Olympic Security
Bruce Schneier has written insightfully about Olympic security. They’ve spent $1.5 billion, and today’s marathon race was marred by some idiot leaping into the path of the front-runner, and dragging him into the crowd. Its always tempting, and usually wrong, to say that any failure of security could be prevented.
However, this Olympics has seen a large investment in protecting the sponsor’s brands. (See here or here.) I’d be very curious to see how much was spent in this “brand protection” in comparison to say, brand protection for the Olympics as a business endeavor. It seems that the money might have been mis-allocated if scorn for the Olympics grows because of this sort of thing.