#olympic security

Olympic Opening Ceremony in question due to terror threat.

Paris, April 18, 2024, Socrates George Kazolias French authorities are having second thoughts on their ambitious plan to hold the Olympic opening ceremony on the river Seine. “There are Plans B and C which we are preparing in parallel,” French president Emanuel Macron said on April 15.  From the beginning, those in charge of Olympic security have been hostile to the idea of an opening ceremony,…

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/J2xmhZ

TOKYO | Facial recognition system set to be used in Olympic security

TOKYO  — A facial recognition system will be used across an Olympics for the first time as Tokyo organizers work to keep security tight and efficient at dozens of venues during the 2020 Games.

The NeoFace technology developed by NEC Corp. will be customized to monitor every accredited person — including athletes, officials, staff and media — at more than 40 venues, games villages and media centers, Olympic and company officials said Tuesday.

Olympic officials said Tokyo will be the first Olympic host to introduce the face recognition technology at all venues. The system is expected to effectively eliminate entry with forged IDs, reduce congestion at accredited waiting lines and reduce athletes’ stress under hot weather.

Tsuyoshi Iwashita, Tokyo 2020 executive director of security, said venues that are spread around in and out of Tokyo would be a big burden in achieving high levels of security.

“By introducing the face recognition system, we hope to achieve high levels of safety, efficiency and smooth operation at security check points before entry,” he said, adding that the system would contribute to less stressful environment for athletes.

Iwashita said a test last year showed that gate checks with the facial recognition was more than twice the pace of the conventional system using X-ray with visual siting by security guards.

The facial images of every accredited person for the Olympics and Paralympics will be collected after the approval process and stored in a database to be used to verify identities at accreditation check points.

NEC says its biometric identification technology is used at airports and elsewhere in 70 countries, including Japan.

By Steven Lee Myers, NY Times, Jan. 18, 2014

SOCHI, Russia--This may now be the safest city in Russia.

Even as a frantic rush of construction rattles on less than three weeks before the opening of the Winter Olympics, the government of President Vladimir V. Putin has put in place what officials and experts described as the most intensive security apparatus in the history of the event.

In addition to deploying tens of thousands of police and military reinforcements to the Sochi area, the government has tightened control inside the city ahead of the opening of the Games on Feb. 7, imposing a ban on vehicles that are not registered in the region and requiring even Russians who visit to register with the police within three days, as foreigners must do.

The threat of terrorism has become a grim reality of major sporting events--from marathons in the wake of the Boston bombings last year to this year’s Super Bowl at the Meadowlands in New Jersey.

With the Winter Olympics being held near a simmering Islamic insurgency just over the Caucasus Mountains, the threat here has been particularly acute, as have Russia’s preparations.

“They have tried to make it a country of its own,” said Mark Galeotti, a New York University professor now conducting research in Moscow, and an expert on the Russian security forces. “For a while at least, Sochi has been cut away from the rest of the world.”

Though the plans have been in the works for years, they gained new urgency after twin suicide bombings that killed 34 people in Volgograd at the end of December. The perpetrators remain unknown.

In response to the bombings, the authorities banned even the smallest amounts of liquids on all flights in Russia, and in Sochi, the police and border guards have stepped up screening at all train stations. The main station, a neo-Classical-style building dating to the Stalin era, has a new temporary structure to screen all passengers and bags before they enter the terminal. New wire fencing prevents access to the rest of the station.

Tens of thousands of surveillance cameras are trained on virtually every public space, monitored by officials around the clock in a situation center inside what was once a conference hall for the city’s Communist Party in Soviet times. “Everything is being done for everyone in the city to feel at home and safe,” said Sergei V. Cherepov, the center’s director, turning to make a spitting sound over his shoulder, the Russian equivalent of knocking on wood.

Olympic spectators must apply for a special pass that will bear their photographs and biographical information that scanners will be able to read instantly. Only those with passes and tickets will be able to enter the Olympic areas.

Two Russian journalists, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, who have written extensively about the secret services in Russia, have chronicled efforts by the Federal Security Service to update the country’s eavesdropping system, known as SORM, to monitor virtually all communications in Sochi.

The State Department recently warned that no one attending the Olympics should expect privacy, noting that Russian law “permits the monitoring, retention and analysis of all data that traverses Russian communication networks, including Internet browsing, email messages, telephone calls and fax transmissions.”

Russian officials have promised to make the security as inconspicuous as possible during the games, but some of the measures, far from invisible, are meant to serve as obvious deterrents. Antiaircraft batteries have been installed on hilltops along the coast of greater Sochi, which stretches 90 miles, from just south of the city of Tuapse to the border with Georgia, only three miles from the cluster of stadiums. Naval warships cruise up and down the coast.

At the Olympic Village in the Adler region of Sochi, double fences wall off access to the cluster of stadiums and arenas where organizers expect more than 80,000 people to gather each day, with roughly 40,000 a day in the mountain venues around the village of Krasnaya Polyana, 30 miles into the Caucasus.

Dr. Galeotti, the N.Y.U. professor, said that the more than 50,000 police officers and soldiers deployed in Sochi were twice as many as were used during the London Olympics in 2012, even though London’s population is more than 20 times that of Sochi. “It shows how much Russia is throwing at it,” he said.

By Steven Lee Myers, NY Times, December 30, 2013

MOSCOW--A deadly suicide bombing at a crowded railroad station in southern Russia on Sunday, followed by a blast in a trolley bus on Monday in the same city, raised the specter of a new wave of terrorism six weeks before the Winter Olympics in Sochi.

President Vladimir V. Putin's government has worked to protect the Olympics with some of the most extensive security measures ever imposed for the Games. But the bombings, in Volgograd, underscored the threat the country faces from a radical Islamic insurgency in the North Caucasus that has periodically spilled into the Russian heartland, with deadly results.

Security has become a paramount concern at all major international sporting events, especially in the wake of the bombing at the Boston Marathon in April, but never before has an Olympic host country experienced terrorist violence on this scale soon before the Games. And would-be attackers may have more targets in mind than the Russian state.

Current and former American law enforcement and intelligence officials said Sunday that they were more concerned about security in Russia during the Sochi Games than they have been about any other Olympics since Athens in 2004.

Russian officials attributed the explosion on Sunday to a bomb packed with shrapnel, possibly carried in a bag or backpack. It was detonated in the main railroad station in Volgograd, a city 550 miles south of Moscow and 400 miles northeast of Sochi. The bomb blew out windows in the building's facade and left a horrific scene of carnage at its main entrance. At least 17 people were killed, and nearly three dozen others were wounded, some of them critically, meaning the death toll could still rise.

On Monday morning a blast struck a trolley bus in the city, killing at least 15 people, including an infant, according to preliminary reports. Photographs posted by Russian news organizations showed that the force of the blast tore open the bus and shattered windows nearby. Nearly two dozen others were wounded in what officials immediately described as a suicide bombing.

The Sunday blast, captured on a surveillance video camera from across the central plaza in front of the station, occurred near the station's metal detectors, which have become a common security fixture at most of Russia's transportation hubs. That raised the possibility that an attack deeper inside the station or aboard a train had been averted.

Vladimir I. Markin, a spokesman for the main national criminal investigation agency in Russia, called the railway station bombing an act of terror, though the exact motivation, target and perpetrator were not immediately clear.

Volgograd was also the scene of a suicide bombing in October, when a woman identified as Naida Asiyalova detonated a vest of explosives aboard a bus in the city, killing herself and six others.

In that case, the authorities said she was linked by marriage to an explosives expert working with an Islamic group in Dagestan, a republic in southern Russia where the police have struggled to suppress a Muslim separatist insurgency. A month later, the authorities announced that they had killed her husband and four others in a raid. But the attack on Sunday indicated that the threat was far from extinguished.

It was not clear why suicide bombers have chosen targets in Volgograd, a city of 1 million that was formerly called Stalingrad, the site of one of the crucial battles of World War II. It is the nearest major Russian city to the Caucasus, and its proximity may play a role.

Mr. Putin vowed on Sunday to redouble security at Russia's railway stations and airports, which are especially busy around the New Year's holiday.

The autonomous republics of the North Caucasus, including Dagestan and Chechnya, have been roiled for nearly two decades by armed insurgencies--complex, ever-shifting conflicts that the International Crisis Group recently called "the most violent in Europe today." The violence has claimed hundreds of lives this year, prompting the Russian authorities to make extraordinary efforts to keep it from reaching Sochi, a resort city on the Black Sea coast among the foothills of the Caucasus. The city will effectively be locked down starting Jan. 7, with all traffic banned except officially registered vehicles. Visitors to the Olympics, which begin on Feb. 7, will be required to obtain a special pass to enter the region.

With security so tight at the site of the Games, experts have warned that insurgents who want to disrupt the Olympics might turn instead to "softer" targets elsewhere. On Friday, an explosion in a car killed three people in Pyatigorsk, another city in the Caucasus; details of that attack remain sketchy, and it was not clear whether it was related to the bombings Sunday and Monday.

Doku Umarov, the Chechen rebel fighter who now leads a terrorist group known as the Caucasus Emirate, vowed in July to attack in Sochi, calling the Games "satanic."

One reason American law enforcement and intelligence officials are concerned about Sochi is that the United States has more of an arms-length relationship with Russia than with most Olympic host countries. The United States provided extensive security resources to the Greek government in 2004, but the Russians have stronger capabilities than Greece and almost always refuse American offers of help.