By allowing Beijing to host the games you will help the development of human rights,’ announced the vice-president of the Beijing Olympic bid committee, Liu Jingmin, in April 2001. But with the Olympics two years away, there are worrying signs that they are being used to justify investment in a security infrastructure whose legacy will remain long after the athletes have left. ‘The after effects of importing so much security infrastructure to a country that still executes 15,000 people a year have been largely ignored,’ says Dr Steve Wright, Reader in Applied Global Ethics at Leeds Metropolitan University. ‘It is unlikely that the security technology imported for the games will stay in Beijing. We will likely see a proliferation of equipment deployed throughout the country to challenge any threat of disruption by protest or terrorism. In the longer term, the occupied territory of Tibet is likely to be an unwilling beneficiary of new security infrastructure.’ Recent Olympics have seen several variations on this theme of using Olympic security to justify tough measures, which are then retained afterwards. In the run up to the Sydney games, for example, the spectre of the 1972 Munich hijackings was used to justify the passing of Australia’s Defence Legislation Amendment (Aid to Civilian Authorities) Act 2000, which for the first time gave the government the right to employ the military to control public disorder. That legislation remains in force. In Athens, the first summer games after 9/11, over US$1.5billion was spent on security. Haris Konstandatos, a Campaign Anti-2004 activist, explains that the Olympics were ‘used as an excuse for spending money on police infrastructure and the introduction of new anti-terrorist laws’. David Tubbs of SAIC, a leading security contractor for the 2004 games, agrees that the objective ‘was to leave an extensive legacy’. ‘Almost all of our system stays,’ he said, including a vast new network of surveillance cameras and motion sensors. The Beijing Olympic Committee has not yet revealed how much of its US$40 billion budget will be spent on security. But it is very likely to exceed the equivalent spending in Athens, and has already generated a boom in the Chinese market for ‘sub-lethal weapons’. A recent Asia Pacific China Police 2006 Expo displayed a bewildering array of security technologies and weapons. Chinese companies exhibited ‘wolf sticks, electroshock batons, paralysing injector weapons, robots armed with riot gas equipment, and electrified human capture-nets’, says Steve Wright, who attended the exhibition. And he notes that foreign companies were just as eager to ‘participate in this security feeding frenzy. Israeli companies were selling water cannon with Chinese livery, American riot equipment suppliers were promoting dazzling armadillo riot police gear. One Australian company told me that they had official permission from the US state department to export 50,000 volt taser electro shock weapons to just one Chinese agency.’ This last allegation is particularly shocking, because such exports have been banned since the Tiananmen Square massacre. Weapons are not the only security technologies being snapped up in advance of the games. In 2002, Thales, one of Europe’s ‘big four’ security multinationals, won a major contract to provide China with an electronic ID card system. Google, Yahoo! And Microsoft have also provided electronic means for rooting out dissent. All have ‘facilitated or colluded in the practice of censorship in China,’ according to a new report from Amnesty International. Amnesty claims that Yahoo! allowed its Chinese partner to ‘pass evidence to the authorities that was subsequently used to convict individuals, at least two of whom received long prison sentences’. EADS, Europe’s second largest arms manufacturer, has also used the Olympics to bolster its strategic interest in selling arms and ‘dual use technologies’ in the Chinese market. The company has coordinated European manufacturers’ bids for security contracts at the Beijing games. Its sales pitch encourages Olympics organisers to adopt a high-tech ‘global security architecture’ of integrated surveillance and communication systems, including cameras mounted on unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), and stresses the ‘longer-term advantage of being able to use the infrastructure for other purposes after the Games are over’. Building on this Beijing bid, EADS has already announced its intention to compete for the London 2012 Olympics security contract. ‘Memories of Munich in 1972, Atlanta in 1996 and of course the bombings in London … have brought a new intensity of focus to Olympic security,’ says Philippe Meleard, director of public safety at EADS DS. ‘This represents a perfect opportunity for EADS to improve infrastructure and security through the implementation of integrated state-of-the-art information, communications and security technologies.’ This is one legacy that London, like Beijing, could do without.