Security Review: Blogging at the Olympic Games

By Justin McOmie at 11:52 pm on February 17, 2008 | 1 Comment

Summary:
The International Olympic Committee will be granting Olympic athletes the right to blog at this year’s summer games in China, and there will be a few interesting restrictions placed on what they can say. In addition to the standard laws all bloggers have to conform to (copyright, etc) the athletes are prohibited from posting photographs of events, and from writing about other athletes, as well as from writing about anything that “may compromise the security, staging and organization of the games”. I’m going to examine the motives of the committee in putting these restrictions in place as they may pertain to security, ignoring issues like intellectual property for now.

Assets:

  • The layout of the facilities. This includes the location of rooms, training facilities and other parts of the buildings used by the athletes.
  • The architecture of the buildings involved and any weak spots or entrances to the facilities that may not be well secured.
  • The privacy of the room assignments of athletes.

Adversaries:

  • People targeting specific athletes or groups of athletes to cause harm. The Olympic games have been a popular target in the past, most notably in the 1972 “Munich Massacre.”
  • People looking to leverage internal information to alter the outcome of specific events.
  • Those looking to invade the general privacy of athletes by compromising the security of the facilities.

Weaknessess:

  • The public nature of the Internet makes it very easy for prying eyes to find and utilize and vulnerable information posted about Olympic events.
  • The games are by their nature a very public affair, which makes security from a top to bottom perspective rather difficult.
  • The increased incentive to cause havoc at the Olympics due to the hugely international nature of the events, as well as the guaranteed publicity and notoriety. Large congregations of specific groups of people make it more likely that hate groups will attack.

Defenses:

  • The committee has already done a significant amount to try to curb the potential damage they feel may be incurred from Olympic athletes blogging too openly. These include the prohibition of photographs, blogging about events.
  • If during the course of the games the committee finds any content that it feels could harm the security of the games, it should coordinate well with the ground security to ensure that they are able to be dynamic and responsive.
  • The games committee has to balance freedom of expression with the necessary restrictions they put in place.

Conclusion:

The balance between allowing full freedom of expression and taking a pragmatic approach to security is a difficult one to find in this day and age. Though it’s nice that athletes will have personal blogs, it is unfortunate that restrictions need to be put in place at all. The security that will be ensured by censoring the athletes is very much “security by obscurity”, but it may be an effective practice in circumstances like those at the Olympic games, where the security needs are very instance-specific and temporary in their nature.

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1 Comment

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    Comment by jerins

    February 18, 2008 @ 10:01 pm

    It seems that the restrictions that have been put in place in many ways deny the athletes the right to talk about the most interesting and relevant aspects of their experience in the games. While this does seem justified and necessary from a security standpoint, it is just a shame that the content and appeal of such blogs should have to suffer in this way. I also find the wording of the restriction “may compromise the security, staging and organization of the games” to be interesting. This seems to be a very vague and broad definition, and consequently, it’s enforcement will have to be open to wide interpretation. This seems like a “catch-all” restriction that can be used to restrict anything else that the moderators deem to be inappropriate on the fly.

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