Security Madness

[kevin_standlee]

Good thing I'm not in the UK, as my use of the five-rings logo as a userpic would allow the police to enter my home and seize my property, it appears. So would linking to the London 2012 Olympics web site in a derogatory manner, as I'm doing right now.

See this post for links to articles on how the UK has passed special custom-written laws that effectively say that free speech doesn't apply to the Olympics, the London Olympic Committee can tell you what words you can use (not just trademarks), and how London is being turned into an armed camp for the duration.

My annoyance with this is not inconsistent with my role as chairman of WSFS's Mark Protection Committee, which tries to keep people from misusing "Worldcon," "Hugo Award," etc. WSFS doesn't care if you use those terms to refer to the actual convention or the awards presented by WSFS. Indeed, we like you doing so. We like it when cities consider it worthwhile to put up banners at the airport or on the streets welcoming our convention to town. We only get annoyed when conventions that aren't the World Science Fiction Convention describe themselves as "Worldcon" or when people give out awards that are confused with the Hugo Awards. (Both of these things have happened and continue to happen.) What the London Olympic Committee is doing is radically above and beyond simple trademark protection.

With luck, they won't decide that having the military occupying the city isn't a good long-term idea. If I lived in London, I would have been long since been trying to figure out how to be out of the city — preferably out of the country — for the games this summer. My sympathies go out to flickgc, drplokta, and my other friends who live in around London, who it appears may be prisoners in their own homes for a month or so this year.

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

The fascist overtones of the 2012 Olympiad were obvious years ago -- I remember back in 2008 Cory Doctorow was joking about how for 2012 he was going to go look for a year-long teaching slot in a hippy-friendly anarchist libertopia like Singapore.

[drplokta]

It's highly unlikely to be as bad as is being made out. The number of extra visitors to London is not much higher than the usual reduction in public transport usage in August. All the scare stories are largely attempts to change people's behaviour in advance -- deliberate self-defeating prophecies.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Have you heard Londoners' griping about the Zil Lanes yet? Starting with, well, calling them Zil Lanes...

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Not until the replies to this post, but I'd heard about their existence, and I'm not at all surprised at the resentment they're causing. All that London can hope for, I think, is to hunker down for a couple more months and hope that most of the mess subsides, and then they'll finally be able to use the magnificent infrastructure investments lavished upon the capitol for the Games.

OTOH, I suspect the rest of the country will turn up the volume on "You've spent billions of pounds on the Home Counties; how about a bit more for us?"

[regfoghorn.livejournal.com]

I will admit, I was dreading the moment when SF would win the Olympics during the various times that it has tried to get them. I'm not sure what will happen during the America's Cup next year, but I hope I don't have to commute into the City.

If I lived in London right now, I'd be living in Cardiff or on the Cornwall coast, so I wouldn't be affected by the Olympics. :-)

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/11/nation/la-na-olympic-security11-2010feb11

London had a "ring of steel" for years, with every car being investigated and many cars searched every day, due to the IRA bombing campaign, and I had my car stopped and occasionally searched when driving near Canary Wharf several times in the mid-2000's.

All vehicles entering and leaving London (or parked on the streets) have their number plates scanned and recorded.

You learn to live with Big Brother when it seems to be a useful way of reducing the chance of dying in a terrorist bombing ...

US Olympics had big security operations, military, surface to air missiles etc.

Oh, and Cardiff is the home of the Millenium Stadium, where I believe some of the Olympic football (soccer) matches will be played ... so not far enough away to avoid the "London" Olympics :-)

[flick.livejournal.com]

Completely contradicting beloved husband, I think it's going to be a bloody nightmare.

I very rarely go into London-proper, so hopefully the inevitable tube nightmare won't bother me too much, but I do drive, pretty much daily, out of London, in order to look after GB, along a road that's going to have a zili lane on it.

It's only going to cover a bit over half a mile, but it's a busy road anyway, and the fact that they've closed the side roads is already causing chaos. Even more annoyingly (for me, anyway: I'm still a little uncomfortable with central-London-agressive-driving, so I like to take a while and change lanes when it's quiet) the Games Lane that I'll need to pass is made up of about 200 yards in the right hand lane, then a 200 yard gap, then 200 yards in the left hand land. So that's two streams of traffic having to cross, on one of the busiest bits of road in the area.... (Edit: oh, and past a missile launcher. Lovely, just what you want to see on the Common!)

Maybe I'll just go the long way around, along with everyone else!

(I say "it's going to": a couple of weeks ago, they put up signs saying "overnight road works, 2/7/12". The second came and went, no work had been done but the signs remained, flashing their time-travelling warning. A few days ago, in the middle of the day, they did do some work: removing the central reservation and replacing it with fold-down poles, presumably so that the Olympic traffic can do a U-turn if the roundabout completely backs up. They still haven't actually painted the lines, though.)

(There's a-probably-unsucessful attempt at a grass-roots protest, involving gluing a blue bucket (to 'mimic' emergency lights) to the roof of the car. It would be amusing, though. And, you know, what if one happened to run out of petrol and had to pull over in an Olympic lane...?)

Plus, there's the whole chip fry chip we're English! thing. And then the utterly ludicrous attempts, backed up by the police, to stop shops from having Olympic-themed displays, to stop (haha) spectators from posting to social media, and so on. Utter nightmare. I can't imagine what made people think it was a good idea. I just hope that it rains the entire time: half the summer shows have been cancelled, maybe the Olympics can too?

Sh*t Like This Makes Me Miss Socialism....

[britgeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

It's fucking disgusting what LOCOG and the Olympics entities are getting away with. The event costs money, I get that, but, yeah, there's such a thing as going too far.

And, of course, now that the precedents have been set, don't be surprised when they're perpetuated at future Olympiads.

(And allowing McDonald's license to call itself "The Official Restaurant of The Olympics" is, like someone else said, making smoking the official treatment for lung cancer. Sheesh.)

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

The US Committee isn't much better. Ravelry, a knitting and crochet online community, has finally gotten big enough that the US Olympic Committee has found out we've been running a Knitting/Crochet competition during the Olympics called Ravelympics. We were actually told in a form letter that we were denigrating the athletes. It was not a nice letter.
We've renamed them the Ravellenic Games, and some knitters are threatening to boycott the Olympics, it pissed them off so much. I just find it petty and annoying. We are different enough to not threaten their TM, which they got by Congressional decree, since Olympic would not be trademarkable otherwise. The name has been around for 2000+ years for pete's sake.
Frankly, the whole thing has gotten way too commercial. I'll be watching some bits, but it just doesn't pull me in like it used to.