The core objective in this is to analyze and question the warranting of implementing mass public surveillance by studying the reasoning and political propaganda behind world-renowned large-scale events. Through the process of logically analyzing the shifts that our modern surveillance capabilities have taken, I will be able to present the drastic changing features of these events that have clearly been and are continuing to be shaped by today's massive political agendas and changes.
These influenced shifts and political groups have complete control of security and surveillance in today's modern society, of which they have certain agendas and features that will need logical addressing. I have found that most of these issues can be addressed under three features: the political reasoning behind mass surveillance and military presence as a validation for precautionary security, manipulating the use of threatening language and political movements that in today's modern society have been exploited through the government and media as a form of social control, and the personal loss of civil and privacy rights through various forms of security and surveillance that have started and/or will be continued beyond the event itself.
While large-scale events are usually found in public favor of mass security, I feel that recently this display of controlling power in contemporary society has breached our privacy and civil rights as citizens, and now our politicians that are the ones enforcing this power need to be questioned about this breaching. In particular I will be considering the London 2012Olympic games, and the perverse varieties and amounts of securities that have and are being implemented, many of which are intended to continue monitoring the public of London well beyond the last day of the events. The immediate interest is of the security at the London2012 Olympics and my main topic of discourse are the three features that I found useful in defining the reasons behind this as apolitically charged event.
However, I don't think that the issue of the pervasive use of mass surveillance applies only to this display of the Olympic Games. This issue has become so large and widespread that it permeates nearly every aspect of our modern lives.I wish however, to use the London 2012 Olympics (hereafter, London2012) as a stepping stone to discussing the larger, more pervasive topic, that our politicians are sneaking behind our backs. That is the loss of civil and personal liberties through the manipulation of security and surveillance, in the name of protection, warranted through propagation and fear mongering. Hopefully a brief analysis leading through the history of those three features will lead to abetter understanding of how our politicians could potentially be leading us down the road towards a world much like “Oceanian” in Orwell's dystopian future described in “1984”.
It's very important to understand why we have large scale events. Today's large scale events in modern society are often high-profile, world-renowned, and media driven.Today's most well-known events are the FIFA World Cup, the Olympic Games, and several World Exhibitions. These high-profile events are competitively sought after by politicians and civic planners because of their status around the world and the event's ability to change the way the host city is viewed. Planners seeking a catalyst to redefine their cities recognize them as a rare opportunity to do so.The intense media coverage of these events offers an opportunity to promote a distinctive image of the city to a global audience that can, it is hoped, consolidate its position within the global hierarchy of cities (Degen 2004; Hiller 2006). So, not only does the city get a chance to show itself off, but the event gives the city and surrounding regions a reason to flex their muscle. But, when did this start? How did our world-renowned gatherings and global events become states of military presence and surveillance?
Well to address this and the proposed issues about the security behind London 2012, I think we need to see why the public feels the need to rely so heavily upon the government and it's subsidiaries for that feeling of security during large-scale events. I mentioned earlier that I feel one of the largest issues behind this breach of civil liberty is the threatening language used to incite fear. Primarily, there's a word the government has given to the public to justify too many of its actions in recent history, and now they're using this word to justify taking away the rights of privacy and civil liberty. It's known as “terrorism”, it incites fear, creates dependency, and most important of all it uses these two emotions to manipulate an insurmountable control over decisions and legal issues. Its linguistic use is without question the biggest issue that needs to be addressed politically, but for some reason real “terrorism” is allowed to keep on going, untouched,unquestioned, and terrifyingly unexplained by those who wield it.
So, how did the world manage to bring about the use of the word terrorism?Throughout history there have always been groups of people that join together to fight for what they think is right. These people were given to performing acts of extreme nature in order to incite fear in those they were fighting against. In antiquity they called groups of people like this zealots, however because of their actions and how they have effected history we now give them the name of terrorists.The earliest known organized group were called sicarii, or dagger-men, by the Romans they targeted (Horsley). They executed large and small scale assassinations of the Roman occupation forces and Jews who fought for them. For them living as Roman subjects went against their faith and they could not practice while the occupation lasted. This however, didn't last long as the group was eventually rooted out and put to a stop sometime around 73 A.D. (Smith). Even though the Scarii were historically in antiquity and are no longer in functioning existence, we can find much of their aspects relevant and reflected in today's developing use of terror. Most importantly being that they are remembered because of the psychological impact they had.
This psychological impact is the main idea behind the use of terrorism, but these early types of groups never succeeded mainly because the cohesion of society was not ready yet. Barbarianism and assassination attempts along with poor ability to communicate, religious differences, rebellions, and ethnic strife usually just led straight to open warfare. It was not until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, that the nations of Europe as we know them today were consolidated. The treaty formed just the right central authorities and independent cohesive societies that these groups of “terrorists” were trying to influence (Repgen). Later in history we learn that through the American (1775-83) and French(1789-95) Revolutions the word terrorism is first used alongside the arrival of liberal democracy. It was used to describe the massacres of the French nobility in the post-revolutionary French government (Enders and Sandler, 2006, 17).
In the autumn of 1793, Robespierre and Jacobins focused on addressing economic and political threats within France. What began as a proactive approach to reclaiming the nation quickly turned bloody as the government instituted its infamous campaign against internal opposition known as the Reign of Terror. Beginning in September, Robespierre, under the auspices of the Committee of Public Safety, began pointing an accusing finger at anyone whose beliefs seemed to be counter-revolutionary—citizens who had committed no crime but merely had social or political agendas that varied too much from Robespierre’s. The committee targeted even those who shared many Jacobin views but were perceived as just slightly too radical or conservative. A rash of executions ensued in Paris and soon spread to smaller towns and rural areas. During the nine-month period that followed, anywhere from 15,000 to 50,000 French citizens were beheaded at the guillotine (SparkNotes, 2005).
The French Revolution gave the world great examples in oppressing their populations. It also inspired different varieties of terrorist tactics (assassination and intimidation) that would become ways for other governments to control and manipulate the thoughts of citizens. It was the reactions of fear from the Parisian public that played a critical role in the French Revolution and its aftermath. Even though these types of terrorist activities, (targeting and killing officials and nobility in horrifying ways, in the case of the French, by public guillotine),started long before the French Revolution ravaged and shocked the world, it was the reactions and group distrust from the watching and waiting French population that taught future governments and powerful groups that the manipulation of that fear was the next step in understanding and harnessing the power behind terrorism.
With the knowledge of this came the ability to stop, contain, and control any type of terrorist or similar group. Alongside the development of the fear that terrorism is designed to inflict, came the ideas of defending our new found liberty, democracy and “freedom” developed and controlled by the governments. Now it was realized that terrorism in itself could be pitted against this want of freedom, thus allowing the people themselves to be controlled and used by the government. No longer did the government just have to root out the group or stop the terror,but by identifying it, it could then manipulate it instead.
Terrorism is an activity that has probably characterized modern civilization from its inception. In the past decade, however, terrorist activity has increased infrequency and taken on novel dimensions. For example, incidents are being employed more as a means of political expression and becoming characterized by a transnational element (Sandler, Tschirhart, Cauley, 1983, 36)
Because terrorism exists in many forms whether it's propagated or manipulated by governments or fanatical groups, for the purposes of this political analysis, I would bring to the surface a historically pronounced event that was meant to create what the government now expects us to fear most. This type of manipulated “terrorism” is now used as reasons to start wars,create military states, invade nations as acts of protection, and has brought about types of surveillance that attack civil liberty and personal privacy.
In the early 1960s, the U.S. Join tChiefs of Staff planned Operation Mongoose as part of the fifteen page Central Intelligence Agency document titled: The Cuban Plan. It would be a performance of numerous covert “terror attacks” that would then be blamed and pin-pointed on the revolutionary (Communist)Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The United States would then have the justification they were looking for in order to declare war on the communist regime sixty miles from its southern border (The National Security Archive).
The suggested courses of action appended to Enclosure A are based on the premise that US military intervention will result from a period of heightened US-Cuban tension which place the United States in the position of suffering justifiable grievances. World opinion, and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the inter-national image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere (CIA:Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1962, 5).
These contrived justifiable grievances included staging the assassinations of Cubans (friendly) living in the United States, developing a fake Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, sink a boat of Cuban refugees (real or simulated), fake a Cuban air force attack on a civilian jetliner (a planned hijacking), and concocting a “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then citing Cuban sabotage(The National Security Archive, 2001). In his book Body of Secrets,author James Bamford describes how the U.S. National Security Agency operates, and states that their plans “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. Government.”
These types of plotted and contrived terrorism have been used by society's governments as justifications to legitimize war on other occasions, and by countries other than the United States. Briefly, for example, the Argentine military dictatorship, in 1982, made an attempt to change public opinion and to bring society around the army, by distracting them from the infractions occurring upon their civil, human, and economic rights.The Argentine military tried to occupy the Malvinas Islands, then under British rule. Their plan failed because in response to their invasion of the islands, Margaret Thatcher, who also needed critical action (The Falklands War), to rally the British Empire under her,dispatched a navel and large task force to reclaim the area. So actually, the Argentine military plan backfired and gave the British State the needed boost to its pride and international position of power (Hickman, 2012).
These types of covert operations,pseudo terrorism, and government filibusters are all twisted reversals of “propaganda by the deeds” a rallying institution that was preached by anarchists in the later half of the 19th century and provoked the people’s rebellions and even their revolutions through isolated acts of violence against governments and social elites. What governments have found is that these types of pseudo terrorism can be compliments to the perfect untraceable crimes and injustices they wish to commit onto their own people (Garrison,264-8). Today's terrorism intends on doing exactly the opposite of the anarchists “propaganda by deeds” – these terrorist attacks are a systematic plans laid out and executed to achieve certain aspects of control. By analyzing the media we can see that our governments are now using their planned attacks to change the course of public opinion during times of growing civil unrest, to mask the loss of civil liberties and freedoms, or to force it to support a weak government that through its own failure has lost its ability to govern and may be facing reprimand or (as it would see it) even worse significant change.
Something very important to realize about the modern terrorists of today, if and when they actually exist, is that they are predominantly invisible to the public. Rarely have I seen a picture of a large scale terrorist group or seen their own propaganda thrown across my streets. Robespierre, Hitler, Lenin,Stalin and Mao didn't have to hide away and make threats like the bogey-man from the dark. No, they all used the fear and terror they created to instill the changes they wanted in the governments they hated (Garrison, 2004, 263). But today, our terrorists are unobtainable, unseen, and ultimately continuously emerging and making threats until their demands are met. Making them, for governments and international social elites, the perfect enemy. The idea that they (terrorists) are out there waiting, planning and manipulating events around a single explosion, but you cannot actually exterminate them because of their evasive nature, only helps governments and the ruling elite perpetuate the fear and prove their justification for more security, surveillance and social controls. These are now showing up as zero tolerance laws and enforcement (in which questionable use of these laws and their enforcement have already been a topic of many debates), less civil liberties, money hemorrhaging wars, high-level surveillance, and now the use of biometric information. If we look at the ups and downs of the media we can see that these types of attacks occur around elections to bolster the credibility of its nominees, they rain down upon the public when the government needs to continue their failing control in actions against the interests of its own people, or even... at an international large-scale event to bring those countries participating under a pseudo blanket of disturbing and unimaginable surveillance protection. These perfect crimes are nearly untraceable and often go unchallenged. Is this because more often than not, those who are supposed to challenge the performance of these crimes are often the ones who made it? Are we being manipulated by our intelligence agencies, like the Americans in the 60s? So, how is the issue of surveillance and security handled today, during our large scale events like the Olympics? And why do (or don't) we feel like this is the appropriate action, or reaction, to modern events?
To get back on point about current surveillance issues in London 2012, I think that undeniably, the 1972 Munich Olympics first coupled terrorism and the Olympics in popular consciousness.The murders of eleven Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants threw the security of the international event into shock (Cottrell, 2003). This event was one of many in a post-Cold War shift in the realization that the locations for needed heightened security were beginning to change. This view began to shift mainly because for the duration of the Cold War, security was typically seen as a matter of national security as a whole – border defense, maintaining security awareness of rockets and air raids. However, as a result of the development of terror from the 60s until now, national borders went from the primary targets needing to be secured, to merely being a“physical barrier and as part of the symbolism of the nation-state”(Tirnman, 2004). Terrorist attacks and wars post-Cold War all led up to one of the more interesting and simultaneously terrifying changes in security that swiftly followed and were implemented in the wake of 9 ⁄11. The tendency for modern security itself is to become something that is all-powerful, and no longer does it just stay for the event, but often its practices are put into use indefinitely afterward.
I believe that there are three very distinct factors that help to account for this development. First,large-scale events have always been representative of our human ability to come together and believe that we are a great power of one, able to overcome the trails of our own existence. Much like the trade towers presented a symbol of unity, strength and power for the United States market, the large-scale international events symbolize the same for the people of the world. Thus since we have been fed fear by our own governments we feel the need to protect these emblems of power and unity, perhaps one day even from ourselves. Lastly, we have given our civil liberties to this militant state only, because the uncertainty of fear has been promoted and propagated by the government and international elites, inciting in us a feeling that didn't exist, until it was promoted that an attack could happen anywhere. For if something can attack buildings meaning to cause irreparable damage, what would stop the attack on a different form or different scale? It is this high regard for the situations, places,and gatherings of people that now incites fear itself. In ourpost-9/11 world that we live in, that escalates them to targets for terrorist attacks within our own minds, irrespective of the rationality there-of.
Sure, we still understand that protecting our national borders is important and a matter of international protocol. However, it is the fear that has been stricken into the public, through the manipulation of implicating additional terrorizing, that has led the large-scale, media-saturated events where large crowds gather to drastically change the dynamics of what we allow as suitable security at these events.
New York City gave an exemplary example in 2001, in the description of a New York Giants baseball game that was to take place just a couple weeks after the 9/11attacks. The Times writer, Wong, states that, “There will be more people with guns and uniforms there this weekend than at some minimum security prisons. They will look in bags and look over cars and scrutinize the tickets of tens of thousands of fan standing in long,long lines” (2001, D.8) This event, along with others similar in its kind, was very large in scale. However, the security behind it had drastically changed in ways that would never have been foreseen.Security experts claimed (post 9/11) that “sports arenas are now logical targets for terrorists. Stadiums are gathering places for tens of thousands of people. And sports events often have a highly symbolic patriotic value” (Wong, 2001, D.8). It's actually this idea that every possibility needs to be taken seriously and accounted for that drives most of the securities we see emerging with these large-scale events. En-Lou of speaking about some of the first events to be held under higher levels of security were the New Orleans SuperBowl and the Salt Lake Winter Games, both occurring just months after9 ⁄ 11. Both of these large-scale events were stated to be a National Special Security Event (NSSE), these being given their higher states of security resulted in significantly more federal involvement. The US Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI], and Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] all with major funds being devoted to their levels of security (Reese, 2008).
Why then, might I point out, have we not had this type of security before? It's obvious benefits are becoming increasingly apparent, what with the Occupy Movements and other symptoms of national unrest, to have the leeway to hand over the protection of cities to the military. Where zero-tolerance, and no questions, are par for the course. There is also an increasing social and official willingness to acknowledge that absolute security is actually unobtainable. Leaving a very large gap of unwritten command, that we as society have allowed the government to take control of. By handing this power over to the government and not taking a moment to consider our own loss of personal liberties we give them the ability to reign as a militant state, paving the way for government to implement the policy of Total Information Awareness, (a policy where the word Total was quickly replaced with the word Terror to give it public validity), and soon after 9/11, many of the faded feelings that had been propagated during the Cold War began to resurface. The governments then began their new processes of security and surveillance.
For London 2012 they quickly created a process that incorporates discipline, fear, surveillance, and power.Many of the processes and techniques follow a system of surveillance that was designed by Jeremy Bentham, and implemented in the Olympics in Athens, that is referred to as the “Panopticon”(Bentham,1787). Now, with the collective fear behind randomized attack attempts conceptions of security have consequently become increasingly sub-national, regional, and urban in scale (Graham,2004).
The Olympics 2012 will be taking place in a city still recovering from riots that have been said by Guardian-LSE Reading the Riots, to partially have been fueled by resentment at their seemingly unrestricted securities cost. In late2011 London was rocked by massive welfare, housing benefit and legal aid cuts, unemployment and rising social protests. Now at the request of the government the citizens of London are obliged to make sacrifices from their already threadbare pockets for the security of London 2012. You can see through the riots and social unrest collectively perpetrating the minds of those living in London, that these actions and requests by the government are only proving to throw their own society's collective consciousness into a deeper fear and their personal pockets into an insurmountable debt, just alone for the securities they are paying for. When the many factors of the Games have been factored in the figure may be as high as £24billion, according to Sky News. Thanks to the Guardian and their watchful eye on the ever growing receipt for London 2012, we know that just seven years ago when London won the rights to the Games the tab for the event came in at a paltry £2.37 billion. What a significant change in price tags! Where is it going and what type of security is London opting for while it's people can barely afford to keep their front doors on hinges?
London 2012 will host “the biggest mobilization of military and security forces seen in the UK since the second world war. More troops – around 13,500 – will be deployed than are currently at war in Afghanistan. The growing security force is being estimated at anything between 24,000 and 49,000 in total.Such is the secrecy that no one seems to know for sure”. During the Games an aircraft carrier will dock on the Thames. Surface-to-air missile systems will scan the skies. Unmanned drones, thankfully without lethal missiles, will loiter above the gleaming stadiums and opening and closing ceremonies. RAF Typhoon Euro fighters will fly from RAF Northolt. A thousand armed US diplomatic and FBI agents and55 dog teams will patrol an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city by an 11-mile, £80m, 5,000-volt electric fence (Graham,Guardian Article).
Beyond these security spectaculars, more stealthy changes are underway. New, punitive and potentially invasive laws such as the London Olympic Games Act 2006 are in force.The Olympic Act, which sets out various laws relating to the Olympics, gives the right of forced entry into private property to remove unauthorized advertising or protest banners. Even more worrying is that the right of forced entry is extended outside the police force to staff contracted to the ODA (Wells, 2012) . According to (The Times) security measures for the London Olympics will include the nationwide use of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, allowing police to stop and search citizens without suspicion.
London is also being wired up with anew range of scanners, biometric ID cards, number-plate and facial-recognition CCTV systems, disease tracking systems, new police control centers and checkpoints (Graham, Guardian Article). London,similar to many other international cities of the world, is already under very heavy underhanded government surveillance. Little can go unnoticed by the CCTV cameras and the biometric scanning that is in place. One can only imagine with the bringing of all these new devices and adding onto what already exists, wouldn't it feel more like London 2012 is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison facility, and not a city ready to welcome the world for some competition? Many of these systems have been designed to stay in place long after the games have finished and gone, and it's not because those empty buildings need watching.
As I said earlier, London 2012 and its security is not alone in this large, pervasive use of surveillance, but instead it struggles with the world in an ever increasing state of counter-terrorism measures, along with the loss of civil liberties promoted through our governments by manipulating fear. So what does all this mean for the future of security and our civil liberties?With the advancement of these new technologies and the manipulation occurring in the higher echelons of our governments our world seems to be careening headlong into a “big-brother” police state. The additional powers being gained by our governments over the people should cause us to question the state of our personal freedoms,because like London 2012, the danger is that they will never leave or change. You can now see that through the manipulation of fear throughout history our world leaders and elite have managed to combine policing, military operations, and the intelligence services much more closely to our daily lives, capturing citizens in a Panopticon created and operated through our own advances in technology.
Reviewing the ideals behind the history of the world-renowned large scale events and the perverseness that has permeated surveillance and intelligence throughout history show only one thing: these large-scale events are protection on steroids and allow our governments ample room with which to experiment their social-control strategies if we let them. You can see that these events historically and through modern news bear a striking resemblance to the changes world-wide: the rise of the corporation and the world elite causing a growing gap in class and inequality, a “big-brother” security complex incited and proliferated through fear, and with it the shift toward authoritarian governments obsessed with the idea of control. It is important to realize that relying on them furthers an agenda of collective dis-empowerment, while serving to separate the masses from the true unity that the Olympic Games were created to signify and at the same time presenting a window of opportunity for global governments to monitor and manipulate our decisions.
Works Cited -
Ball, James; Lewis, Paul; Newburn, Tim,Taylor, Matthew. 2011. “Reading the Riots”. The Guardian.05 December 2011.
Bentham, Jeremy. 1787. “The Panopticon Writings”. 1995. Ed. Miran Bozovic. London.Versa.
Cauley, Jon; Sandler, Todd and Tschirhart, John T. 1983. “A Theoretical Analysis of Transnational Terrorism”. The American Political Science Review.77(March)1. 36-54
Copetas, Craig. 2001. “New York Attack Has Sports World Worried: Officials Review Security Measures for High-Profile Events”. The Wall Street Journal. 18September 2001. B.7.
Cottrell, Robert. 2003. “The Legacy of Munich 1972: Terrorism, Security and the Olympic Games”. The Legacy of the Olympics Games 1984-2000. International Olympic Committee.
Degen, Monica. 2004. Barcelona’s Games: The Olympics, Urban Design, and Global Tourism - In Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play. London. Routledge.
Enders, Walter; Sandler, Todd. 2006.The Political Economy of Terrorism. 2ndEdition. New York, NY. Cambridge University Press.
Garrison, Arthur H. 2004. “Defining Terrorism: Philosophy of the Bomb, Propaganda by Deed, and Change Through Fear and Violence”. Criminal Justice Studies. 17(3).259-279.
George Washington University. 2001.“The National Archive: Bay of Pigs 40 Years After”. http://gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/bayofpigs/chron.html. (April 25,2012).
Gibson, Owen; Hopkins, Nick. 2012.“Olympics Security Bill: How it Soared to More Than £1bn”. The Guardian. 9 March 2012.
Graham, Stephen, Ed. 2004. Cities,War and Terrorism: Towards and Urban Geopolitics. London.Blackwell.
Graham, Stephen. 2012. “Olympics 2012Security: Welcome to Lockdown London”. The Guardian. 12March 2012.
Hickman, Kennedy. “The Falklands War:An Overview”. http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/battleswars1900s/p/falklands.html.(April, 26 2012).
Hiller, Harry H. 2006. “Post-Event Outcomes and the Post-Modern Turn: The Olympics and Urban Transformation”. European Sports Management Quarterly. 6(4):317–332.
Horsley, Richard A. 1979. “The Sicarii: Ancient Jewish Terrorists”. The Journal of Religion.59 (October): 435-438.
Joint Chiefs of State. 1962.“Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS)”. Unclassified Documents – Operation Northwoods. National Archive. George Washington University. 13 March 1962.
Reese, Shawn. (2008). National Special Security Events. Washington, DC: The Library of Congress Congressional Research Service.
Repgen, Konrad. 1998. “Negotiating the Peace of Westphalia: A Survey with an Examination of the Major Problems”. 1648: War and Peace in Europe: Essay Volume 1:Politics, Religion, Law and Society. (1). 355-372.
Smith, Morton. “Zealots and Sicarii,Their Origins and Relation”. The Harvard Theological Review.64(January): 1-19.
SparkNotes Editors. 2005. “Spark Note on The French Revolution (1789–1799)”. http://www.sparknotes.com/history/european/frenchrev/. (April24, 2012).
Tirnman, John, ED. 2004. The Maze of Fear: Security and Migration after 9 ⁄ 11. New York, NY. TheNew Press.
Wells, Mike. 2012. “London 2012: One Big Party or One Big Prison?” http://counterolympicsnetwork.wordpress.com/resources/london-2012-one-big-party-one- big-prison.(April 26, 2012).
Wong, Edward. 2001. “Guard Is Up for Stadium Security Officials Across the Country”. The New York Times, 28 September 2001.
