How technology secured the Games

Host City speaks to Peter Ryan, the man behind security planning at the last two Summer Olympic Games, about the machinery that made the Olympics safe

Effective security at major events can be a huge challenge for organisers, not least because of the extensive geographical area that many events now cover. Modern stadiums and athletics grounds are often spread around the host city, and can hold hundreds of thousands of spectators, athletes and officials.

With more than 32 sporting venues to protect,
security at the Athens Olympics was a huge challenge

The 2004 Athens Olympics was held amid a great deal of concern about terrorist attacks, particularly as it was the first summer Games since the 11 September 2001 World Trade Centre attacks. It was also the largest Games ever held, posing great challenges for security planners. As a result, the event was considered to be at serious risk from terrorist attacks, and the Greek government invested an estimated USD 7bn (RMB 49.1bn) in some of the most advanced security technology available.

Peter Ryan, former Commissioner of the New South Wales Police, Australia, and Principal Security Advisor to the Athens Olympic Games Organising Committee (ATHOC), worked on both the Athens Games and 2000 Sydney Games. The emphasis on wide-ranging security began even before the Twin Towers attack, he says.

“Sydney really re-wrote the book for security at the Olympic Games. The Games prior to that had been in Atlanta, and we learned a lot of lessons from how the Americans prepared for and responded to situations, such as the bomb in Centennial Park. So we tried to factor in as many scenarios as possible for Sydney; even those that would sound bizarre and outlandish to non security professionals were taken into account and given a response capability.

“The 2001 attacks focused our minds very closely on the fact that, if terrorists could mount an attack like that, we would have to plan for every contingency – I coined the phrase ‘Thinking the unthinkable’. When we went into Athens in 2002, a huge amount of effort and energy was put into finding solutions to the various threats we faced. The need to have absolute security all around meant that a great deal of technology had to be purchased and a large number of agencies had to be trained in the use of that technology.”

In order to prepare the city, and the country as a whole, security was divided into layers which grew more robust the closer you got to the main venues – a system which has now been adopted by most major event organisers. In this instance, the outer ring was the borders of the country, followed by the city boundaries, and finally the event centre itself which contained the hard core of protection.

Hi-tech communications
One of the most pressing concerns was communications. Unless agencies could share information quickly with their command chains and each other, the security chain would be weak and response to incidents would be impaired. Ryan explains how Athens was fitted with a cutting edge communications system based on the Terrestrial Truncated Radio (TETRA) standard which could connect 22,000 security, intelligence and public safety agents.

“Communications is one of the most crucial elements at any event – it must be encrypted, digitised communications that cannot be overheard or hacked into by third parties,” he says. “It also has to be very robust, and must not be subject to geographic problems like being inside a building or in an alleyway. If you can talk to your people, you can get responses quickly.”

The city-wide system, designed and managed by a consortium of Motorola CGISS, SAIC and Siemens proved enormously reliable, and is still in use by Athens’ emergency responders today.

Surveillance was also a major component of Athens’ layered security. While there was no shortage of security personnel, the area covered by the Games – more than 250 square kilometres containing 32 sporting venues, up to 20 training venues and dozens of support venues – was too vast to be effectively patrolled. Because of the number and geographical distribution of the venues, a digital IP video system was selected to fill this gap. The result was one of the most comprehensive and integrated CCTV systems ever designed, with more than 700 IndigoVision 8000 transmitter/receiver modules being used to transmit MPEG-4 quality digital video, audio and control data over the IP network.

The video had to be transmitted throughout the Olympic region, so Siemens was contracted to install an ATM data network backbone with Ethernet devices at the edge, to which the IndigoVision 8000 transmitter/receiver units were connected. This meant that hundreds of video images could be streamed from any point on the system to any other point simultaneously. This crucial feature ensured that a major requirement was satisfied, namely that local operators could immediately pass over security control to regional or even national command centres.

The choice of high resolution cameras was essential if the operators were to be able to spot threats accurately. Ryan describes how some degree of data analysis was added to enhance the system: “The important thing with surveillance was to get the highest resolution lenses available. It’s no use having a camera which produces a fuzzy image – you want to be able to read a number plate, identify the colour of a car, tell whether you’re looking at a man or a woman and so on.

“Some of the cameras on the main streets, which were mounted on very high poles, had sensors attached to them which could identify unusual sounds, such as explosions or gunfire, by their particular resonance values. The sensor would then transmit the sound back to the base, giving us immediate knowledge of the event. The location could be triangulated, and the cameras are then swung into that area, either automatically or by an operator, so they could see what is going on.”

An aerial view
One further surveillance asset offered a more flexible and wide-ranging solution – the ubiquitous airship which came to be a well-recognised symbol of the Games’ commitment to security. Provided by Airship Management Services, the Skyship 600 used was a 13-seat airship filled with the inert gas helium and powered by twin Porsche 930 engines. For its Olympic mission, it was fitted with the most sophisticated suite of sensor ever carried on an airship, designed to provide live intelligence to the Olympic Security Command Centre.

Primary surveillance was provided in the form of two Wescam MX-15 Sensors, which offer a military-standard surveillance system incorporating an electro-optical (EO) camera and an infra-red (IR) camera that can be used by day or night. The cameras were gyro-stabilised and had an enhanced zoom with auto tracking capabilities. A gyro-stabilised Wescam 16SS commercial broadcast camera with low-light capabilities was also added, providing crisp images from long stand-off distances.

During security missions the airship flew with two pilots, a Greek Police liaison officer and three camera operators. Working around the clock, the airship was available for missions for up to 15-hours each day, seven-days-a-week. During the month of the Olympics the airship flew 38 missions for a total of 200 hours in support of security operations.

All the outputs from the three cameras were recorded to digital video onboard the airship, providing an archive of operations conducted. At the same time, the airship provided live, continuous images to the Olympic Command Centre in central Athens using the latest encryption and downlink technology provided by UK-based company Navtech. Using a network of microwave receiver sites, the images were received from the airship from any part of the Attica region and relayed to the roof of the Police headquarters where it was displayed on video walls and integrated into the Olympic Video Network.

A mission command console was provided for the Greek police commander. With two screens to monitor footage, the commander had the ability to control video recording and downlinks streams from this terminal, which also included a Global Positioning System (GPS) moving map system and a Geographic Information System (GIS) street mapping system.

Peter Ryan explained that the airship offered an unprecedented layer to the event’s security. “The airship offered us very high resolution imagery,” he said. “As a platform it also offered a great deal of stability – previously the platforms would vibrate and reduce the quality of the images. It also offers a great deal of flexibility – once you targeted something with the surveillance equipment, the airship could turn and manoeuvre and you could keep on the target. A bonus was that it provided a good communications platform as well, allowing us to control a large number of other aspects such as traffic movement and crowd control.”

Central command centres
With so many sensors – whether they were high resolution cameras, air-breathing biological detectors, or human patrols – robust and effective command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4i) centres were required to process all the information gathered. In total, 63 command centres shared access to the parts of the city’s security information, including law enforcement, emergency services, military, traffic management, coastguard and local security agencies.

According to Ryan, these centres, along with the main Olympic Security Command Centre, were essential for effective incident management and security control. “We positioned our security control centres in locations that were close to the event operations centres, so security control and event management could talk to each other easily,” he says. “To enable us to do that, we needed very robust data communication lines, so there was very rapid data transfer and no chance communications could collapse during a power failure. This data is passed from the sensors back to the major control centre, where intelligence, unusual events, information on people, etcetera, was collected, operational decisions were made, and it could then be spread around the venues and staff.”

While the 2000 Sydney Olympics marked a watershed in event security management, the culmination of this changing approach can clearly be seen in the technology that was implemented for the Athens Olympics in 2004. Ryan stresses that the Games highlighted the most important factor that holds true for any city planning to host a major event: “New technologies are essential for making our layered security approach possible, but we set a rule that we would choose only technology that had been in use for at least nine months and was proven. We did not use any untried equipment, and so had a far greater success rate over all.”