Heightened Security Plus Tickets Scams: Bad Mix For Olympics?

As sports fans get ready for the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, some security experts have begun to voice concern that the Chinese government’s attempt to use high-tech tickets to keep troublemakers out of the opening and closing of the games could itself cause large amounts of trouble. People looking to buy new tickets to replace the ones they lost to online ticket scams may only add to the potential chaos.

The primary chance for confusion will come at the Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies. Though tickets for other Olympic events are of a familiar type, for the opening and closing ceremonies the Chinese have embedded microchips into every ticket sold, microchips that, when scanned by ticket-takers, will connect to a computer database that will compare a photo of the person who is supposed to have the ticket against the face of person actually holding it. At the same time, the database will provide personal information about the proper ticker-holder such as age, gender, and the like. It’s a greater level of security than that faced by people trying to board airplanes, or even visit the White House.

One purpose of these high-tech tickets, as the Associated Press noted in a story titled Olympic Ceremony Ticket Security Gets Tight , is to “keep potential troublemakers from the 91,000-seat National Stadium, as billions watch on TV screens around the world. Along with terrorists, Chinese officials fear protesters might wreck the glitzy ceremonies, unfurling Tibet flags, anti-China banners, or even T-shirts adorned with strident messages.” But as Australian security expert Roger Clarke pointed out in the same story, “If somebody is handing out six tickets to six people, they somehow have to shuffle these tickets successfully to get the right ticket in the right hands. If they fail and then people are separated in the queue, we'll get enormous delays at the gates.”

Equally problematic is the issue of what happens to tickets that have been resold, and are in the hands of one person when the embedded microchip will connect to a photo of someone else. Officially, tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies could be resold just once, and then only if the buyer and seller submitted new personal information to the Chinese government. There was also a July deadline for any such sales, a deadline that has now passed.

The question is whether those rules are widely known enough to be followed. This has become a particular concern as more and more people have discovered that the Olympics tickets they paid for online from what turned out to be fraudulent websites never actually existed. With an influx of such Olympics visitors arriving in China desperately looking for new tickets, the chances of people not knowing the rules, and of legitimate tickets for the opening and closing ceremonies changing hands, even though their microchips cannot now be updated, increases.

What will happen when those people arrive at the stadium in Beijing for the opening or closing ceremonies, legitimate ticket in hand, is unlikely to result in the sort of Olympic dreams most hope for. Fortunately, since tickets to the Olympics sporting events are not microchipped and will not be compared against a computer database, similar problems are unlikely to occur there. With those events, the issue will be making sure the tickets purchased are truly legitimate, given how widespread counterfeiting is in China. In the end, it could be that in their quest for Olympic control, the Chinese will instead have created Olympic chaos.