Olympic Security! To the highest bidder…
So I was perusing Schneier’s blog the other day and he put up two posts. The first I read was about some clever crooks who called in a bomb threat in Belfast - the tenants of the 8 or so homes were evacuated and while the cops were busy blowing up the alleged car bomb, the burglars were going into the backs of the homes and taking everything. It just goes to show you that security is really, really hard. Even your security procedures can be hacked to the bad guy’s advantage.
So with that thought still fresh in my mind, I saw that he had posted a little blurb about Olympic security. The Olympics being the logistically huge and symbolically huger event that it is, I was hoping to see a - “now this is how you layer on your security” type of post. Unfortunately, it turns out that the London Olympics (2012) can only use one of ther major sponsors as their security vendor. I can’t make that up.
So in one of the biggest global events, with the concentrated attention of the world focussed on this one place and time, given a security problem that must be incredibly daunting - they are not free to find the best and safest possible solution? They have to use one of their major sponsors?? That really has to be one of the most stunningly and blindingly stupid things I’ve heard all afternoon. (Ok, so I heard a lot of stupid things, what can I say?).
So, who’s the luck sponsor they’ve picked? At least it wasn’t Coca-cola, they went with Visa. Now, sure, visa has a bit of a fraud/identity theft problem, but they kinda sorta got a bit of a hold on that. This thing is totally ridiculous and I hope that we are not the worse for some stupid decisions by the IOC.
