U.S. Intelligence wants to monitor WoW chat
Called The Reynard project, it is a series of plans for the U.S. Intelligence to monitor more internet traffic, most notably, data mining from several major MMORPGs, including WoW. The goal being to eventually create a system that can “automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.” Games often have things like bombs and assassinations in them, and it seems like the potential for a very high false positive rate is there. It kinda makes me wonder if custom UIs will have an option to use some sort of encryption with their in-game chat for those who are really bothered by big brother being over their shoulder.
Source:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/nations-spies-w.html
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/02/23/wired-national-intelligence-seeking-terrorists-in-wow/
Comment by kurifodo
February 25, 2008 @ 12:56 pm
Doesn’t the US government have better ways to spend our tax money? I can see the agency who implements and conducts the monitoring system for this creating profiles for potential “terrorists” in an effort to increase their threat databases. One has to wonder how accurate their information will be from MMORPGs. Online gamers make threating but harmless jokes, use offensive words, etc due to their anonymity on the net. Usually, these threats and words are not acted upon, but it is foreseeable that the US Intelligence might try to characterize particular gamers based on their comments in game. This information doesn’t seem reliable or related to the problem they might be trying to solve on a national level.
Comment by robert
February 26, 2008 @ 6:39 pm
It’s true that the majority of things that are said during a game are probably not worth checking into, but one could also make the argument that attackers would discuss things in a virtual world specifically for that reason. It’s probably not likely that people in a CounterStrike game would be plotting acts of terror, but it seems slightly more conceivable that malicious people could use the anonymity of a game, combined with its slower pace and large virtual world to set up meetings or something of that sort. It seems like a lot of counter-terrorism efforts are expensive (like data-mining WoW would likely be), but they are (ostensibly) designed with the idea of preventing the worst case.
I don’t think it’s about using games alone to track adversaries, but to use them as part of a larger system of information. (think Microsoft and tracking cyber criminals)