The 10,500 athletes participating in the London Olympic and Paralympic Games, the world's greatest celebration of human physical endeavour and progress, will be guarded by a security force of some 40,000.

The 10,500 athletes participating in the London Olympic and Paralympic Games, the world's greatest celebration of human physical endeavour and progress, will be guarded by a security force of some 40,000. This beats the 3:1 ratio of guards to athletes at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, as the London Games continues the Olympian trend for record-breaking security contingencies. Indeed the home secretary, Theresa May, only last month crowed that the Games' security would constitute "the UK's largest ever peacetime logistical operation". Never mind the performance of athletes: the Olympics is about government and business delivering security solutions.

And it's a great show. Armed officers from the Metropolitan police and the Royal Marines hammering along the Thames in speedboats and helicopters, ground-to-air missiles scanning the skies, hovering spy drones scanning the land, security services scanning the internet for nascent plots or cyber attacks – it's all being co-ordinated by a bevy of Olympic-themed security agencies.

The police-led multi-agency National Olympic Coordination Centre co-ordinates the forces to deal with the threats identified in the Olympic Intelligence Centre's "national Olympic threat assessments, while the Olympic Clearing House is screening 380,000 people, from athletes to voluntary litter pickers, seeking accreditation for the Games. Meanwhile the UK Borders Agency boasts the UK is to be the first country to welcome arriving athletes by funnelling them up dedicated "Olympic lanes" at airports for fast-track fingerprinting.

Locals are also in the firing line, in subtle, privatised ways. Houseboaters on the River Lea have been priced out of a controlled mooring zone around the Games, while the £60m Prevent strategy has screened the five Olympic host boroughs for what threat they pose for brewing local extremism, with "engagement officers" dispatched to each borough.

Random security screening has been carried out on cars parked at Stratford City's Westfield shopping centre, by officers from the staggering 23,700-strong private security contingent of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) and G4S. Westfield isn't even in the Olympic park, itself a hotbed of embedded biometric scanners and CCTV with automatic facial and behaviour recognition technologies, amid which LOCOG's forces can search anyone and use "all available powers" to dispose of troublemakers, particularly anyone caught with anything that could be used … in a tent.

Who LOCOG's bouncers are accountable to is not clear, but they are backed by 13,500 military reservists, apart from countless police deployments, and international contingents such as up to 1,000 US agents, possibly armed. The Games' security costs exploded from £282m in 2010 to £553m by end-of 2011, with another £475m for policing. Under the host city contract, the chancellor of the exchequer signed a guarantee "bearing the costs of providing security" – a blank cheque signed by the taxpayer for Olympic security planning that industry lobby body the British Security Industry Association (BSIA) has proudly been involved with from the outset.

Olympic security is booming business. The $1.7bn security budget for the 2004 Athens Games was over four times that of the 2000 Sydney Games, while $6.5bn went on security at the 2008 Beijing Games, mostly going on security technologies supplied by firms like General Electric and Panasonic – two major sponsors of the London Games. Beijing also saw innovations like armed police zipping around on Segways, or tickets inserted with radio-frequency ID chips to enable the real-time tracking of ticket holders.

Bureaucrats and lawmakers have internationalised efforts to use the Olympics to install and expand intrusive, permanent surveillance measures. The 2005 European Prüm Treaty justified the mass sharing of data among Europe's security forces on convicted criminals, suspects, possible protesters and anyone deemed suspicious for seeking to attend a big sporting event. Britain didn't sign Prüm but certainly shaped and aped its aims, as it did from a 2006 EU manual that standardised how the security forces should respond to threats arising from major events, "political, sporting, social, cultural or other".

Amid the greater alarm of security and the Games, the coalition is soon to wheel out the Communications Capabilities Development Programme – an old, dusted-down plan to force companies to hoard of all text, phone call, email and internet data.

Meanwhile, installed gadgetry always finds other uses. CCTV set up to monitor traffic during the Athens Games were later used to monitor public gatherings. In addition, a communications system set up to co-ordinate the Greek emergency services has, at great cost, been expanded into a surveillance command system dealing with "Greek post-Olympic security needs", presumably in great use now in the bankrupt land where the Games were born.

And so thousands of impoverished teenage Londoners who've lost playing fields to highly secured Olympic carparks, missed out on sports training or couldn't afford tickets, instead of rioting, may take up X-ray screening and door supervision qualifications backed by LOCOG, the BSIA and Home Office, securing their own futures by becoming part of the industry that's securing all our futures. Everyone's a winner.

LET THE OLYMPIC GAMES DIE IN THE LAND THEY WERE BORN

	In times of war for the imposition of global domination, where the bosses proceed to inter-state coalitions and capitalist completions, coordinating their operations in the name of "anti"terrorism to establish totalitarian control and to loot the world... In times of an all-out attack against the peoples of the so-called "third world", whose genocide from starvation and diseases and their enslavement in the dungeons of mass production-multinationals' colonies are nourishing the well-being of the "developed" world; whose death during the new order's crusades and under military occupation, their confinement and torturing inside concentration camps and the attempts to neutralize their resistance have become the foundation stone for the Security of domination's projects... In times of intensified exploitation, surveillance and repression for the excluded and those who resist within the walls of the western world... ...The olympic games are a front-window of capitalism and domination itself. An advertisement for the world of class slavery and for the means to impose it. A global gala, sealing in one more level the cooperation of the local bosses with multinational corporations, international political staffs and agencies of repression. For the greek state, a participant in the criminal coalition that is launching the global terror-war, the olympic games are a step to upgrade its role in the world's elite and strengthen its pre-eminent position in the Balkans. They are its own way to contribute to the expansion of this terror-war and especially to this aspect that concerns the militarization of western societies and the extermination of the "internal enemy". Inside the country, the games are the spearhead for the state's attack against the exploited and oppressed, as well as the means to accelerate the imposition of a long-lasting State of Emergency, signifying a new era of repression and social control. In the name of accomplishing the National Grand Idea, the "ideals" of profit are praised by all kind of bosses: companies, contractors and state officials who handle the huge 2004 budgets. In this giant commercial enterprise which will cost more than 6 billion euros, the proletarians are forcefully labeled "volunteers" to pay its cost by being robbed through the taxes, the expensiveness and wage freeze, but also to pay its price: by speeding up the rhythms of work, in extremely dangerous conditions and under new forms of surveillance, with their own blood in working "accidents". These human sacrifices (more than 620 dead immigrant and local workers the last four years) in the altar of profit and due of the bonuses given for the fast termination of the Works, have taken nightmarish dimensions in the olympic construction sites where hundreds of workers are killed or seriously injured. A new model of absolute exploitation and expendable humans is consolidated in the olympic works, to characterize from now on the conditions of labor in every other site of wage slavery. At the same time, as the games offer a unique opportunity for capitalist pillage, the natural environment is plundered and destroyed, while the urban landscape is redeveloped according to the new norms of commercialization and surveillance of public spaces. The local version of international "anti"terrorism is being established trough the colossal operation "safe olympic games", including: the collaboration of "anti"-terrorist specialists from greek, US, british, israeli, australian, german, french and spanish secret services, military exercises by greek and foreign special forces, based on scenarios of "pre-emptive action" and "management of disproportionate threats"    NATO's engagement after official demand made by the greek state, with spying aircrafts, special units on alert and navy patrolling in the Aegean and Mediteranea sea, mass imports of modern weapons and the installation of technologically advanced equipment monitoring public spaces and persons, such as the C4I system developed by the american multinational SAIC (a company providing know-how, infrastructure and armament for the war in Afghanistan and Iraq). Hundreds of surveillance cameras are being placed and forbidden "red zones", where access is possible only for those having license, are instituted. All areas around athletic facilities, hotels, ports and airports in the five olympic cities are sealed and sterilized with the use of sensors to locate anything and anyone considered as suspect. In the streets, the death squads of a police occupation army undertake "cleansing operations" against the homeless, drug addicts and immigrants, while the former US base in Aspropyrgos, outside Athens, is transformed in to an olympic concentration camp. In Heraklio, Crete, Roma families will be evicted out of their settlement to be relocated in an old military base. During the games, 50.000 soldiers will take position around Athens and patrolling inside the red zones. Through these orgiastic preparations, the repressive apparatus is modernized, and the new role of the army in the confrontation of the "internal enemy" is promoted. The "zero tolerance" doctrine against any expression of social and class dissidence is rooting and the borders, where already hundreds of refugees are loosing their lives, are even more fortified. The olympics are proclaimed "matter of national interest" and their safety becomes the ideological vehicle for the implementation of methods that are either way considered as priorities for the intensification of state terrorism, in the framework of constructing a global Guantanamo. Within this situation, "court-martials" are set, such as the one that accomplished its mission inside Koridallos prison, imposing to the accused as "November 17" members exterminative sentences of political convenience, and the one that is taking place now against the five accused for participation in E.L.A (Revolutionary Popular Struggle), with the judges cynically admitting that "the trial must be finished before the olympics". These are trials aiming at having the institution of "independent justice" legalize the tortures and confinement in "white cells", the collaborators and the pogrom against the dissidents of terror-democracy. After they're finished, political prisoners will be sent to the new isolation wing, which was recently built in the jail of Larisa. Participation in social-class struggles and the expression of solidarity are both criminalized, and every choice to resist without apologizing to state legality, rejecting the mediation of institutions is baptized "terrorism". The greek state signs international "anti"terrorist acts and treaties allowing extradition. Within these circumstances it was decided to extradict in Germany Sinan Bozcourt - Taylan, a Kurdish communist arrested in Greece on the same day that many other political refugees from Turkey were arrested in different countries of Fortress-Europe. Using the alibi of the olympics' safety, the greek secret service and police authorities are officially now after political refugees, Arab and muslim immigrants, anarchists and anti-authoritarians, announcing that their places are being watched and their email and telephone communication monitored. The fact that the recently formed european task force -which introduces the term of confronting "anarchist terrorism" for reasons of preemptive repression- is dealing, among other things, with the safety of the olympics, and the press statement of a greek police official that "until the games we will be finished with the anarchists", are indicating that this is a chance for the state to attack social militants in an examplary way in order to intimidate society and disarm the idea of resistance. The olympics, as the bosses' Grand Idea, propagandized by the whole spectrum of the authoritarian system (political parties, financial institutions and the Media) is a contemporary ideological machine to extract social consent, consisting of the most conservative figures, such as nationalism, to the most modern "values" of consumerism and "voluntary" offer of unpaid labor in the service of the bosses. We do not forget that, here as much as globally, the excess of multi-advertised means, mechanisms and methods of repression the state and capital are getting armed with, as well as their intimidating campaign, reflect also their insecurity caused by existent and imminent social explosions. They reflect the failure they taste in their effort to present their domination as indisputable and totally invulnerable, when all over the world there are struggles and revolts bursting against globalization of exploitation and oppression, against war and capitalist peace. Today, the olympics concentrate the state's effort to deepen its authority in society, repressing all those resisting its plans. But this campaign is not adequate to instill fear, discourage and deter the multiform expressions of social and class struggle. On the contrary, it is a condition highlighting the necessity to intensify and spread this struggle in every front the bosses are opening with their aggression and in every front they try to close to their account. We antagonize the projects of the growing commercialization and surveillance of public spaces, reclaiming them and transforming them to spaces of resistance. We sabotage social peace. We resist the "anti"terrorist war inside and outside the borders. We stand in solidarity with political prisoners and persecuted social fighters. We act together with all those revolting against the dictatorship of the State and Capital. REKINDLE THE FLAMES OF SOCIAL AND CLASS WAR DESTROY THE BOSSES' GRAND IDEA Open Assembly of Anarchists-Antiauthoritarians June 2004

http://squathost.com/anarchist_assembly/en/f2004.htm