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."

Comments

Re:Well, of course.

[ackthpt]

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?

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"is your elf now or has ever been a member of the bolshevist glorious workers party opposed to trollish bourgeois oppressors?"