[artinfo] World Cup 2006

[by way of Janos Sugar]

The security industry is having a field day at the World Cup. The German
government, with the help of private corporations from all over the world,
is applying state of the art surveillance technologies to manage the
crowds attending World Cup 2006. Philips, the Dutch electronics giant, is
the official sponsor of this year's Cup. Philips, and the many other
corporations involved in this global football extravaganza, wants us to
have a series of exciting, but safe, soccer matches. Security starts with
the tickets. Philips manufactured three and a half million tickets with
tiny RFID chips embedded in every single ticket. RFID stands for radio
frequency identification. These smart tickets have a tiny silicon chip
that responds to queries from a radio transceiver. Each ticket is
personalized and represents the person who purchased it. To get a ticket
for a World Cup match you had to give your name, address, nationality,
your birth date, which team you support, your bank details, and your ID or
passport number. When you enter a stadium your ticket is checked against
your ID or passport. Very little information resides on the ticket's chip,
but the identity check is conducted against a series of computer
databases. The Central Sports Intelligence Unit of the German Interior
Ministry in Berlin has a database of over 6,000 hooligans already known to
police. Germany's National Information and Cooperation Center is
coordinating agencies as diverse as the German Soccer Association and
Interpol. Interpol will use its I-24/7 electronic communications system
to check World Cup tickets against its databases of stolen travel
documents and photographs of known criminals. You can bet the CIA is also
involved as terrorism is always a concern at such major global events.
Tickets that trigger suspicion will activate surveillance cameras with
facial recognition software. Privacy advocates are concerned that visual
databases are being assembled using these smart football tickets to tag
personal and financial data to the faces of ordinary citizens. The
security industry is having a field day at World Cup 2006. The machines
and software reading the tickets are provided by AXCESS, a ticketing
technology company based in Salzburg, Austria.


Nerve Theory: http://www.kunstradio.at/2006A/H5N1en.html