http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/08/world_cup_2006_big_brother_charges/
Enjoy watching sports in the crushing pressure of invisible surveillance
To apply for a ticket you have to give your name, address, nationality, which team you want to support and your bank details. You must also supply your ID or passport number and your birth date.
Assuming you are successful, you receive a fully personalized ticket containing an RFID chip; this enables authorities to check the ticket against your passport. Very little information resides on the chip: the identity check is conducted against a database at the German Football Association (DFB).
"The World Cup will be abused to stage a mega-surveillance project, that allows total control over football fans," warned Thilo Weichert, data protection officer of the Independent Center of Data Protection in Schleswig-Holstein (www.datenschutzzentrum.de).
(((Yet these harsh measures are prudent, because European football fans are vigorously violent lumpen-prole hooligans thoroughly involved in vandalism, gang-fights and small-scale narcotics trafficking – oh wait, did I say that? Carry on:)))
"This is a World cup," says Jens Grittner, spokesman for the Organisation Committee. "We have to address very delicate security concerns," he said. The personalizing of the tickets would help to avoid black market sales and fraud in entering the football stadions. Controls in which RFID number and the set of personal data in the DFB database where matched would only be made at random or in suspicious cases.
((("Random and suspicious." Hey, who among us isn't one of those? I want the T-shirt!)))
The ticketing scheme had been presented to the Data Protection Authorities in Darmstadt, the German Ministry of the Interior and even to the European Commission, he said. "Every comment we got has been considered and we are somewhat amazed by the imagination of the critics."
(((That's not half as amazed as they're gonna be by the imagination of the criminals. New RFID measures have put a dent in the biz of your everyday street-corner ticket scalper, so they're now selling World Cup tickets *on eBay, in America,* where the parochial local authorities don't get it that a ticket to a soccer match is a matter of life and death.)))
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/07/business/tkts.php
Glorious eBay, from Pez dispensers to the black-market fence of the global epoch
