When the Olympic flame is doused on Sunday, we know the cheers will quiet, the athletes will move on and fans will go home. But will Big Brother stay behind?

Every Olympics host city goes through it: the Olympic hangover. When the athletes step off the medal podiums, the city must clean up, pay the bills and figure out how to monetize a series of shiny new venues. The most important decision, however, might seem much more subtle: What happens to all those new security cameras and other surveillance technologies that were installed for the Games? Privacy experts fret that, as with Athens, Beijing and Vancouver, the Olympics means a steep ratcheting up of security that never really gets ratcheted down.

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"It would be a tragedy if the most visible legacy of the Games in London was a huge increase in the amount of surveillance people are subjected to in their everyday lives," said Nick Pickles, director of London-based Big Brother Watch.

Host cities tolerate massive shows of security that would otherwise be unimaginable. In London, which already has more CCTV security cameras than any other city in the world, 2,000 new cameras were installed in the Olympic Village, while nearly 2,000 more were installed around the city, according to Big Brother Watch. License plate recognition systems have been installed throughout London. There are even surface-to-air missiles atop apartment buildings and more military troops on the ground than Britain has in Afghanistan. An $877 million effort, it's been called the largest peacetime deployment of security forces in history, but the question remains: Will there be mission creep? How much of that infrastructure and the public’s newfound tolerance for being watched will remain after the Games are finished?

Earlier this year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published an analysis of all recent Games and says the results are disheartening.  It should come as no surprise that the Beijing Summer Games were used as an excuse to install thousands of cameras that are still in operation, said the report’s author, Rebecca Bowe. But other cities have suffered similar fates, too.

"The Games bring a legacy that lives well beyond the prestige," Bowe said. "We've witnessed time and again, the security infrastructure lives on well beyond the Games."

Concrete concerns
The concerns aren't merely theoretical. Athens officials installed about 1,000 cameras for the 2004 Summer Games. In 2007, Greece amended its national data protection law to exempt the cameras; Greek privacy commissioner Dimitris Gourgourakis resigned over the incident. The cameras have since been used during protests following economic unrest there.

More Olympics coverage in London 2012: Hosting the Games

The Olympics has a long-running legacy as a massive security event, which long pre-dates post-9/11 terrorism concerns. It dates at least as far back as the Munich Summer Games of 1972, when a security breach contributed to the kidnapping of Israeli athletes from the Olympic Village; 11 were eventually murdered.  But even before that event, the Olympics were never free of international politics and the real possibility that some group might use them to violently make a point.

No one disputes the need for heightened security during the Games, but is the installation of security infrastructure, and the culture that comes with it, a one-way street? Can a security state be dismantled? Or are the Games a Trojan horse that allows those with a heavy-handed security agenda to gain the upper hand?

Olympic security plan transforms London into fortress

"The equipment has been bought and paid for. The real risk is they simply leave it in place and turn it over to local authorities, and by the back door, we have a huge increase in surveillance," Pickles said. "Government officials have made assurances that some of it is temporary, but they haven't said what."

Already, whiz-bang security technology in London has proven tempting to local authorities. Pickles pointed to minutes from a recent borough council meeting in Newham, just east of London, where officials openly expressed desire to buy Olympics surveillance technology after the Games end.

Alfredo Lopez, founder of the international privacy advocacy organization MayFirst/PeopleLink, said it's very difficult to reverse the Olympics security buildup.

"There is no way these guys are going to take down those cameras, especially with all the social unrest there," said Lopez, who is based in New York.

Lopez, a professed lover of Olympic sports, said the security issue threatens to squander any of the goodwill gained by the otherwise-peaceful international gathering.

Red Tape Chronicles on NBCNews.com

"I happen to believe, and I know this is corny, (that) the Olympics is one of the greatest things the human race does, so why do these bastards pervert it with their repressive attitudes?" he said. "How can you run a principal event of goodwill and friendship, then at same time, on top of buildings you have missiles? It's totally incongruous. It's very, very disturbing and contradictory to the Olympic spirit. It ruins the whole thing."

'It softens people up'
One fundamental problem of the Games is that they are used as an "obvious show of military capability," Lopez said, with host nations using the occasion the beat their chests about their powerful ability to respond to threats. But Pickles is worried about a much more subtle issue: Residents get used to the trade-off between privacy and heightened security practices, and their tolerance level is slowly raised, leading to fewer objections to police tactics.

"The danger is it softens people up to the next step," he said.

The next step is Brazil in 2016, where circumstances on the ground dictate what will almost inevitably be an even stronger implementation of security force and technology. (Privacy advocates are too pessimistic about the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, to use those games as a battleground.) An active battle between paramilitary police forces and organized crime means residents are used to compromised civil liberties, and even before the 2016 Games, Rio de Janeiro will host the World Cup in 2014. Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks suggest that U.S. government officials have encouraged use of additional surveillance tools by the Brazilian government, as well as a partnership with U.S. security agencies.

As a result, market research firm 6Wresearch predicts the market for security cameras will nearly quadruple, to $362 million, by 2016.

By then, Pickles warns, people have another element to worry about: increased sophistication of technologies like facial recognition. Londoners, for example, would almost certainly not tolerate a permanent military presence in the city. But as police gadgets get smaller and smarter, they also become less visible.

"It's getting more discreet, even as the processing power is getting more powerful," he said. "It's becoming much more clandestine, ... which means people won't object to it as much."

Looking to Vancouver
Brazil and London might be able to learn something from Vancouver's experience after the 2010 Winter Games. Western Canada has an active civil participation culture, and even before the Games began, Canada's privacy commissioner warned about mission creep in Olympics security plans.

"The right to privacy must be upheld, even during mega-events like the Olympic Games, where the threat to security is higher than usual," Commissioner Jennifer Stoddard said in a speech delivered before the Games calling for dismantling of surveillance technology after the Games. "Will the residents of Vancouver and the lower mainland wind up living surrounded by an array of surveillance systems that they neither want nor need?"

Partly as a result, most of the 900 video cameras installed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were removed after the Games. About 75 were left behind for use by the Vancouver police, said Adam Molnar, who is studying the Olympics security effect as part of his Ph.D. work at the University of Victoria.

"British Columbia civil liberties associations put pressure on the Vancouver Police Department, which was in negotiations to keep the cameras up," he said. Even some of the remaining cameras were turned off, only to be used in crisis situations, he said.

On the other hand, analysis of Vancouver's post-Olympics security hangover is muddied by the fact that in the spring of 2011, there were major riots after the Vancouver Canucks lost hockey’s Stanley Cup final. City officials have successfully turned to Twitter and other social media tools that deputized people to help identify criminals during the riots. Given the embarrassment over the riots, many residents were eager to help.

"That turns out to be an alternate route to (security) cameras everywhere," Molnar said.

The most lasting legacy of the Vancouver Games, Molnar said, was not police gadgetry, but rather reorganization of the police force into small, nimble anti-riot teams that share some characteristics with paramilitary teams.

"The extent that militarist ideal supplants community-based policing, that should concern people," he said. "And any time you have a deepening of integration between civilian and military police, like you have now in London, that's disturbing."

Molnar felt confident that Vancouver's security experience offered some hope to privacy advocates in London and Rio, however.

"You can look to Vancouver as a positive example of an active civil liberty and political community that tried to engage the government around privacy and surveillance issues, and that did earn some small victories," he said. "In many ways it's forced policing agencies to respond to public debate. ... There's certainly a need for informed civilian oversight."

'Mega-events'
But Bowe, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she's worried that the Olympics will continue to be abused as one of a list of "mega-events" that give officials permission to tighten the security screws until tremendous power is concentrated in small government forces.

"The march toward a militarized, urban future will continue apace unless people push back," she said. 

And Lopez sees little room for hope at the moment.

"My general worry as a human being is about the setting up of apparatus of police states in all of these places," he said.

Even those who have faith in the good intentions of their current government are being short-sighted, he warned.

"The (U.S.) and some of these places are not a police state now. But the problem is if the apparatus is set up, it could be easily be Nazified and turned on people. ... If there's a history to the world, it's that certain small, elite groups of people usurp and pervert the great works of the majority of humanity, like the Olympic Games, for nefarious and selfish purposes."

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Why would the well-heeled suburb of Gilbert, Ariz., spend a quarter of a million dollars on a futuristic spy gadget that sounds more at home in a prime-time drama than a local police department?

The ACLU caused a stir Monday with its extensive report of cellphone surveillance by local police departments, which routinely request location information and other data from cellphone providers, often under vague legal circumstances.

But one bit of information provided by Gilbert officials suggests that cops sometimes try to cut out the middle man. Buried in the 380 public records requests sent by the ACLU is a response from Gilbert which indicates that the town purchased a device that allows it to track cellphones on its own for $244,195.

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"The Gilbert Police Department obtained a $150,000 grant from the State Homeland Security Program," the agency wrote to the ACLU in response to a public records request. "These funds, along with $94,195 of R.I.C.O monies, were used to purchase cell phone tracking equipment in June 2008 (total acquisition cost of $244, 195)."

 

Gilbert didn't offer additional details about the device to the ACLU, and Chief of Police Tim Dorn didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

But several surveillance experts said the device sounds like a gadget that's sometimes called a stingray.  

The stingray, made by Harris Wireless Products Group of Melbourne, Fla., lets users set up what amounts to a fake cellphone tower and trick all phones nearby into connecting with it. That data can then be used to track the physical location of anyone nearby carrying a powered-on cellphone -- even if the citizen isn’t on a phone call. A stingray can also register other data, such as the phone numbers dialed by all phones while connected to it. The device reportedly cannot record or intercept the content of a phone call, so it does not act like a wiretap.

Still, the stingray is at the heart of a hotly contested criminal case involving an identity thief named Daniel David Rigmaiden, who allegedly stole $4 million through a fake tax return scheme. Federal authorities used a stingray to find Rigmaiden in California in May 2008, then sent him to Arizona for trial.

Perhaps Gilbert was impressed with the result -- it says it acquired its device one month later.

In September 2011, a federal court in Arizona heard Rigmaiden's request to receive all details about the government's secretive use of the surveillance technology. Federal prosecutors are resisting disclosure because they say it will jeopardize use of the critical law enforcement technology in other cases.

Rigmaiden's case, as yet undecided, is largely seen as a test of the constitutionality of stingray and related police surveillance technologies. Would use of a stingray constitute a search, and thus require application for a time-consuming search warrant? Or do cellphone users give up their expectation of privacy by turning on a phone and carrying it in their pocket? The issues were discussed extensively in this recent Wall Street Journal story.

Use of a stingray-like device raises even thornier issues than cellphone records requests, said Catherine Crump, the lawyer who headed the ACLU project.

"I think when law enforcement starts purchasing technology that allows them to track cellphones in that manner, it raises a whole host of questions about how that technology is being used that are even more serious when they track people through carriers," Crump said. "At least when a carrier is involved, there's a third party that may raise concerns if the request is of questionable legality. But when a law enforcement agency can do on its own surveillance, that raises even more serious questions about whether there is appropriate oversight."

No other local police department that responded to the ACLU's public records requests mentioned purchase of a stingray-like device -- one other community mentioned borrowing such a gadget -- but Crump said that's because she didn't specifically ask about them.

"If I had to write the requests it over again, I would,” she said. “We didn’t realize how big an issue these devices were at the time. We know that there are others purchased by other agencies around the country, mainly from press reports."

The Miami police department, for example, asked Harris for a price quote in 2008. The firm's response is still on the city of Miami's website. A more extensive price list from Harris can be found at this website. 

A spokesman for Harris Wireless said the company didn't comment on clients' purchases and referred questions to Gilbert's Police Department.

The use of fake cellphone towers by law enforcement has caught on outside the U.S., too. Britain's Metropolitan Police, which serves the greater London area and is that nation's largest police force, began deploying similar technology provided by England-based Datong PLC last year, according to The Guardian. The disclosure began a round of debate about civil liberties in Britain.

Matt Blaze, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on stingray-like devices, said they are a mixed bag.

"Certainly these devices are powerful surveillance tools that, if misused, have the potential to be quite invasive against the privacy of innocent people," he said.  "But, then again, so do many other law enforcement investigative methods -- physical searches, hidden microphones, informants and so on. The question is how they are used, how often they are used and the oversight mechanisms in place to prevent and detect misuse."

Devices like stingrays are technologically limited in scope, however -- they can only monitor a limited physical area in real time -- so Blaze is less concerned about them than he is the revolving door of data between private companies and law enforcement.

"I'm less worried about law enforcement agencies with stingrays and other targeted surveillance gadgets than I am about location and other kinds of tracking through the carriers, especially when done without strong legal oversight or without probable cause," he said. "While I do worry about abuse of these kinds of electronic surveillance devices, the fact that they are inherently rather targeted in what they can collect acts as something of a built-in safeguard. I'm more concerned, in the long run, about large-scale surveillance capabilities being included in our communications infrastructure."

Still, privacy researcher Chris Soghoian – who has written extensively on law enforcement use of cellphone technology for surveillance – said police use of the stingray device is among the most troubling privacy developments in years. Some phone companies allow police officers to use a website to download customers’ GPS location data easily, “from the comfort of their own desks,” he said, and charge as little as $5 for the information. With phone company record access that easy and inexpensive, there’s no need for stingray, he argued.

“The real issue is that this device is about allowing police to perform surveillance when the phone company would say no,” said Soghoian, who is Graduate Fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University. “This is not about saving time and money … it’s about the fact that there’s no one to insist that the law be followed when a stingray is used.”

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