Security at the Olympics

If you watched the Olympic Games on television, you saw the unprecedented security surrounding the 2004 Olympics. You saw shots of guards and soldiers, and gunboats and frogmen patrolling the harbors. But there was a lot more security behind the scenes. Olympic press materials state that there was a system of 1,250 infrared and high-resolution surveillance cameras mounted on concrete poles. Additional surveillance data was collected from sensors on 12 patrol boats, 4,000 vehicles, 9 helicopters, 4 mobile command centers, and a blimp. It wasn't only images; microphones collected conversations, speech-recognition software converted them to text, and then sophisticated pattern-matching software looked for suspicious patterns. Seventy thousand people were involved in Olympic security, about seven per athlete or one for every 76 spectators.