World Cup: Time to Whoop Ass

I don’t like foot­ball (read: soc­cer) any more than you do. But we can prob­a­bly agree that the arrival of those lust­ful foot­ball fans on German soil for the World Cup is a good test for a multi-​​national secu­rity force.
A com­bi­na­tion of Stella Artois, 30 degree heat and dis­cus­sion about my native England’s “chances” cre­ate a men­tal state capa­ble of (and fit for) quite a lot of pun­ish­ment. And it’s not just the Germans that want a chance to beat the crap out of these morons.
13 Countries have queued for an oppor­tu­nity to get on the action with about 80 uni­formed British offi­cers tak­ing part in the largest joint police oper­a­tion in European his­tory. Its also worth not­ing the threats to this World Cup are roughly com­pa­ra­ble to those in a mod­ern bat­tle­field — peace­ful and vio­lent demon­stra­tors, far right/​left wing groups, multi-​​ethnic /​multi-​​religious group ten­sions and pos­si­ble for­eign ter­ror­ism will make affec­tive secu­rity and polic­ing a chal­lenge.
Along with the usual sur­veil­lance equip­ment asso­ci­ated with mod­ern sport­ing events, some of the 2006 World Cup tech­nol­ogy includes:

* Fast Fingerprinting devices allow­ing German police to trans­mit iden­ti­fi­ca­tion data to be matched against archives stored in the cen­tral data­base of the German Federal Intelligence Service.
* Facial recog­ni­tion CCTV in the sta­di­ums will allow cam­eras to record bio­met­ric facial fea­tures of sus­pected hooli­gans which can be checked in real time against pho­tos stored in the cen­tral data­base.
* RFID chips in more than 3 mil­lion tick­ets will include iden­ti­fi­ca­tion infor­ma­tion that will be checked as hold­ers pass through entrance gates. Those with the tick­ets have had to pro­vide per­sonal data such as name, address, nation­al­ity, and pass­port num­ber (with minor out­rage)
* NATO AWACS planes and the German Air Force will patrol the skies above Germany through­out the tour­na­ment main­tain­ing an exclu­sion zone around the sta­di­ums.
* 5,000 pri­vate secu­rity, 7,000 German army troops and 30,000 German police (luck­ily unarmed) are sup­ple­mented by vol­un­teer groups; most notably the now mil­i­tant “Die Hasselhoff, Die.”

The Germans are being quite coy on the cost of all this, other than it’s “less” than the $1 bil­lion spent in the Athens Olympics. They actu­ally seem more impressed with their new ball and the game’s motto: “a time to make friends”.
For me, the World Cup just wouldn’t be the same with­out Henry “4–4-2″ Kissinger, so for you ner­vous first-​​timers here’s a snip­pet of his 2000 word coma-​​fest explain­ing the game — you should wake up around mid-​​July, well after the end of the tournament:

In eight groups of four, each team plays the oth­ers in its group. The top two teams of each group advance to a sudden-​​death round…Manipulating a ball by foot along a 110-​​yard-​​long field into an oppos­ing goal requires skills anal­o­gous to ballet…This turns the game into a kind of geom­e­try of find­ing uncov­ered open spaces from which to launch an unim­peded shot on the goal…The result was a kind of total foot­ball: what­ever the assigned posi­tion of the player, he had the addi­tional task of rein­forc­ing the cen­ter of grav­ity, attack or defense, depend­ing on the situation.

– Steven Snell

June 14th, 2006 | Cops and Robbers | 19458 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/06/14/world-cup-time-to-whoop-ass/World+Cup%3A+Time+to+Whoop+Ass2006-06-14+17%3A13%3A46david_axe You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.