses on security and surveillance issues in the context of airport risk-management and sports mega-events. He is also currently co-editing a special issue of the journal Urban Studies on the theme of securitization/surveillance and sports mega-events.
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Complexity and Irony in Policing Mega-Events
Gary T. Marx, M.I.T., Patrick Gillham, University of Idaho, and John Noakes, Arcadia University
This paper analyzes recent developments in the social control of large gatherings. Events such as the World Trade Organization Protests in Seattle and Washington, the New York City Republican National Convention, the U.S. presidential inauguration, the Athens and Beijing Olympics and the Super Bowl show significant differences with respect to goals, tactics, the roles of public and private and national and international control organizations and the kinds of groups subject to control. We will offer some systematic comparisons between controls in these different kinds of events and also note changes associated with the increasing sophistication and diffusion of technologies of control and neutralization. While mega-events show significant differences across types and over time, they also face a number of common contingencies. Here we will expand on a previous typology of 10 social control ironies in policing temporary gatherings. ((Marx, 1998, Gillham and Marx 2003, Noakes and Gillham 2006, Gillham and Noakes, 2007.
References
Gillham, P. and Noakes, J. (2007) ‘More than a March in a Circle’: Transgressive Protests and the Limits of Negotiated Management. Mobilization, 12(4), 341-357. http://www.class.uidaho.edu/gillham/research/More%20than%20a%20March%20in%20a%20Circle.pdf
Gillham, P. and Marx, G.(2003) Ironies in Protest and Policing: The World Trade Organization in Seattle" revised. In Representing Resistance: Media, Civil Disobedience, and the Global Justice Movement, edited by Andy Opel and Donnalyn Pompper. Westport, CT: Greenwood. (http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/seattle.html)
Marx, G. (1998) Some Reflections on the Democratic Policing of Demonstrations In D. della Porta and H. Reiter, The Policing of Protest in Contemporary Democracies, University of Minnesota Press, 1998. http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/seattle.html
Noakes, John A. and Patrick F. Gillham. (2006). “Aspects of the New Penology in the Policing of Global Justice Protests in the United States.” In Policing Political Protest After Seattle, edited by Donatella Della Porta, Herbert Reiter and Abby Peterson. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. http://www.class.uidaho.edu/gillham/research/Noakes%20&%20Gillham%20Aspects%20of%20New%20Penology%20PROOF.pdf
Biographies:
Gary T. Marx is Professor Emeritus from M.I.T. He is the author of Protest and Prejudice, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America, Collective Behavior and Social Movements (with Doug McAdam) and editor of Racial Conflict, Muckraking Sociology, Undercover: Police Surveillance in Comparative Perspective (with C. Fijnaut) and other books. With Norman Goodman, he revised Society Today and edited Sociology: Popular and Classical Approaches. Undercover received the Outstanding Book Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and Marx was named the American Sociological Association's Jensen Lecturer for 1989-1990. He received the Distinguished Scholar Award from its section on Crime, Law and Deviance, the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association and the Bruce C. Smith Award for research achievement. In 1992 he was the inaugural Stice Memorial Lecturer in residence at the University of Washington and he has been a UC Irvine Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow, the A.D. Carlson Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences at West Virginia University, and the Hixon-Riggs Visiting Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA. Major works in progress are books on new forms of surveillance and social control across borders. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
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The Spectacle of Fear: Anxious Events and Foreign Threats in Japan
David Murakami Wood, Department of Sociology, Queen's University
Kiyoshi Abe, School of Sociology, Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan
The main focus of this paper is dichotomous: in general terms, we provide a comparative study of sport mega-events and other mega-events; in specific terms, we examine the specific case of Japanese sport mega-events, notably with reference to Japan's political culture and forms of national self-representation within the global context. Since the period of post-war reconstruction, Japan has opened up economically and to a lesser extent, demographically. However the 'outsider' remains a significant spectre haunting debates about security and safety. At the same time, with the rise of the Chinese regional and global power, Japan's political elite are struggling to cement Japan's place in the world with attempts to secure a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and other moves to secure a global political status equivalent to nation's economic influence. This necessitates the hosting of major global events, but these remain beset with a particular anxiety over foreign threats to order which, in Japanese public discourse at least, often glosses over internal dynamics, at the same time as presenting a welcoming face to outsiders and the global media. However, as in many countries, the 'War on Terror' has provided a justification for these already existing contradictions to coexist without the need for resolution. This paper pulls these threads together through an examination of three major recent events, the Japan/Korea World Cup 2002, the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, and the G8 summit in Hokkaido in 2008, and the public policy developments between them. In particular, it examines the role of the politics of nationalism, and the generation of fear, in the context of the 'one-world' ideology represented by mega-events.
Biography:
David Murakami Wood is a new Canada Research Chair (Tier II) and Associate Professor of Surveillance Studies at Queen's University. His main current interest is in surveillance and gloablization, and this year he has been working in Brazil and Japan as part of a large international comparative study, Cultures of Urban Surveillance, which was funded by a UK ESRC Research Fellowship. He is currently working on two new books: The Watched World (in Rowman & Littlefield's Globalization series) and Global Surveillance Societies (for Palgrave).
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Feeling the Stare: Emotional Resistance to Rhizomatic Surveillance in Public Ritual
Mark B. Salter and Philippe M. Frowd, University of Ottawa
I always feel like…somebody’s watching me…
Who's watching me
I don't know anymore!
Rockwell (1984) Rereleased Mysto + Pizzi or Geico (2008)
Our paper analyzes two sites of resistance to surveillance systems at or immediately after mega-events through an exploration of the use of affect and empathy. Building on the metaphor of the surveillant assemblage, we examine how disparate actors and uncoordinated systems take advantage of the emotional potentiality embedded in mega-events to change the affective landscape of urban spaces. We take two cases: the Athens Olympics, and in particular the implementation and subsequent removal of the wide-scale CCTV system, and the surveillance of religious pilgrimages in Iraq, notably Karbala.
We identify an affective turn in surveillance studies, in which the emotional sphere is taken as a serious realm of analysis. (Koskela 2000; Anderson + Smith 2001, Thrift 2004, Adey 2008). The affective is particularly important at mega-events, which are themselves structured around emotion and in particular the construction of certain kinds of emotional fields (national pride, religious fervor, etc.) that are dependent on empathy and notions of solidarity – the group representing to itself a common affective experience that then comes to reinforce a particular form of politics + identity. The wide-scale implementation of surveillance systems has the potential to subtly undermine this affective field, precisely because contemporary surveillance systems – exemplified by CCTV in Athens and military operations in Karbala – use technology as a way to increase social distance the watcher from the watched. The use of emotion as a resource or condition of possibility for surveillance system has been well-explored by Foucauldian scholars who focus on or supplement the panopticon (Hier, Walby and Greenberg 2006). However, less has been written about affect as a condition of possibility within the surveillant assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Bogard 2006) or affect as a phenomenon that is ‘spaced’ (Anderson and Harrison 2006).
The Athens 2004 Summer Olympics were largely perceived as a test-bed for large-scale surveillance systems. Setting aside the extent to which this system achieved its policy goals (Samatas 2007), we want to examine the resistance to the CCTV system by the police and Greek citizens after the games, which eventually led to its dismantling. Police officers reported that the presence of the CCTV system did not facilitate their police-work, but made it impossible to accomplish it.
The Shiite pilgrim route to Karbala commemorates Arbaeen (40 in Arabic), which marks the end of the mourning period for Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed – and thus crucial to the doctrine of Shia sect. The pilgrimage had also marked a resistance to the totalitarian and Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein, and is now represented as a sectarian sign. An estimated 12 million Shiites were in Karbala in February for the religious rite. In 2009, over 80 pilgrims were killed over the week-long rite through direct terrorist attacks, bombs, and a (female) suicide bomber. Though the US military has returned control of Karbala to the Iraqi government, the pilgrimage route remains a vulnerable site for sectarian violence, and both Iraqi and US military have established checkpoints and conduct route security (Santora 2009). We do not argue that the attacks on the pilgrims constitute acts of resistance to the surveillant systems, rather we demonstrate that, because of the particular religious significance of Arbaeen, the empathy with the martyr Imam Hussein is intensified if the pilgrimage itself is surveilled or attacked.
Seeking to go beyond the metaphor of the panopticon which overemphasizes an arboreal conception of surveillance, our paper moves towards the assemblage as a more accurate paradigm of surveillance at mega events. While the surveillance assemblage has been the subject of study as have varying conceptions of resistance to surveillance, the dualism of affect in the context of surveillance is an under-theorized section of surveillance literature. While affective and emotional imperatives enable events to become ‘mega’ events, empathy as a function of affect can also function, depending on its intensity, to increase or decrease the social distance from the assemblage of surveillance technology to its intended target. Affective appeals and historical legacies constitute a key part of public rituals such as the Shia pilgrimages in Karbala, while the ‘mega-event security complex’ visible during the Athens Olympics includes non-state actors in the surveillance assemblage. The affective urban landscape which is the focus of our paper fundamentally links emotion, empathy and identity to spatial phenomena (and the public rituals which take place within them) in new and interesting ways.
Works Cited
Adey, Peter (2008) Airports, mobility and the calculative architecture of affective control Geoforum 39(1): 438-451.
Anderson, Ben and Harrison, Paul (2006) Questioning affect and emotion Area 38 (3): 333-335.
Anderson K. and Smith S. J. (2001) Editorial: Emotional geographies Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26 (1): 7–10.
Bogard, William (2006) Surveillant assemblages and lines of flight in David Lyon (ed) Theorizing Surveillance Cullumpton: Willan, 97-122.
Haggerty, Kevin D. and Richard V. Ericson (2000) The Surveillant Assemblage British Journal of Sociology 51(4): 605-622.
Hier, Sean P., Kevin Walby, and Josh Greenburg (2006) Supplementing the panoptic paradigm: surveillance, moral governance and CCTV, in David Lyon (ed) Theorizing Surveillance Cullumpton: Willan, 230-244.
Koskela, Hille (2000) The gaze without eyes’: video-surveillance and the changing nature of urban space Progress in Human Geography 24(2): 243-265.
Samatas, Minas (2007) Security and Surveillance in the Athens 2004 Olympics: Some Lessons From a Troubled Story International Criminal Justice Review 17(3): 220-238.
Santora, Marc (2009) Suicide Bomber Kills 35 in an Attack on Shiite Pilgrims in Iraq New York Times Feb 13, 2009.
Thrift, Nigel (2004) Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect Geografiska Annaler Series B 86(1): 57–78.
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Surveilling Athens 2004 Olympics under the exploitation of 9/11 impact
Minas Samatas
Athens 2004 Olympics were the first Summer Olympic Games after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), the "security industrial complex," many foreign countries, especially the US government , and international media, as presumed Olympic partners in the Olympic industry have seriously exploited post 9/11 terrorist panic not only for the success of the games but also for their own expedient political-economic interests. Yet the Greek governments took advantage of 9/11 to accept the pressure and buy a super expensive, however ambivalent C4I surveillance system for post-games, long term use against terrorism and crime, even traffic control. Hence this paper will first analyze the whole pressure of the international Olympic industry on Greece to implement a "super-panopticon" the fierce competition, entailing even corruption (bribes), of corporations producing surveillance systems; the serio-comic implementation process of the super-electronic surveillance system and the reasons of its blatant failure; and finally the Greek people's anti-surveillance attitude during and after the games, especially after the revelation of the Olympic phone tappings against the Greek government.
Biography:
Minas Samatas, has PhD in sociology from New School for Social Research, NYC. He is currently Associate Professor in the Sociology Department, University of Crete, Greece. Author of Surveillance in Greece: From Anticommunist to Consumer Surveillance ( Pella, N.Y. 2004), and co-editor with Kevin Haggerty Surveillance and Democracy, Routeledge 2010 (forthcoming). His other publications include:
“Security and Surveillance in the Athens 2004 Olympics: Some lessons from a troubled story” International Criminal Justice Review, September 2007; 17;220.
"Studying Surveillance in Greece: Methodological and other problems related to an authoritarian surveillance culture" Surveillance &Society, 3(2/3):181-197, 2005.
"From Thought-Control to the Traffic-Control:A comparison of traditional and new surveillance” in Surveillance and Governance: Crime Control and Beyond. Edited by Deflem, Mathieu, Amsterdam: Elsevier, (2008).
He is also the Greek national representative in the Managing Committee of the European Action “Living in Surveillance Societies” (LiSS).
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Short and long-term impacts of surveillance and other security preparations for mega-events on civil liberties
Christopher A. Shaw and Alissa Westergard-Thorpe
Mega-events, by their nature, attract widespread attention and are often promoted as engines designed to further economic development and increase tourism. This same attention brings the potential for disruption by those hoping to use worldwide media coverage to highlight some cause or grievance. Disruptions can take the form of terrorist attacks, so-called ‘lone wolf’ actions, or political demonstrations. The attack against Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics in 1972 catapulted the Palestinian group Black September into worldwide consciousness. A bombing at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 by an anti-abortionist sought to draw attention to his cause. Large scale street protests in Seattle (1999), Quebec City (2000) and elsewhere - and the police responses that attended each - indicated to a large media audience that many people did not support what had previously been presented as consensus on economic globalization. The first two examples show that the Olympics as an archetypal mega-event remain potentially the most obvious targets for disruption by terrorists or lone wolves. With the street demonstrations against the Olympic torch relay in 2008, the Games were used effectively for the first time to promote social/political causes. Protest groups planning for Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics and similar groups in other bid cities indicate that the Olympic Games are now emerging as a likely focal point for protests on a variety of issues. Rather than being “apolitical” as the IOC would like, the Olympics have become intensely political events.
With these historical and emerging trends, Olympic security has become exceedingly expensive for host nations. Further, the perceived need by the security forces to protect the Games from all potential threats inevitably creates a security culture with wide ranging implications for daily life and civil liberties. For Vancouver’s games, CSIS’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC) has identified three primary concerns: Al Qaeda or related terrorism, lone wolf attacks, and anti-Olympic protests. Of the three, ITAC regards the latter as the most likely and the largest concern. With an overall budget of at least a billion dollars, the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit has begun surveillance of anti-Olympic groups and individuals, including approaching members at their homes or elsewhere. In once incident, a well-known anti-Olympic activist was pulled over in a road side “identity check”. The City of Vancouver will allow the installation of security cameras and other monitoring devices in large parts of the city. Planned traffic restrictions are certain to have a profound affect for an extended period before and during the Olympics and Paralympics.
This paper will explore the implications of Olympic security from the joint perspectives of ordinary citizens attempting to go about their daily lives during the Games as well as for those involved in protests against the Olympics. What happens to these groups during the Games will almost certainly have profound impacts on Canadian society long after the Olympics have departed.
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The Business of Surveillance: A Preliminary Report
Laureen Snider
Professor of Sociology
Queen’s University
Adam Molnar
PhD Student
University of Victoria
The sophisticated, omnipresent technologies that created today’s “surveillance society” (Lyon, 2001) emerged from a complex of priorities rooted in active and “cold” wars throughout the 20th Century. From these roots, enabled by the convergence of the 3 formerly independent industries of telecommunications, photography and computing, grew the surveillant assemblage and digital rule (technologically mediated surveillance) (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000; Norris & Armstrong, 1999: 260). However this history did not occur by chance; these developments should not be seen as “inevitable” solutions to issues of data complexity or societal fear of “the other” (the criminal, enemy combatant or terrorist). Their design and capabilities were produced by human agents, organized in complex, multi-faceted organizations and guided by specific priorities, values and commercial interests. The role of commercial interests, however, has been neglected in surveillance literatures, which have been preoccupied with governance and practices of the state. Thus the phenomenal growth and power of surveillance as a business has gone largely unremarked, despite studies showing that simply monitoring town centres was costing the United Kingdom 23M pounds a year, and the overall UK budget for automated surveillance topped 385M pounds back in the late 1990s, (Graham, 1999). The security industry today has an estimated market capitalization of more than $400Billion U.S. as well as its own Security Stock Watch (Wood, 2006: 8.4.2).
This paper explores the cultural, economic and political power of the security and surveillance business in the context of the mega-event. Although mega-events represent only a marginal fraction of the overall economic expansion of the global security industrial complex, security operations associated with mega-events involve very lucrative contracts for private interests and intensive degrees of multi-scalar bureaucratic and technological integration. Furthermore, mega-events are largely used as test-sites for new forms of high-tech security, that are often diffused throughout the broader homeland security industry. To the extent that mega-events serve as a microcosm in the development of contemporary security and surveillance practices shaping the global-security industrial complex, they are crucial sites of investigation.
The confluence of neo-liberal policies associated with mega-events (and associated crisis-tendencies) form a fertile local basis for the operations of multinational security firms. Here, the social and political implications of neo-liberal economic restructuring of urban centers associated with mega-events reproduce heightened demands for security and surveillance at mega-events. For this reason, mega-events form an important niche market for major security firms.
Second, Mega-event security operations also condition the development of extensive bureaucratic (both public and private) networks that function to reproduce the expansion of the security and surveillance industry. Multi-scalar security partnerships are characterized by strategies pursuing the increasing technologization and privatization of surveillance that underscores the legitimation of large-scale domestic security and surveillance operations as the “obvious solution” to public safety concerns. In this context, new modes of risk and dataveillance practices such as database management and information exchange often reflect a trend towards the de-differentiation of institutional apparatuses, such as policing, military and intelligence agencies (Amoore and De Goede 2005; Balzacq 2007; Geyer 2008; Bigo 2008).
The final section of the paper examines the emergence of contemporary trends of mega-events as a niche market in the global security industrial complex in the run-up to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games. Specifically, we examine the relation between capital accumulation strategies associated with mega-events and security politics in promoting surveillance as the “obvious” solution to the security issues posed by the games (Coleman & Sim, 2000: 623; Norris, Moran & Armstrong, 1999: 260; Coleman, 2003).
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Citizen spies at mega-events: Surveillance, suspiciousness, and normalization
Rosamunde van Brakel
University of Sheffield, UK
“Don’t rely on others. If you suspect it, report it”
Anti-terrorism campaign launched in March 2009 just before the G20-summit in London
"Report the suspicious, not the strange"
Campaign launched in Vancouver in the lead up to the Winter Olympics
Surveillance and security at mega-events are more and more dominated by new technology, however ‘old-fashioned’ surveillance methods are not dead yet. The use of volunteer spies and incorporation of the general public to look out for suspicious behavior is back in fashion. Exemplary is an advertising campaign that was launched this year in the lead-up to the Vancouver Olympic Games aimed at warning transit users to report suspicious activity; using the catchphrase, "Report the suspicious, not the strange". In one of the campaign posters the phrase is accompanied by an image showing a person taking pictures of a CCTV camera. A similar campaign is being employed by the London Metropolitan Police (LMP), which was launched a week ahead of the G20 Summit in London.
Characteristic of these campaigns is that they all focus on suspicious behavior. A certain norm is given about what is considered suspicious and what is not. Garland (1996) argues that from the period of the late 1970s up to the present, we see a “new and urgent emphasis upon the need for security, the containment of danger, the identification and management of any kind of risk.” One effect of this, says Garland, was the emergence of a criminological discourse of the ‘alien other.’ It is a criminology that “represents criminals as dangerous members of distinct racial and social groups which bear little resemblance to ‘us’. It is, moreover, a ‘criminology’ which trades in images, archetypes and anxieties, rather than in careful analyses and research findings.”(Garland, 1996)
The ‘other’ is suspicious and if one does not want be categorized as suspicious one does everything to act as normal as possible. But what is suspicious behaviour? This behaviour, that used to be ‘normal’ i.e. not suspicious, like walking up and down a platform, not looking police officers’ eyes and taking pictures of certain objects, places and buildings are now suspicious and abnormal. The consequence of this is that people who were already considered ‘abnormal’ will be made to feel even more abnormal and excluded and people who were considered ‘normal’ will try to behave even more ‘normal’. According to Elias (1939) and also Foucault (1976) after him, people, after a while, no longer need the external power to regulate and control their behaviour. The power comes from within the subject; people internalize what is considered normal and automatically start behaving in a certain way and regulate themselves. However there are characteristics like gender, ethnicity, religion that resist normalization. This is where it becomes even more problematic, since it touches the core of people’s identities and law enforcement agencies are trying to create an image of an ‘abnormal’ person i.e. a terrorist based on these characteristics.
Mega-events can be seen as microcosms of the larger security and surveillance trends used within Western anti-terrorist strategy. The main purpose of this paper is to zoom in on the use of citizen spies that are brought into play at mega-events in order to make more general conclusions about the societal consequences of the use of this surveillance method when it is applied as a more general anti-terrorist strategy.
Biography:
Rosamunde van Brakel is a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield doing criminological research on pre-emptive surveillance: the (re)emergence of profiling in British youth justice policy. She has recently co-authored an article in the journal Surveillance & Society, on Understanding resistance to digital surveillance: Towards a multi-disciplinary, multi-actor framework (2009). She is involved in one of the working groups of the EU COST-Living in Surveillance Societies project.
