The NSA has been secretly using online video games to spy and recruit informants, according to the latest Snowden leaks:
American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents. Fearing that terrorist or criminal networks could use the games to communicate secretly, move money or plot attacks, the documents show, intelligence operatives have entered terrain populated by digital avatars that include elves, gnomes and supermodels.
The agencies also have targeted the XBox Live network, which has nearly 50 million users. Peter Suderman collects some eye-opening details from the report, filed jointly by the NYT, the Guardian, and ProPublica:
US defense forces created mobile video games designed to spy on users. “The Pentagon’s Special Operations Command in 2006 and 2007 worked with several foreign companies – including an obscure digital media business based in Prague – 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.”
In-game communications were subject to mass collection. “One document says that while GCHQ was testing its ability to spy on Second Life in real time, British intelligence officers vacuumed up three days’ worth of Second Life chat, instant message and financial transaction data, totaling 176,677 lines of data, which included the content of the communications.”
The government spent millions of dollars on video game behavior research to reach really, really obvious conclusions. “A group at the Palo Alto Research Center, for example, produced a government-funded study of World of Warcraft that found ‘younger players and male players preferring competitive, hack-and-slash activities, and older and female players preferring noncombat activities,’ such as exploring the virtual world. A group from the nonprofit SRI International, meanwhile, found that players under age 18 often used all capital letters both in chat messages and in their avatar names.”
One thing the agencies didn’t do – prevent any terrorist attacks:
[F]or all their enthusiasm – so many C.I.A., F.B.I. and Pentagon spies were hunting around in Second Life, the document noted, that a “deconfliction” group was needed to avoid collisions — the intelligence agencies may have inflated the threat. The documents, obtained by The Guardian and shared with The New York Times and ProPublica, do not cite any counterterrorism successes from the effort. Former American intelligence officials, current and former gaming company employees and outside experts said in interviews that they knew of little evidence that terrorist groups viewed the games as havens to communicate and plot operations.
Games “are built and operated by companies looking to make money, so the players’ identity and activity is tracked,” said Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, an author of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know. “For terror groups looking to keep their communications secret, there are far more effective and easier ways to do so than putting on a troll avatar.”
Some gamers even suspected the NSA was keeping an eye on them:
In one World of Warcraft discussion thread, begun just days after the first Snowden revelations appeared in the news media in June, a human death knight with the user name “Crrassus” asked whether the N.S.A. might be reading game chat logs. “If they ever read these forums,” wrote a goblin priest with the user name “Diaya,” “they would realize they were wasting” their time.
Will Oremus smirks:
Here’s my favorite part [of the NYT report]:
One problem the paper’s unnamed author and others in the agency faced in making their case – and avoiding suspicion that their goal was merely to play computer games at work without getting fired – was the difficulty of proving terrorists were even thinking about using games to communicate. A 2007 invitation to a secret internal briefing noted “terrorists use online games – but perhaps not for their amusement. They are suspected of using them to communicate secretly and to transfer funds.” But the agencies had no evidence to support their suspicions.
Being an NSA agent sounds fun, no? Want to spend all day playing video games? Just convince your superiors that terrorists play video games too – perhaps not for their amusement! Want to take a trip to Hawaii? Terrorists take trips to Hawaii – perhaps not for their amusement!
But he adds ominously:
Fun fact: In 2007, a Second Life executive made a pitch to US intelligence agencies about the potential for government spies to use online games “to understand the motivation, context and consequent behaviors of non-Americans through observation, without leaving US soil.” That Second Life executive was a former Navy officer named Cory Ondrejka who had previously worked at the NSA. Ondrejka no longer works at Second Life, the Times notes – he’s now director of mobile engineering at Facebook.
The Dish 