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Paris Olympics Security Issue: Macron’s Big Challenge

All of France is looking ahead to Sunday’s elections, which could bring Marine Le Pen’s far-right party to power. However, this is not the only event the country is preparing for; on July 26, France will host the Olympic Games, and Parisians seem to have internalized what is coming. Some with enthusiasm, others with resignation, and others with a discomfort that they do not stop expressing at every opportunity. Inevitably, the Paris Olympics will affect the routines of the city’s inhabitants. In the metro, billboards encourage citizens to work remotely as much as possible and plan their journeys in advance to avoid problems. Some companies have started to market ‘gadgets’ that will allow them to overcome transport complications in real time on those dates.

Whether people like it or not, the Games will be felt in the lives of Parisians, and it is unclear how much this might impact the early general elections. The head of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, says that the Paris Olympics enjoy broad support across almost the entire political spectrum in France. He says the elections won’t change that, regardless of the results. But in the French capital itself, the unease is real.

Security is one area where this disruption will be most noticeable. Paris City Hall and the central government are implementing a major deployment of measures—some clearly visible, others not so much—to prevent incidents, some of which are of significant concern to the authorities.

The tangible threats can be summarized in three areas: terrorist attacks, disruptive or criminal cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns aimed at ruining France’s reputation, which would ruin attendance at the Games. To counter these, the Elysee has launched an ambitious series of initiatives in different areas with which it hopes to ensure that the event goes off as normal.

A total of 45,000 police officers, 20,000 private guards, and 15,000 soldiers—including a contingent of the Foreign Legion—will ensure the physical security of the Olympic sites and prevent violent actions. Furthermore, Emmanuel Macron’s government has requested additional assistance from 45 countries’ security services and has asked Greece to lend it a Crotale anti-aircraft system for the duration of the Olympics.

During the opening ceremony on July 26—which for the first time in history is scheduled to take place outside, on the River Seine—a 150-kilometer no-fly zone will be established for a period of six hours. An aircraft with an AWACS surveillance system will also patrol the skies above Paris to detect possible aerial threats. An anti-drone coordination center has also been set up at the Villacoublay military base on the outskirts of the capital. It is also planned to deploy officers armed with the British SkyWall Patrol system, which can launch nets at high altitude to catch unauthorized drones.

Similarly, four private companies—Videtics, Orange Business, ChapsVision, and Wintics—have developed artificial intelligence software to analyze images captured by existing surveillance systems and identify potential threats in public spaces. The Paris 2024 consortium has reached an agreement with the firms Eviden (Atos) and Cisco to secure the Games’ critical infrastructure and protect it against potential cyberattacks, as well as to monitor the internet, including communication channels used by cybercriminals, and detect and prevent intrusion campaigns and attempts before they take place or in their initial stages.

Drones and jihadists

All these precautions are not trivial. In early June, the private intelligence firm Recorded Futures announced that it had detected the circulation of an exhaustive, ten-page manual created by an Islamic State sympathizer, explaining how to transform small commercial drones so that they can carry homemade explosives. They explicitly encourage their supporters to use these techniques to carry out attacks during the Paris Games. “What we’ve observed is a supporter—not an official element of the Islamic State media apparatus, but someone active on their forums—who has produced a relatively detailed analysis. This focuses on commercially available drones and provides analysis of the types of drones that can be used and attempted to be acquired,” said analyst Matt Mooney in statements to the newspaper The National.

This is part of an explicit campaign by the jihadist organization to call on its followers to attack mass sporting events. In April, the Arabic-language channel Halummu, which broadcasts Islamic State propaganda, called for attacks on the Paris Games “with dynamite, explosives, Molotov cocktails, and knives.” Some of these supporters have taken it seriously.

On April 23, Paris police arrested a 16-year-old boy in the town of Marignier, in Haute-Savoie, one day after the boy expressed on social media his desire to attack the Olympics and “die as a martyr.” When they searched his home, the officers found handwritten documents in which the minor declared his loyalty to the Islamic State. The authorities are now investigating whether it was a simple teenage folly or whether he really intended to commit an attack.

More serious is the arrest on May 22 of another 18-year-old of Chechen origin who has been formally accused of planning to attack the Geoffroy-Guichard football stadium in Saint-Ettiene, one of the secondary venues that will host some of the Olympic events outside Paris. The individual, identified as Rokhman B., had arrived in France in 2023 from the Russian Federation with his parents, who had requested asylum in the French state. While waiting for a permit to enroll in a university, the young man spent his days on conspiratorial and jihadist channels on Telegram.

There, he was communicating with members of the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) about his intentions to carry out an attack and was detected by the DGSI, the French domestic intelligence service, which decided to arrest him. When his phone was analyzed, the agents found images and videos of the stadium, indicating that the suspect had carried out surveillance tasks on his target. They haven’t found any weapons or explosives, nor any evidence that this person tried to make them at home.

But the speed with which the anti-terrorist services have acted shows how seriously they take this risk. “If you can do Moscow, you can do Paris,” says French expert Gilles Kepel, author of several books on political Islam and jihadism, in a recent article in The Economist. “Moscow could be a training rehearsal for the Olympics,” Kepel said, referring to the attack on Crocus City Hall last March.

Virtual threats

Cybersecurity experts expect that, as is often the case with such events, cybercriminals will take advantage of the opportunity for their own criminal purposes, such as launching phishing campaigns or trying to steal the customer databases of tour operators, travel agencies, or other companies involved in the tourism exploitation of the Games. Another expected complication is denial-of-service cyberattacks, especially against peripheral institutions, which are generally more vulnerable targets than key infrastructures.

But French authorities are more concerned about the potential impact of disinformation operations. Over the past year, countries such as Russia and Azerbaijan have launched influence campaigns to discredit the Olympic Games’ hosting. In the latter case, for example, Azerbaijani accounts promoted a video in 2023 that interspersed images of sporting activities with images of the French police using violence against protesters in different situations, in response to the political support expressed by Macron’s government for the Armenian executive during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

However, Russia has been the most active in this field. According to a recent report by the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, Moscow has been carrying out such campaigns against the Olympic Games for at least a year. Their frequency and intensity have increased in recent weeks. The firm has detected how, in the last 12 months, two Russian influencers, dubbed by Microsoft as “Storm-1679” and “Storm-1099” (better known to other analysts as the so-called Doppelganger Network), have reoriented their disinformation activities towards the Olympics.

The operation began in June last year with a long video titled “Olympics Has Fallen” (a reference to the 2013 action film “Olympus Has Fallen”), a mockumentary criticizing the top brass of the International Olympic Committee. It featured fake audio clips of Tom Cruise that were generated using artificial intelligence. The video, according to Microsoft, was first posted by Storm-1679 on Telegram channels and then distributed on other social networks.

According to the report, Storm 1679’s targets “seek to spread public fears to discourage spectators from attending the Games. Over the past year, it has consistently produced a collection of misleading videos about the expectation of violence,” including several fake clips from legitimate networks such as Euronews and France24. These claim that many Parisians are buying property insurance or that 24% of tickets to the Games have been returned due to fear of an attack. They have also issued fake CIA and DGSI press releases, urging tourists not to go to the stadiums because of the high risk of an attack.

In the middle of this month, Twitter accounts linked to Russia circulated a purported DGSI video warning about reports of future attacks on McDonalds restaurants in Paris. These outlets have also generated digitally altered images of graffiti equating the Paris 2024 Olympics with the 1972 Munich Olympics, where a Palestinian commando from the Black September organization murdered 11 Israeli athletes.

Other accounts have tried to promote the message that these are going to be “the worst Olympics in history”—messages that, despite their artificial nature, exploit the real anxieties and concerns of citizens and authorities. But while many Parisians groan at the inconvenience caused by this event, most shrug their shoulders, and many others are proud that their city has been selected as an Olympic venue. After all, an Olympic Games is far from the worst thing that has happened to the French capital.

All of France is looking ahead to Sunday’s elections, which could bring Marine Le Pen’s far-right party to power. However, this is not the only event the country is preparing for; on July 26, France will host the Olympic Games, and Parisians seem to have internalized what is coming. Some with enthusiasm, others with resignation, and others with a discomfort that they do not stop expressing at every opportunity. Inevitably, the Paris Olympics will affect the routines of the city’s inhabitants. In the metro, billboards encourage citizens to work remotely as much as possible and plan their journeys in advance to avoid problems. Some companies have started to market ‘gadgets’ that will allow them to overcome transport complications in real time on those dates.

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