The city already has experience
in violating the rights of its citizens in the name of security at major events
and for massive manhunts
At Cheers, everyone already knows
your name. But if Boston gets the 2024 Olympics, they won't be the only ones.
Photograph: Eric Gaillard /Reuters
If the Olympics come to Boston –
and the US Olympic Committee, having chosen it as their contender to host the
2024 Summer Olympics, hopes they will – the government will likely treat it as
a National Security Special
Event. That means the Boston Police Department and the Massachusetts State
Police would fall under the authority of the US Secret Service, Department of
Homeland Security, and Federal Bureau of Investigation, which would be in
charge of security operations. All people within the NSSE “security” zone –
possibly the entire Boston metro area and beyond – could lose a host of
constitutional rights, including the
right to protest on public land, and the
right to not be searched or questioned absent any reasonable suspicion of
wrongdoing.
Proponents have
already said that the security at the Democratic National Convention in
2004 (an NSSE-designated event) provides a security model for a possible 2024
games. And Dave
Zirin reported at The Nation in November that the International Olympic
Committee was particularly interested in Boston “because of how the city was
able to shut itself down after the Boston Marathon bombing”.
That’s a chilling statement. On
Friday April 19, 2013, Bostonians woke up to shocking news: the government was
taking the unprecedented step of asking residents in the Greater Boston region to remain in
their homes. People were not to go to work. The public transit systems were
shuttered. To say that it felt like a declaration of emergency law is not an
exaggeration.
But on that day, as always, all
was not equal. Many in the Boston area felt a particularly neon-bright target
on their back because of their religion, their dress, or the color of their
skin. Just imagine having that suspicion affixed to people like semi-permanent
tattoos for a full year, in the lead-up to the lighting of the Olympic torch.
And for those of us who remember
the 2004 DNC in Boston, comments about our city’s efforts then serving as a
model for security in 2024 are troubling. In the days leading up to the DNC,
authorities built a protest cage for “free speech” sealed by razor wire,
overhead netting, and chain fencing, monitored by rooftop snipers. Federal
authorities claimed that the cage was an adequate accommodation for our freedom
of speech.
After the ACLU and National
Lawyers Guild challenged the restrictions, a federal judge called the cage “an
offense to the spirit of the First Amendment”:
Protesters, demonstrators, and
dissidents outside a national political convention are not meddling interlopers
who are an irritant to the smooth functioning of politics. They are
participants in our democratic life. The Constitution commands the government
to treat their peaceful expression of dissent with great respect –respect equal
to that of the invited delegates.
But the
court nonetheless upheld the use of the cage.
Before the DNC, hundreds of federally networked
surveillance cameras were put in Boston without any public debate. Those
cameras (or more powerful replacements) still watch us a decade later. Subway
bag checks started with the DNC, too – but, like so much less-visible surveillance,
they didn’t leave with the out-of-town guests.
Under the NSSE regime, Boston
will likely receive substantial federal funding to expand its already unaccountable and secretive
surveillance
apparatus. Moreover, history suggests that the people targeted by the
permanent surveillance regime won’t be elite athletes or business leaders; it
will be poor
people, communities
of color and political
activists.
Before hosting the games in 1996,
Atlanta officials
arrested more than 9,000 people – most of them black. In Atlanta and in
Salt Lake City in 2002, the ACLU sued to challenge antidemocratic
secrecy and unconstitutional
limits on free speech. In Georgia, for instance, our colleagues noted for
the court that the Centennial Olympic Park’s regulations “make it a criminal
offense to ‘hold vigils or religious services, and other like forms of conduct
which principally involve the communication or expression of views or
grievances.’”
Boston, like the rest of the
nation, is struggling with issues of public safety and community concern:
police militarization from the wars on drugs and terror; the disproportionate targeting of black and brown
youth for harassment and arrest; and the trickle-down
of “national security” warrantless surveillance to the state and local
level. When communities of color are calling
on police departments to reform stop-and-frisk policies and demilitarize
their forces, the prospect of turning our local police departments over to even
less-accountable federal agencies is worrisome.
Boston’s bid for the 2024 Olympics must
include an open, public discussion of how the city will protect civil liberties
and rights during the games. Otherwise, if the Olympic games come to town, the
civil liberties landscape for the ordinary people of Boston could be forever
damaged, long after the visitors go home.
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