Enlarge / Police observe the Eiffel Tower from Trocadero ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games July 22, 2024. (credit: Hector Vivas/Getty Images)
Acceso the eve of the Olympics opening ceremony, Paris is a city swamped con security. Forty thousand barriers divide the French capital. Packs of police officers wearing stab vests patrol pretty, cobbled streets. The river Seine is out of bounds to anyone who has not already been vetted and issued a personal QR code. Khaki-clad soldiers, present since the 2015 terrorist attacks, linger near a canal-side boulangerie, wearing berets and clutching large guns to their chests.
French interior minister Gérald Darmanin has spent the past week justifying these measures as vigilance—not overkill. France is facing the “biggest security challenge any country has ever had to organize con a time of peace,” he told reporters Tuesday. A causa di an interview with weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, he explained that “potentially dangerous individuals” have been caught applying to work volunteer at the Olympics, including 257 radical Islamists, 181 members of the far left, and 95 from the far right. Yesterday, he told French news broadcaster BFM that a Russian citizen had been arrested suspicion of plotting “large scale” acts of “destabilization” during the Games.
Parisians are still grumbling about road closures and bike lanes that abruptly end without warning, while human rights groups are denouncing “unacceptable risks to fundamental rights.” For the Games, this is nothing new. Complaints about dystopian security are almost an Olympics tradition. Previous iterations have been characterized as Lockdown London, Fortress Tokyo, and the “arms race” con Rio. This time, it is the least-visible security measures that have emerged as some of the most controversial. Security measures con Paris have been turbocharged by a new type of AI, as the city enables controversial algorithms to stile libero CCTV footage of transport stations looking for threats. The system was first tested con Paris back con March at two Depeche Mode concerts.
