Canada's Games. Sea-to-Sky Games. Green Games. Surveillance Games. The first three are VANOC slogans. The last is not.
It was coined by Queen's University sociologist David Lyon and is the title of a Friday and Saturday research workshop at SFU Harbour Centre.
The 2010 Winter Olympics are forecast to be the most technologically complex Olympics. Canada's police and military are working with a $900 million taxpayer-funded budget for Games security and academics are gathering in the Olympic city to examine the growth in surveillance and its linkages with mega-events.
"Surveillance as in observation, identification and tracking will be the hallmark of these Olympic Games," says Complexity and Irony in Policing Mega-Events, a paper by professors Gary Marx (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Patrick Gillham (University of Idaho) and John Noakes (Arcadia University).
Surveillance, they say, isn't just to keep tabs of protesters. Attendees, vendors, volunteers, protesters, revelers, terrorists, host-city residents, VIPs, criminals, media and even athletes will be under varying degrees of observation.
Why athletes? Marx and his co-authors point out that drug testing is also a form of surveillance.
The ironic ripple effects of precautionary security measures will be felt in Vancouver. Long checkpoint lines may dissuade or prevent people from crossing borders or going to venues.
Ultimately, the authors wonder if Vancouver will ever be the same after the 2010 Games.
"Can a post-opticon, super-surveillant fortress return to being a welcoming resort and tourist area?" they ask.
More findings of the VPSN/SFU inventory will be presented at the Surveillance Games forum Nov. 20-21.
