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NSA Collect Gamers' Chats and Deploy Real-Life Agents Into WoW and Second Life
An anonymous reader writes in with news that some NSA agents were trying to dig up info by joining the horde. "To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something. The agency's impressive arsenal of cable taps and sophisticated hacking attacks was not enough. What it really needed was a horde of undercover Orcs. That vision of spycraft sparked a concerted drive by the NSA and its UK sister agency GCHQ to infiltrate the massive communities playing online games, according to secret documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.....The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which has more than 48 million players. Real-life agents have been deployed into virtual realms, from those Orc hordes in World of Warcraft to the human avatars of Second Life. There were attempts, too, to recruit potential informants from the games' tech-friendly users."
We've read recently that the NSA types are becoming disaffected by their jobs.
So letting them play WoW on company time will help with that, eh?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
We have word that xXxNoScopezN00bKill3rxXx will dip his balls on the President at 21:00!
Good thing someone is watching over SecondLife. Maybe they can finally get enough data to fully explore the sexual proclivities of furries in an unconstrained environment.
They're not infiltrating anything; some of the sharper razors there have scammed their PHB's into letting them play WoW all day and get paid for it....
So long as all members of your guild have less than a 51% chance of being foreign they won't play with you.
I'm generally opposed to the NSA's actions, but I have to admire the ones who were clever enough to talk their superiors into paying them to play WoW all day in the interests of national security.
Sheldon: I donâ(TM)t care! Iâ(TM)m losinâ(TM) it, man!
Leonard: Why donâ(TM)t we play this smart? Try a little good goblin, bad goblin.
Priya: Oh, dear Lord.
Howard: Nah, I think we have to be more subtle.
Raj: Okay, I see where this is going. Fine, Iâ(TM)ll have sex with him.
Leonard: Thatâ(TM)s not where it was going.
Raj: Good, because I would hate that.
I kid, I kid.
"We're not here because we are free. We're here because we are not free. There is no escaping reason. No denying purpose. Because we both know without purpose, we would not exist."
Red pill, blue pill?
This is why battlefield 4 keeps crashing! Especially right after I attempt to communicate sensitive information with my overseas contact via a sophisticated system of bunny-hopping and helicopter aerobatics.
To be honest, I've long suspected all of this was occuring. Being an IT guy in the industry now for almost two decades, I've worked for some big players and seen things which I have often considered dodgy and outright suspect. I tend to fly under the radar when it comes to an online presence, and, as a consequence, I have no public-facing accounts like Facebook, Twitter, any online storage, etc. Gaming is supposed to be fun -- and perhaps now it's less fun knowing that it's not just MS or Sony watching the chat rooms and interplay that occurs in these venues. I'm not surpirsed, just disappointed that nothing seems to be free of constant surveillance. George Orwell himself would likely be shocked at how impressive the watchful eyes of the state have become and to what breadth and depth they reach. 1984 has become an operators' manual...
Now the government will know when Stormwind raids will take place.
When she complains you're spending all your time in WoW, you can say you're trying to get a job with the NSA...
"Here's yet another way we can funnel tax payer money to private contractors under the guise of our black budget." Brilliant. I bet he got promoted for this.
The surveillance revelations so far have been scary, sinister, infuriating, offensive. But this one? This is just... sad.
OK, bad guys could potentially use the in-game comms functions on X-Box live to plans their nefarious deeds, but do we really need to be paying teams of people to go into the games and play them all day long? If they really need to snoop on that shit (they don't) then couldn't they just hoover up all the conversations and analyse them offline like they do our emails, phone calls, texts etc? What additional benefit does having someone actually in the game world offer? Are they worried that somewhere out there a virtual ogre and elf controlled by kiddie-porn-terrorists are communicating in avatar sign language or something? This is fucking ridiculous.
Our government is telling us they can't afford basic shit like hospitals and education and welfare, but they can afford to pay dorks to play Xbox all fucking day. I get the feeling some very ballsy gamer put together a presentation to get paid taxpayers' money for playing CoD all day long and hit the jackpot. If there was any justice on this fucking planet we'd all be knee deep in fired "intelligence" agents months ago.
So few of even those who understand what the government is doing were interested, much less concerned, or more properly, panicked and furious beyond belief. Maybe this will ring a bell that means something to them?
There are a few people who collect info within second life and publish it. I'm one of them. I have, in the past, gathered information on how the platform is used, socially, and where people are hanging out and what they're doing. It requires a lot of human effort to suss out the human activity from the automated activity in Second Life, because there is a lot of the latter designed to simulate the former. I've been very vocal about my findings, but nobody has approached me for sharing info or to discuss methodology. They'd be able to tell from my writing that I'm not paranoid about authority, as most people still in SL and talking about it seem to be.
In short, if they were looking for informants in Second Life, I'm an obvious candidate. But they haven't approached me.
At least as far as the NSA is concerned. In fact I'd be happy if they spent all their resources on virtual worlds.
This has been going on for years: When I still worked at the NSA (beginning of the nineties), I also used to pla... monitor all these Solitary games.
Oh, now they've gone too far. We've sat around and impotently whined on internet forums when the Snowden files came out. We sat around and impotently whined on internet forums when we learned the NSA infiltrated communications on the internet (OUR precious internet*!) at the backbone level. We sat around and impotently whined on internet forums when we learned the NSA was spying on our phone calls. We sat around and impotently whined on internet forums when we learned the NSA hacked into Google's encrypted intra-datacenter communications.
But NOW they're spying on OUR VIDEO GAMES! Oh, man. Ohhhh, man. They're gonna regret that. This shit just got REAL now. That's it. It's time, my internet brothers and sisters. We have to unleash the FULL power we all have as Citizens of the Internet. Unleash the revolution NOW! You heard me, NSA! We're gonna sit around and impotently whine REALLY REALLY LOUDLY on internet forums now!
*: Which was made by the government.
According to the NYT article http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/world/spies-dragnet-reaches-a-playing-field-of-elves-and-trolls.html
In 2007, as the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies were beginning to explore virtual games, N.S.A. officials met with the chief technology officer for the manufacturer of Second Life, the San Francisco-based Linden Lab. The executive, Cory Ondrejka, was a former Navy officer who had worked at the N.S.A. with a top-secret security clearance.
He visited the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., in May 2007 to speak to staff members over a brown bag lunch, according to an internal agency announcement. “Second Life has proven that virtual worlds of social networking are a reality: come hear Cory tell you why!” said the announcement. It added that virtual worlds gave the government the opportunity “to understand the motivation, context and consequent behaviors of non-Americans through observation, without leaving U.S. soil.”
Mr. Ondrejka, now the director of mobile engineering at Facebook, said through a representative that the N.S.A. presentation was similar to others he gave in that period, and declined to comment further.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
If they are watching, I hope they are impressed by my Firefighter achievement.
If you were a terrorist organization, you would play a video game where chats are monitored by the company as a rule? No you would not. Monitoring text is clearly in the EULA of these games, and private chats are logged just like group/party, raid, etc.. chats are logged. If you truly believe in this fantasy of propaganda please go visit your local mental health professional and request medication immediately.
Now if you were asking "Are some corrupt fuckers in a 3 letter agency advocating that agents try to recruit people on these MMO sites?" my reply would be different. Sure they would. Numerous 3 letter agencies have made it a habit of trolling forums and Facebook looking for patsies. They even found a few of them and gave them everything they needed including targets so that they could heroically save the day by busting the patsy at the scene of the crime with fake explosives that the agency provided. I don't put any shitty tactics beyond these people at this point.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It would also make sense such communication was done via private channels (all games have private messaging). So the way one would monitor that would be via their normal intelligence hoovering methods, not via playing the game.
Well, that would explain all the crappy healers/tanks who go AFK and wipe the party... right?
I love gaming. I have spent far too much time at it. The thought that somebody in our nation's government is getting paid to do it and spy on the rest of us while doing so is ludicrous. The NSA will never be able to assemble enough SIGINT to prevent anything, only follow key words retroactively to find perpetrators after it's too late. In the meantime, the temptation to exploit casual behavior for political ends is too overwhelming.
The NSA represents the most existential threat to our freedom as Americans that has ever been, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union combined & included. If we fail to put an end to the NSA, then what happens with China, Russia, and Islamic terrorism is entirely moot.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Nobody said they were doing everything they were doing competently.
Of course the intelligence community is going to leak such a story, or ten, or a thousand. They want us to believe that they are actually catching terrorists, and they want us to believe that all they money they are pissing away is well spent. So, they'll tell us that they are catching Al Queda terrorists on WoW, and all the other gaming worlds.
I certainly hope that they have infiltrated the online doll makers and doll costume crowd. I know of at least one red headed Pagan who frequents those sites. That woman is a holy terror, and God knows what kind of people she associates with!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I have to admit I've thought along similar lines. I play an old, outdated, unpopular but still surviving multiplayer game. Not many people on there but enough for some fun.
Anyway, the game has a chat function built in, and it's crossed my mind in the past that chatting through that game could be an effective way to communicate under the radar. Security by obscurity thru FPSs.
So I'm not flabbergasted that they spy on WoW. It's still depressing, though, that they have both the compulsion and the means to tap virtually every form of electronic communications. I'd be a lot less pissed if they were selective about it instead of behaving like mentally ill hoarders.
Who really cares about the sexual proclivities of furries? I'm more worried about the proclivities of these secretive anal spies. They seem to be getting off on the conversations of pre-pubescent young men of all ages.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
NSA Collect Gamers' Chats and Deploy Real-Life Agents Into WoW and Second Life
...or more like the Matrix?
coding is life
Games could serve multiple purposes: out of band communications (i.e. not phone, email, or mail), rehearsals, and recreation. Since the Caliphate is going to be a while in coming they have some time to kill.
I don't think there is any surprise that WoW or similar games would have broad appeal, even among terrorists. After all, the Harry Potter books have been among the most popular reading for inmates at Guantanamo Bay.
What Prisoners Are Reading at Gitmo
... Harry Potter. He may not come riding in on the back of a hippogriff to free his favorite captives from their own version of Azkaban, but he shows up once a week on a cart of books from the prison library, offering an escape of the imagination treasured by many. Indeed, the Harry Potter series has been one the most popular titles among the 18,000 books, magazines, DVDs and newspapers on offer from the prison library at Guantánamo.
Other offerings in the library started in 2003 include the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Twilight series and a self-help book called Don't Be Sad. Prisoners don't browse the shelves of this particular library; instead, they wait for a weekly visit by a cart of books prison officers think they might be interested in. There are mysteries and books of poems, copies of National Geographic magazine (a favorite), dictionaries and science textbooks. If the prisoners see something they like they are allowed to check it out for 30 days.
The library's offerings now span some 18 languages including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, Russian, French and English. Officers scan newspapers to stay up on the latest titles and try to meet requests from prisoners — though finding books in their native languages can sometimes be a challenge. "I tell ya, Dan Brown's been beating me up lately," says Navy Lt. Robert Collett, who as the officer-in-charge of detainee programs, is known as 'Dean of Gitmo U'. "All his books are very popular, but we don't have all of them in Arabic." When the military has trouble finding a title in a certain language, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) sometimes steps in. Martin De Boer, ICRC's deputy head of the regional delegation in D.C., says his group sometimes sends its representatives in far-flung places to local stores in order to answer requests for novels in Uzbek or magazines in Bahasa (the language of Indonesia). "Access to books and news from the outside is very important to the prisoners mental state," says De Boer.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
will spy for epic lootz...
Assholes => Shoot Them => Tell Vile Rat
They should have recruited the terrorists to join WoW clans. Once WoW sucked up their life, they wouldn't be able to stop raiding long enough to...you know...perform acts of Terrorism.
Eventually, they could meet those with terrorist proclivities a bit more easily in the support groups.
http://wowaholics.org/content/wow-ruined-my-life
In places where is common to talk about killing thousands, sabotaging/bombing, fantasy names and even fantasy sex, a lot of people should have by now a big red marker on them, ended in no fly lists, rejected credits or got other real-life consequences of role playing chats with friends.
Why is the only the HORDE being targeted. Those Alliance are shifty characters too.
gif of an orc in fedora, trenchcoat and sunglasses.
We've no need to formally contact you, since your computer is already an open book to us. Thank you, and keep up the good work, Mr. Coward.
Captcha: repress
Back in the Warcraft 2 days, I'd type in "It Is A Good Day To Die" and suddenly my orcs would be invulnerable. One lowly peon would be able to topple an entire human city in short order. Who knew that I was training to be a terrorist? Thankfully, I've veered off that path or who knows what other horrible actions that game could led me to commit!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
That explains a lot:
NSA Guy !: "Dude, you can't do that, you need a warrent ! ... Leroy Jenkins ...!!!!!!"
NSA Guy 2: "Screw that, their data is mine
Of course they don't monitor Second Life. If you are going to kill yourself as a suicide bomber you have to have a life to begin with.
I was playing GTAV:Online a couple of weeks ago and there were a couple of guys on there speaking Arabic and talking about Hezbollah and Syria. Now granted, both of those key words are probably common topics in that part of the world, and I do not speak Arabic so I do not have any context to go with the keywords. But, it does serve as an anecdotal data point to give validity to the claim that people are using in game comms to communicate about something other than the game that they are playing.
If I were a jihadist looking to communicate with agents in the States, a game like WoW is a good candidate to use due to its world wide appeal. Though I would think that some of those Korean MMOs might be even better, given the sheer volume of them, and the fact that their servers are not in the States.
Jenson, give me your report.
"Well sir, I discovered that Silverflame28 is a total noob, and I helped axeman2485 and a few friends on a raid in the nearby dungeon. He's a pretty nice guy; sounds like he's from Australia."
Jenson, you've made the country a safer place. Sleep well, son.
Many at the NSA and similar agencies see the job as a joke. Like most ordinary people, they want to 'enjoy' work, so persuading gullible bosses that gaming all day serves a useful purpose seems like the greatest wheeze in the world.
The the snowball effect kicks in. The parasitical scum that live to promote 'intelligence' agendas start to promote such goofing off as essential security work, cos of all those nasty 'terrorists' and 'extremists' who are hiding in public game space, sharing all their nefarious plans and ideologies. Americans, in particular are so thick and so vicious, they love a 'reds under our beds' scare, and will always empower the forces in government exploiting such nonsense.
So, what started as an excellent work place wheeze to make the day pass more quickly ends up, through laughable propaganda from the state supporting paranoia preachers, as essential intelligence work. It is this pathetic incompetence that Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and those that run full surveillance corporations like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter, wish to reverse.
Historically, unaccountable intelligence bodies always have ever inflating budgets, and a never ending appetite for power. However, the true 'usefulness' of such operations (in providing lasting power services to the elites) is frequently missing- or worse counter-productive as the Intelligence heads engage in empire building at the cost of the political stability of their masters.
The dilemma is this. Bill Gates and Tony Blair, etc, need intelligence operatives to be depraved and immoral, so no command will be refused, but the same lack of moral fibre makes such workers corrupt, lazy and incompetent. This is why Gates, Blair etc focus on us and our attitudes. Get the sheeple to expect and tolerate a massively intrusive surveillance society, and you reduce the 'guilt' felt by many intelligence workers.
However, Blair in particular finds 'scare' stories like "terrorists hiding in online games" very useful indeed. Tony Blair is old-school, and works on the principle of "get group A to hate/fear/distrust Group B because of their differences". So 'gamers' must be a troubling group to non-gamers in Blair's system.
Nobody could've said stuff like this a year ago without wearing an invisible Tin Foil Hat.
Today nobody can say that the middle class is being destroyed in the name of strengthening the middle class, or big banks are getting bigger in the name of stopping too big to fail, without being called a Tea Bagger, a Bigot, or a Racist.
In the meantime the rich are getting richer, the politicians more powerful, and don't care because the voters believe every lie they tell with a Straight Face.
Are all the real problems in Amerika fixed so we have money to waste on this crap?
They've already destroyed Amerika with this kind of unlimited and unwarranted spying...
Dismantle the NSA already, this is just insane at this point.
Ralph Pootawn had to be an NSA troll.
As a career networking guy and technologist, I don't buy half of this Snowden leak info. Who is actually vetting what is being declared by this guy? All of the media outlets accept this guy's word as gospel when, in fact, half of it doesn't pass muster.
wait till SpyParty goes Gold.
http://spyparty.com/
And to prevent any accusations of 'profiling', any conversations in middle eastern languages were automatically filtered out and deleted...
I wonder how they try to parse some of the online wargames where they regularly talk of all kinds of modern weapon stuff and blowing up/bombing thigs constantly... Or do they just look for christian oriented vocabulary in that case??
You're seeing Celine's first law in action. Specifically:-
With manual processes, the Stasi had about 10% of the population reporting on the remainder. With server farms and big data analytics, we're way past that stage.
Do they really need to play? I'd imagine they were just have direct access to the chat logs and that those would be filtered for certain keywords or against certain suspect players.
From my perspective the use for NSA in going into the gamer realm would be more an exercise in infiltration techniques than any real threat hunt. Even covert agents needs training.
It can also be a great channel for information exchange between NSA agents.
The possibility to actually gather any useful real world intelligence from online multi-player games is at best questionable unless they have targeted a specific person that's identified already outside the game.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
We've had this for many years on IRC and the result's aren't encouraging: http://www.bash.org/?246405
... I mean, illegal immigrants. They usually have a license to farm on the servers they do farm on, don't they?
On a more serious note, wow and 2L are harmless. Should they ever dare to tap our CS voice server...
It's that simple.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Some of these raid bosses are espousing ideas that run counter to Horde society. I had better fight them and study their mechanics for any secret messages. Continuous and repeated study is required. Also, loot must be inspected for any anti-American leanings. Goldshire on Moon Guard needs to be investigated, closely.
...it seems like every large web site/game has some kind of internal communications system, often a real-time chat function and an offline messaging system. These might be tough to monitor with any context simply off the wire, and in combat games it would be pretty easy to talk about organizing terrorist activity and trivially mask it in terms of game-based combat in a way completely opaque to an outside monitor.
One of the oldest espionage tradecraft gimmicks (at least in books and movies) are coded messages places as advertisements in newspapers. If you've ever used IMDB you know that pretty much anyone who has a role in a movie automatically has their own IMDB page, including a message board about them. There are THOUSANDS of minor credited cast and crew members with totally blank or very low traffic message boards that likely to remain totally unseen and could be used for exchanging coded messages. Even the high traffic boards for popular actors or movies would be a good place to drop messsages.
Because that's where it looks like the terrorists would hide. Well, maybe Tanaris too.
but then I took an arrow to the knee.
Why do you blame others for your own incompetence and failures? Those who can not accomplish anything meaningful try to bring down those who can- this week it's the Jews, next week it's whoever else the cult leader is angry at. The only conspiracy against you is being done by you- stop blaming others for your ongoing lack of success.
No wonder the NSA is suffering low morale http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/12/08/2232257/employee-morale-is-suffering-at-the-nsa because they chose Horde while these companies http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/09/1319216/google-apple-facebook-twitter-microsoft-yahoo-form-alliance-against-nsa chose Alliance.
> from World of Warcraft to the human avatars of Second Life
I don't get that. why orcs? How does that stop real-world tenorism? Maybe it made sense if NSA infiltrated the World of Tanks, to pre-emptively neutralize maniac otaku, who planned to steal battle tanks from little guarded army depots, in order to overrun japanese girl-only high schools and demand crates of pantsu for ransom. That is a highly realistic scenario compared to most hypothetic threats analyzed by the NSA and the TSA!
Wouldn't it just be easier to start up a game of Quake 2, connect to that one game and start speaking back and forth in code.
Or even better, have the code embedded into the graphics of your model of your character and have the server setup to send it to other when they connect as that is what you are playing as.
Hell, you can always do it over Tetrinet if you wanted and hack it so the message is displayed in the windows of the opponents and all the other forms or even better, just use a bootleg private WoW server that isn't located in the US. I honestly don't think they are paying too much attention to the TBC server named Hellground located in Poland.
We now know who is working at the NSA:
PORN + WOW = 12 YEAR OLD BOYS + NSA = SAFETY FROM TERRORISTS
(Maths equation from the NSA guidebook).
How are those folks that bought the Xbox One with the video camera now?
On a more funny note, the FIRST thing I thought of was this:
Presidential Speech: ...something of national security has come up I will have to pick this up later.
Obama: Blah Blah Blah Freedom Blah Blah Change, etc...
Secret Service Agent: *whispers into Obama's ear* Sir we have reports that Stormwind is under attack...
Obama:
Later in the Oval Office:
OrcPrez69 has logged in.
Someone somewhere just made an WOW toon called "TotallyNotTheNSA"...
Why does it seem like the news stories will soon turn to what the NSA is not monitoring.
The Guardian is reporting that the NSA is not tracking the sales of bread at the grocery store on the corner of 5th and Main. Sources can confirm that other products in the store such as green beans, apricots, and chocolate syrup are being actively monitored.
K, that would have made more sense if I said Orgrimmar... whatever it's a joke.
In North America, more people are killed every year by their own furniture falling on them than by terrorism. Terrorism the single most over-hyped thing I can remember hearing about in my lifetime.
Terrorists are cowardly criminals and even if they were blowing up a large government building every week they could not do any lasting and significant harm to an actual free and democratic society.
However, people are over-reacting to terrorism, and allowing the media and authoritarian types in government to fear-monger about it and use it as an excuse to help push petty tyrannies like the TSA and even serious threats to liberty like the NSA spying on all of us. AMERICANS ARE DAMAGING THEIR GREAT NATION by allowing this to happen. Your Constitution used to mean something, something incredible and empowering. It made you the envy of the developed world and created great opportunities for those who were clever and worked hard to make a better world for themselves and others. You need to wake up, reclaim your country and stop this downward slide into totalitarianism.
I could sort of understand if the NSA were snooping on Arma III. Arma likely is the military training in most 3rd world countries. Another reason to ban side chat.
Someone you trust is one of us.
There were attempts, too, to recruit potential informants from the games' tech-friendly users.
The half-human-haf-cat or blood elf you met at Furry Hangout, Jungle of Sin or Lordaeron might be a secret spy-master as well!
Part of me suspects that this is actually how they justify slacking off on the job...
"Sir, this isn't just a game. We're gathering a lot of valuable data on the terrorists by playing Counter Strike."
A representative agency from the Global Police Force (a.k.a. US Military) wants to peer into the world where some of the best shooters on the planet play against each other in a dizzying pace, complete with weapon loadouts to identify specialists, along with game statistics to show expertise/marksmanship.
Gee, I'm shocked.
So when does the Playstation 5 (NSA's drone "game") come online so they can start demoing it to "players"?
Yesterdays grunt was issued a pair of combat boots, kevlar helmet, and an M-16.
Tomorrows grunt will be issued a FTTP connection, VPN token, and a joystick.
Dear NSA,
Please, sign me up! I want to serve my country playing WoW. I'm happy to infiltrate Orc groups or attempt to convince Night Elves that I'm really one of them. I'm skilled at stripping down to the minimum clothing WoW supports and dancing on rooftops, ambushing game newbies with PvP turned on and teaching them a well-deserved lesson, and other generally sketchy activities that will surely help me blend in with Gnome terrorist cells. I have a special tactic for infiltration that I think will work -- spouting Marxist creed at the major trade centers and interspersing the occasional "Inshallah" into attack groups when we plan to take on a dragon.
In addition, I'm moderately skilled in code work and random numbers and undead culture, so I'm sure I can figure it out if somebody uses some obscure means to communicate with their terrorist cells.
I won't bother posting my name (even though I usually do post by my /. handle) because hey, if you aren't good enough to find me I don't want to work for you anyway. I can probably recruit a few more people to help out (mostly my sons, who are even more skilled at fighting and deceptions) -- can't have too many people on the side of the U.S.A. if a raid on a human outpost goes bad or hordes of the undead descend upon you.
Oh, and I get paid for this, right?
Sincerely,
Anonymous Brave Volunteer to Help Keep Democracy Strong
Were I running a terrorist organization and looking for some form of IM or PM communications between cells... damn straight I'd use WoW, or Eve, or run my own Minecraft server.
So, if those methods are what I would use, then if I were the NSA I would be monitoring them.
Spot The Fed?
Hay, NSA'ers need games to unwind while working overtime at Ft. Meade to collect $100K/week in overtime. They're "Obama Babies."
We're all being monitored and controlled by the military-industrial-entertainment complex!
Don't miss this tidbit from the NY Times version of this story:
The Pentagonâ(TM)s Special Operations Command in 2006 and 2007 worked with several foreign companies â" including an obscure digital media business based in Prague â" to build games that could be downloaded to mobile phones, according to people involved in the effort. They said the games, which were not identified as creations of the Pentagon, were then used as vehicles for intelligence agencies to collect information about the users.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/world/spies-dragnet-reaches-a-playing-field-of-elves-and-trolls.html
Cue The Matrix parallels.
If ever there were a time when Jack Thompson's anti video game crusade would be useful, it would be now.
So the government had prior knowledge of what was going to happen in Vale and didn't act on it. Bet they knew about Theramore, too.
Time has moved on. Facebook and WoW are far past their prime. I suppose the only reason this is happening is A) to pander to the politicians and public or B) grab money.
Reply with your opinion of better places to stack your agents.
I remember this recycled story from around 2008. The Linden Lab executive (who was also one of their main system creators originally) hasn't been with the company now for many years. This was all eons ago, but it's being brought back up in the wake of Snowden. The part about Linden Dollars and the Second Life economy is a little ridiculous, since the money is only useful for buying in-game virtual items. For example, terrorists getting some better high heels for their avatars. You can cash out Linden Dollars, but there are lots of limits and monitors on it, and you cash out through either your verified PayPal account or a bank check mailed to you. Neither of those are in any way anonymous, and they are tightly monitored by the feds at multiple levels. (You could get some IP addresses and in-game transaction information from Linden Lab if you were tracing back some accumulated cash-out; that might be useful intelligence, I guess.) Like any glorified chat system. The idea that terrorists are using Second Life for virtual training is a bad joke. No realistic scenario or actions could be created. You could use the primitive in-game 3D modeling to create a rough representation of the buildings and alleys or whatever. But very little could be communicated beyond that. Avatars can't actually do anything subtle - mainly they can just walk. Arms and hands don't do anything except point-and-click on scripted objects in the world. The scripting can make objects change texture/color and move around. Communication is a very primitive text chat system plus an in-game Voice system that doesn't work very well or reliably. So you could make a really crappy diagramatic 3D model of your bomb scenario, and walk your avatars around it. But you could do infinitely better by just looking at a street map, or Google Earth, and tracing your fingers and talking about it or whatever. Linden Lab advertises that it keeps Chat logs (etc.) for some period, six months was what they said at one point. However, I asked someone there once and they said, "Well, we've' never actually deleted any logs to date." Second Life is an interesting experiment along a number of axis, but it's capabilities are really quite primitive. They tried at one point to sell it to businesses as an online meeting system, and it was such a bad joke they gave up that marketing effort. IBM has an open-source version of the system that is integrated with some other IBM meeting software. There are other service providers running "grids" with the open-source version of SL. You can download the server and client onto your laptop if you want to play with it stand-along (or hook together with some other users and make your own network). But it doesn't have any specially great utility for terrorists. Any more than any other MUD/MOO/Mush type system. That was all just hype, years ago, from when Second Life was exciting and hyped and not understood. NSA monitors AOL chat rooms and whatever, too; it's just exactly the same thing. They didn't understand that a half decade ago when this "news" article first came out.
They have always been interested in this stuff. Problem when it comes to games, they use the work computers to cheat.
Everybody knows Goonswarm (EVE Online alliance) is a CIA front. Glenn Beck obviously knows what's up.
http://themittani.com/media/glenn-beck-goonswarm-cia-front
Remember, people testified using their avatar names for Second Life and some of them were made fun of right here on Slashdot? Privacy and anonymity is an illusion anyway.
Karma, We don't need no stinkin' karma!
Beware the person who uses weasel words like "ultimately", "fairly clear" and "follows naturally". It means he's trying to pull a fast one. Beware also a poster who selectively cuts and pastes passages out of context to push his own agenda. I strongly recommend that anyone who has an interest in the matter to go read the full, unedited letter rather than rely on someone who is, as others have already pointed out, likely to be a paid government shill.
To show you the dangers of citing out of context, I point you to the following passage of the same letter :-
Doesn't that sound very much like what some of the bible belt conservatives in the US are pushing for? Can I then exclude everything else in the letter and based solely on that one passage, argue that the Osama group's ultimate goal is to turn America into a land of "manners, principles, honour, and purity"?
Because this manner of argument is exactly what the previous poster has done.
Come on! It's so much easier to find terrorists there!
The real clever bastards were the superiors. They recognize just how few terrorists there are, so they know they can waste tons of resources on entirely pointless exercises to eat up their budget so, next year, they can hire even more people to waste the budget. And never a head shall roll for this colossal waste of money.
Oh, or option B is that said superiors are grossly incompetent. But, that I really doubt. Even now, the only real backlash against the NSA has been Obama isn't publicly being as supportive as they like. Privately? Obviously a whole different story.
Nice press release, Activision Blizzard. You have a good press agent. Now what really happened when the heard about it. Mike Morheim : *curses like a sailor* Chris Metzen : *invents new curse words and is even louder* Ghostcrawler: "What do I care? I'm outta here anyways..." Yeah, it was about like that, I'm sure.
The very first visit being humped by a unicorn...
I've Googled "sister agency" and all I got was interior decoration websites and something about big brothers and sisters.
If you find your self spied upon in Second Life, this is what you should do: http://thefishpress.blogspot.com/2013/12/nsa-trawling-second-life.html