'Massive attack' on France's high-speed train line highlights security concerns around Paris Olympics

PARIS — Arsonists carried out coordinated attacks on France’s high-speed train line, paralyzing parts of the country’s rail network ahead of Friday night’s Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics.

Service on three lines was disrupted because of the “massive attack,” France’s national railway company, SNCF, said in a statement. Train cancellations will impact about 800,000 travelers by the end of the weekend, SNCF said, advising people to “postpone their trips and not go to the station.”

Each of the fires were set well outside Paris along rail lines connecting other French cities to the country’s capital. This includes the line between Paris and Lille, where Sunday the USA men’s basketball team will take on Serbia. SNCF also said “a malicious act was foiled” along its southeast line connecting Paris and Lyon.

Patrice Vergriete, France’s transport minister, strongly condemned the “criminal actions which will compromise the vacation departures of many French people.” In an interview with French TV station BFMTV on Friday morning, sports minister Amélie Oudéa-Castera called the attacks an attempt to “sabotage” the Paris Olympics.

The International Olympics Committee abruptly canceled an Opening Ceremony news conference previously scheduled for 10:30 on Friday morning. When asked via email by Yahoo Sports how the train attacks would impact plans for the Opening Ceremony, an IOC spokesperson did not immediately respond.

"Our intelligence services and law enforcement are mobilized to find and punish the perpetrators of these criminal acts," French prime minister Gabriel Attal said on X.

The attack underscores the monumental security challenge of these Paris Olympics. France has a long, grim history of suffering terrorist attacks, and the combination of war and extremism in 2024 poses a substantial, even monumental, security task for Olympic organizers. Their solutions — including a massive police presence and a heavy reliance on AI-aided surveillance — are controversial, but French officials defend the measures as necessary to preserve peace at the Games.

Terror alert level

France has been on its highest terror alert level for months. In April, police arrested a 16-year-old who posted on social media that he wanted to detonate an explosion at an Olympic site and die a “martyr.” The threat of explosive-laden drones has prompted France to create an anti-drone coordination center outside of Paris. Fighter jets and helicopters are at the ready. In May, France’s General Directorate of Internal Security arrested an 18-year-old Chechnyan on charges of planning an attack on spectators at Olympic soccer events at Geoffroy-Guichard Stadium in Saint-Etienne. Just last week, French anti-terror police announced that they had detained an individual in France’s eastern Alsace region with alleged neo-Nazi ties over potential threats to the torch relay that made its way across France in recent weeks.

The nation uses a three-level alert system, and attacks within France — or imminent threats — trigger the highest level. That allows French authorities to take elevated security measures, including a significant police presence in public gathering sites, transportation hubs and religious locations.

“Security is the highest priority of Paris 2024,” Olympic organizers said in a May statement. “We are working daily in close coordination with the Interior Ministry and all stakeholders — and will continue to be fully mobilized.”

The Opening Ceremony, for instance, was judged such a security risk that officials cut the number of attendees almost in half, from 600,000 down to just over 300,000. In addition, all airports and airspace within a 150-kilometer (90-mile) radius will be shut down, and a 45,000-member French security force will blanket Paris throughout the Games.

Another 20,000 private security personnel and 15,000 military will be on duty every day. France has asked about 45 countries to contribute security personnel, including fraud experts, K-9 and mounted brigades, and mine clearance specialists, according to Reuters. Security teams have set up a temporary camp in the southeast of Paris, the largest military encampment in the city since World War II, with the expectation that they can be deployed to any Paris-area venue within 30 minutes.

Paris police have begun conducting background checks of people who live and work in all the buildings along the Opening Ceremony’s route on the Seine throughout the city. Security officials implemented a safe zone along the river starting on July 18, and increased that zone incrementally as the date of the ceremony approached. Approximately 20,000 people live and work inside the perimeter of the zone, and according to the AP, nearly 4,000 people have been denied entry because of the background checks.

'Lone wolf' attacks

The challenge for any anti-terror authority is anticipating small-group or individual “lone wolf” attacks, particularly in heavily-trafficked and easily accessible areas such as public gathering spots, tourist sites and train stations. Add to that the sheer range of potential threats — Islamic extremists, violent activists, cyberattacks, drone attacks — and the task ahead of French authorities is monumental. That doesn’t even touch the more minor crimes — pickpockets in tourist areas, counterfeit tickets, deceptive QR codes and so forth.

“We have thousands of risks that have been identified,” Lambdis Konstantinidis, Paris Olympics director of planning and coordination, told Yahoo Sports. “We literally went through them one by one to see which were major risks, minor risks. And then for those that had the highest probability and the highest impact, then we went line-by-line to say, ‘OK, we need a contingency plan.’” Each contingency plan, Konstantinidis adds, has a trigger and a multilayered response, and Olympic organizers have been gaming out scenarios for literal years at this point.

However, the fear of terrorism — and the need for security — can have downstream consequences far removed from the protection of a single city during a three-week period. Anne Toomey McKenna, a professor of law at the University of Richmond and a specialist in electronic surveillance, notes that France modified its privacy laws to permit the use of AI and surveillance to a greater degree than before. France has a long history of police surveillance and data collection, and has faced criticism for literal centuries about the way it gathers and maintains data on Parisian residents and visitors.

While the current law governing AI-powered surveillance expires in March 2025, the nation will be using private vendors to carry out that surveillance — vendors who will have access to Games visitors’ data to a heretofore-unprecedented degree, via an estimated 100,000 cameras trained on all elements of Paris life, looking for suspicious actions such as abandoned packages or sudden crowd movements.

“There’s a lot of concern that these cameras are collecting data,” McKenna says. “The data is being analyzed by AI systems, and there’s not a whole lot of transparency about how the systems are working, what exact technologies are being used, and what’s happening with the data that’s being collected?”

A recent investigation by France’s Le Monde noted that French government officials have established a decree that increases by 20 percent the data-based information-gathering — wiretaps, geolocation, image and audio observation, and so forth — during the Olympics. That’s a significant step up from traditional security measures.

“So it’s not just, ‘Hey, we’re using these tools to see if a person’s fallen on the ground,’” McKenna says. “This is, ‘We’re using these tools to see who and where all persons are at all times, what they’re doing, what they’re communicating about.’ And that’s different. Does [a security risk] mean that your computer data, your texts and all of that information be able to be collected by a governing authority simply because you’re attending the Olympics?”

That dynamic — between personal right to privacy and collective safety — sits at the heart of modern surveillance technology.

One year ago, Paris 2024 president Tony Estanguet declared that the Olympics’ Opening Ceremony would be “the safest place in the world.” For the duration of the ceremony, and for two-plus weeks afterward, Paris will certainly be the most-watched spot on the planet … from many angles.