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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....
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.
I kid, I kid.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
It's that simple.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
...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.
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.
Yup. I feel like the headlines these days are more like GTA radio commentary than reality.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
The UK and US may just like to watch any forming "dissent" and hope online communities will show trends before they shape into visable anti war/human rights/environmental/finance reform protests.
Web 2.0 and online gaming communities seem to offer what "peace groups", 'bars', 'clubs', "unions' and 'universities" did in the past to the intelligence services.
Then certain well funded NSA/CIA/GCHQ "front" groups can be pushed as been wonderful and protesters will be attracted to 'their' unique community forming.
Expect to see a lot of traction surround big 'name' brand protest groups and charming individuals ready to guide people into fake or totally infiltrated movements.
http://voiceofrussia.com/2013_11_02/FBI-was-interested-in-selling-the-material-to-WikiLeaks-in-order-for-them-to-be-charged-with-espionage-Crabtree-3397/
What did the past look like?
"'Undercover police cleared 'to have sex with activists'"
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jan/22/undercover-police-cleared-sex-activists
Another aspect is just for slang and keeping up with the ability to 'blend' in.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
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.