(CNN) -- Spies with surveillance agencies in the United States and United Kingdom may have spent time undercover as orcs and blood elves, infiltrating video games like "World of Warcraft" in a hunt for terrorists "hiding in plain sight" online.
That's the finding of the most recent round of documents released by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden to British newspaper The Guardian.
Agents from the CIA, FBI and Pentagon and England's Government Communications Headquarters infiltrated WoW and virtual world "Second Life," as well as collecting information on the Xbox Live gaming network, according to the documents.
A 2008 NSA memo called online gaming a "target-rich communications network" where terrorists could communicate "in plain sight."
None of the newly leaked documents, published this time in conjunction with ProPublica and the New York Times, mentioned specific terrorist activity foiled via the projects.
But apparently so many agents were engaged in playing video games for national security that a "deconfliction" group was created to make sure government agents weren't accidentally spying on each other.
Unlike traditional console and desktop games in which players compete in a closed environment, massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) allow players from around the world to team up and play together, often in real time using in-game communication tools.
"World of Warcraft" is the most popular online role-playing game ever. It peaked at about 12 million subscribers in 2010 and still has more than 7 million, according to Blizzard.
It's unclear whether the agencies had surveillance capabilities within the massively multi-player games that normal players would not. A spokesman for Blizzard Entertainment, which owns "World of Warcraft," told The Guardian it is unaware of any surveillance having taken place.
"If it was, it would have been done without our knowledge or permission," the spokesman said.
On Friday, Microsoft announced it was strengthening encryption across many of its services in an effort to push back against "government snooping."
And Monday, the company joined Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Twitter and LinkedIn issuing a public statement asking the world's governments to rein in online surveillance.
While acknowledging the scope and popularity of online gaming, some security experts were questioning Monday whether spying on digital playgrounds is either wise or effective.
"I think I've heard it all now," wrote British security analyst Graham Cluely.
"Obviously online games which include chat or IM facilities do provide a method for people to communicate ... but how practical is it to have a team of spies sniffing around 'World of Warcraft' to see what they might find?" he wrote.
"Why aren't they also snooping -- maybe they are! -- on the chess app I have on my smartphone? Perhaps every time I mess up my Dutch Stonewall defence it's not really an indication that I'm a lousy chess student, but instead a coded message for my opponent to launch an attack on SCADA systems in the Netherlands?"
Snowden, 30, has admitted he was the source behind the leak of classified NSA documents, which revealed the existence of top-secret surveillance programs that collect records of domestic e-mails and telephone calls in the United States and monitor the cell phone and Internet activity of overseas residents.
A former contractor with the agency, he is wanted in the United States on espionage charges.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/09/tech/web/nsa-spying-video-games/
Liz Woolley
I think someone in the CIA was caught doing wow at work (they do have good computers there without lag) and explained that he was following a lead:)
leveling in steps, serenity, sponcys, sponsors, exercise, and sleep, (sanity has been downsized) sober from all electronic games since 11/19/2010
That is a good one! Great excuse for getting paid to game!
Liz Woolley
Not surprising when considering this article:
FEATUREThe World of Holy WarcraftHow al Qaeda is using online game theory to recruit the masses.
In December 2004, a frequent online commenter who had reached "administrator" level on his favorite chat site admitted that he was getting fed up with his online life. In his 19,938th comment on the forum, he wrote that his wife had grown impatient with how much time he spent online, he was sick of the verbal assaults from other posters, and despite being just a few posts away from the 20,000 mark, he was throwing in the towel.
"Seriously, i am tired," he wrote. "Looking at that number [of posts] just reminded me of how much time i am online my wife will love me for it, she says i spend too much time here."
He did not, however, stick to his resolution. Seven years later, this same user continues participating as a senior administrator on the same forum, where he has now posted an astonishing 63,000 posts. The forum measures "rep power," a way of rating users based on the quality of their posts, and his rep power is at 50, whereas most other users score in the teens. He's also started using the chat software Paltalk and Skype to reach out, hosting live forums.
The user's online handle is Abumubarak, and the forum where he spends hours at a time is not a gaming site or a forum about celebrity gossip, but one of the dozens of hard-line Islamist sites where commenters post news articles, terrorist propaganda, and their own opinions on the subject of jihad. And more than a few of the commenters have gone from online jihad to the real thing: The majority of Westerners following a radical interpretation of Islam who have been arrested on terrorism charges have either been active in the hard-line forums or in possession of extremist materials downloaded from the web.
The counterterrorism community has spent years trying to determine why so many people are engaged in online jihadi communities in such a meaningful way. After all, the life of an online administrator for a hard-line Islamist forum is not as exciting as one might expect. You don't get paid, and you spend most of your time posting links and videos, commenting on other people's links and videos, and then commenting on other people's comments. So why do people like Abumubarak spend weeks and months and years of their time doing it? Explanations from scholars have ranged from the inherently compulsive and violent quality of Islam to the psychology of terrorists.
But no one seems to have noticed that the fervor of online jihadists is actually quite similar to the fervor of any other online group. The online world of Islamic extremists, like all the other worlds of the Internet, operates on a subtly psychological level that does a brilliant job at keeping people like Abumubarak clicking and posting away -- and amassing all the rankings, scores, badges, and levels to prove it. Like virtually every other popular online social space, the social space of online jihadists has become "gamified," a term used to describe game-like attributes applied to non-game activities. It turns out that what drives online jihadists is pretty much exactly what drives Internet trolls, airline ticket consumers, and World of Warcraft players: competition.
Gamification started out as a corporate buzzword, meaning any attempt to ensure brand loyalty and engagement through applying gaming principles. It doesn't mean turning something into a game, but rather allowing users to gain status-based awards and reputation, earn meaningful badges, compete with others, use avatars, and trade in a virtual currency. If you've used frequent-flier miles, earned stars with your coffee purchase at Starbucks, or checked in on Foursquare, you've had a gamified experience.
Gamification is purely an appeal to psychology, the principle that competition matters more than fun. When knowledge or experience is given a point value, it can be measured and compared through giving out badges and levels, statuses and prizes.
Hard-line Islamist sites have been increasingly building in gamified elements to their forums. "Reputation points" are the most common of these. Users can now earn status for the messages they post and the quality of the messages as judged by other members. In many of the forums, members can only receive points after they have posted a certain number of messages, enticing users to post more messages more quickly. Points can result in an array of seemingly trivial rewards, including a change in the color of a member's username, the ability to display an avatar, access to private groups, and even a change in status level from, say, "peasant" to "VIP." In the context of the gamified system, however, these paltry incentives really matter.
"The real reason I implemented [reputation points] is so we can weed-out useful posts from useless," explained an administrator of the Islamic Awakening forum who goes by the username "Expergefactionist." Virtually every Islamist hard-line forum now has adopted a points-based system, as have some non-Islamist hard-line forums: On Stormfront, for instance, a popular white supremacist forum, users earn points for their posts that can add up to earned statuses ranging from "will be famous soon enough" to "has a reputation beyond repute."
Gamified systems are designed to offer doable challenges. If challenges are too easy or too hard, "players" will just log off. But if they find a happy medium -- what game designers refer to as "flow" -- then people can stay engaged for hours on end. Earning points is a key component and can be part of a system that allows players to advance levels, keep score, and determine winners and losers. After one of the hardcore Islamist forums introduced additional features to its reputation scoring system this January, a member called "Milj" griped, "I think EVERYONE is going to end up with loads of rep and that won't be much fun." Earning reputation points had become too easy.
Other incentivizing structures exist as well. One Britain-based Islamic extremist website called Salafi Media measures a user's engagement level by a "fundamentalism metre." The more "radical" or "fundamental" a user becomes, the more power and legitimacy he holds in the forum.
Another innovation is "thanked" counts, which total the number of times other forum participants click on a "thank" icon in response to a post. Irritated by the introduction of "thanked points" on one forum, a user complained, "Typical! Just when i was about to have ultimate rep power and be the greatest repper in [forum] history i have to fight it out for most thanks now as well??"
Once you've gained all the rep points and "thanks" you can accumulate, you're close to winning one of the most prized goals in Islamist forums: administrator status -- with all the badges, status, and access to special powers and secret levels that come along with it. "From now on the admin/mod team will be editing people's signatures, if too big, at our discretion," an administrator of the 7th Century Generation (7cgen) forum announced in August 2008, boasting later that administrators themselves are allowed longer signatures than average users.
The question in all of this, of course, is whether the administrators and longtime users of Islamist sites reap any further benefits beyond the short-term, compulsive satisfactions of gamification. I.e., does gamification actually drive terrorism?
The obvious implication of Islamist online spaces becoming gamified is that an increasing number of users are likely to go there and spend more time there. Based on the limited personal information most of these online participants reveal about themselves, however, even the most obsessed seem to limit their play to virtual space. But for a select few, the addiction to winning bleeds over into physical space to the point where those same incentives begin to shape the way they act in the real world. These individuals strive to live up to their virtual identities, in the way that teens have re-created the video game Grand Theft Auto in real life, carrying out robberies and murders.
One man in particular has been able to take advantage of the incentives of online gamification to pursue real-life terrorist recruits: Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born al Qaeda cleric hiding in Yemen, famous for having helped encourage a number of Western-based would-be jihadists into action. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter, for example, massacred a dozen soldiers after exchanging a number of emails with Awlaki. Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, admitted Awlaki influenced him, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was one of Awlaki's students prior to attempting to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day 2009. Part of Awlaki's success is due to his creative use of the principles of gaming both online and off, by using himself -- or his personal affirmation -- as a prize. His supporters vie for the right to connect with Awlaki, whether virtually or actually -- a powerful incentive that, from our observation, drives many of them into, at the very least, more active language about jihad.
A user who called himself "Belaid" on Awlaki's now-defunct blog boasted to others about what he perceived to be a response to his email in Awlaki's latest blog post, saying: "S. Anwar Al-Awlaki i sincerely love u for the Sake of Allah for what you are doing, I think you answered my e-mail by giving us this document." He then followed up by expressing his desire to transition from virtual communication to real communication. "I ask Allah to make me go visit you so I can see you in real and we in sha Allah go together do jihad insha Allah in our life time!!!" he wrote in January 2009.
Short of communicating with Awlaki directly, his followers can collect and exchange Awlaki's lectures, videos, and blog posts in the way kids trade baseball cards or comic books. On most hard-line Islamist forums, one can find dozens of posts with full collections of Awlaki's materials, which are now collected and exchanged with much more fervor than videos from Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Awlaki's latest gambit, the notorious English-language Inspire magazine, has made following the guidance of al Qaeda even more of a game, one that anyone can play. The magazine assigns readers tasks to complete, such as "make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom" and "pull off Mumbai [attack] near Whitehouse till martyrdom." These gimmicky-sounding instructions allay the seriousness of what al Qaeda is really asking its readers to do, blurring the barriers in the game between real and fake.
And the followers are responding. "[I] really like that idea of using a car as the mower [to kill people] mentioned in inspire 2 maybe i can use it at school, who knows?" an unindicted co-conspirator in the Colleen LaRose (a.k.a. Jihad Jane) case said in an online conversation in November 2010 with Emerson Begolly, a Pennsylvania man with an extensive extremist online history who allegedly assaulted two FBI officers.
By gamifying his followers' Internet experiences, Awlaki has been able to rally a more engaged online fan club than any other hardcore Islamic extremist to date. Through the creation of an online community of like-minded individuals, al Qaeda has mobilized these e-recruits through a natural process: competing with their peers for status and reputation. Awlaki has used gamification to do what al Qaeda had been unable to do before him, at least in any systematic way: get Americans to compete with one another to put down their keyboards and pick up their weapons.
-/AFP/Getty Images
- See more at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/13/the_world_of_holy_warcraft#sthash.hMrbhcVj.dpuf
Andrew P. Doan, MPH, MD, PhD
My Gaming Addiction Videos on YouTube: YouTube.com/@DrAndrewDoan
*The views expressed are of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the U.S. Navy, DHA or Department of Defense.
There is just no way maintaining a "full time WOW account" complete with "acting like a real wow player" is faster than having a super computer steal the information right off the server the same way they take info from Version or Microsoft.
As a gamer I just don't buy it!
leveling in steps, serenity, sponcys, sponsors, exercise, and sleep, (sanity has been downsized) sober from all electronic games since 11/19/2010
I think a lot more is going on then we can imagine. Thanks for sharing these articles.
Have you heard of hiring people to maintain and level accounts? Just something to consider. :)
Andrew P. Doan, MPH, MD, PhD
My Gaming Addiction Videos on YouTube: YouTube.com/@DrAndrewDoan
*The views expressed are of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the U.S. Navy, DHA or Department of Defense.
Wished I'd known that they would do that. I would have applied for the job.
The government (according to some news accounts) had an interest in W.O.W. a long time ago because they were interested in how people managed their in-game money and how gamers used the auction house. It's really not a big deal.
Government spies on our phone calls, emails, etc. and has for a long time. Gaming doesn't surprise me, and, as Hirsh said--which I agree with--they would have to play the game to actually get involved with the other people. You can't just make a level 10 character and sit around the nearest city to find anything out about anyone. You have to play as intended.
Which means, government officials are playing games on our dollar. Regardless of their "motives". I doubt very much they would learn anything of value in terms of terrorism in the game.
Here: NSA spying on Google advert cookies: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/10/5198592/nsa-reportedly-piggybacking-on-google-advertising-cookies
Something else to consider. Because $100M are traded in WoW annually, terrorists and criminals are using online games to "launder money".
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/21/money-laundering-online
Cybercriminals launder money using in-game currencies TECHNOLOGY 21 OCTOBER 13 by OLIVIA SOLON Shutterstock Cybercriminals are increasingly using online gaming and micro-payments to launder money, according to a report by security researcher Jean-Loup Richet. Richet -- who is Information Systems Service Manager at Orange and Research Associate at ESSEC Business School -- analysed forums to identify how people were moving their money around online through anonymous transactions. "Millions of transactions take place over the internet each day, and criminal organisations are taking advantage of this fact to launder illegally acquired funds through covert, anonymous online transactions," Richet explains in his paper. "The more robust and complex the various online marketplaces become the more untraceable methods criminals are finding to pass 'dirty' money into online accounts and pull 'clean' money out of others." Richet said that we "all know" the oldest physical placement methods of money launderers, including cash smuggling, casinos and other gambling venues, insurance policies and shell corporations, but that a number of new web-based systems are emerging. Richet observed large online hacker forums and communities looking for keywords related to payment solutions and black markets. He found that online role playing games provide "an easy way for criminals to launder money". This tends to involve opening numerous different accounts on various online games -- such as Second Life and World of Warcraft -- to move money. These games use credits that players can exchange for real money. By using the virtual currency systems, criminals can send virtual money to associates in another country, which can then be transferred into real money. A second growth area is "micro-laundering" via sites like PayPal or using job advertising sites. Micro-launching involves moving a large amount of money in small amounts through thousands of electronic transactions. One way of doing this is using mobile banking systems such as MPesa, Kenya's mobile wallet, which allows you to send money from prepaid mobile cards to criminal partners that will convert the credit into cash anonymously. Similarly online job marketplaces with escrow services (money is paid to the platform before being paid out to the person who completes the freelance job) such as Freelancer.com and Fiverr can be used to conceal money via a money mule system. Users can create an account and post a job request asking for a service that would cost the amount of money they need to clean up. They can then sign up on the same freelancing site using a different IP address and bid on their own job offer. The first account can then select the second account to carry out the invented job, and can inform the job marketplace to release the funds to the second account. Richet also flagged up some more "traditional" ways of laundering money online. These include using Costa-Rica-based digital currency service Liberty Reserve to transfer money anonymously. Liberty Reserve was seized by the US authorities in May for laundering $6 billion. The research also makes reference to money mule scams, a slight variation on the rich Nigerian benefactor scam. It involves someone asking you to help them transfer money to your country. For your help you will receive a percentage of the transfer. Instead of trying to steal your money, they might try and transfer large sums of money stolen from other accounts to you. You'll then have to send the money to an alias account of theirs in exchange for a cut. You will then be held responsible for the laundering. More than $7 billion (PS4.3 billion) is laundered every year through Colombian corporations from Mexican and Colombian drug cartels through the Black Market Peso Exchange or BMPE. This is a covert system of banking that lets drug dealers exchange American dollars for pesos. These dollars are then bought by Colombian businessmen and used to buy American goods which are then sold back in Colombia. This traditional crime is enhanced with web technologies, through online black marketplaces and cryptocurrencies. "As we spend more time and money online, opportunities for criminals to involve us in their money laundering scams will only continue to grow. This will create an increasingly difficult situation for the various law enforcement agencies that are already being put to the test by the cunning of such criminals and the myriad untraceable means they have discovered to launder illegally obtained money," concludes Richet. You can read the full paper here.
Andrew P. Doan, MPH, MD, PhD
My Gaming Addiction Videos on YouTube: YouTube.com/@DrAndrewDoan
*The views expressed are of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the U.S. Navy, DHA or Department of Defense.
I don't care if it's true or not.
I showed it to the gamer, who is really paranoid about being spied on, and he hasn't played WoW since. Hehehehehehehehe
LOL!!!!! three cheers for spying!
p.s. they launder money in laundry, coffee shops, banks, supermarkets, and everything else you can think of. Organized crime loves legitimate businesses to launder money in.
It doesn't make games worse or better than anything else in society.
Melissa, LOL on spying!!!
Agreed Patria, because of these activities, however, it provides reason for spying by government agencies.
Andrew P. Doan, MPH, MD, PhD
My Gaming Addiction Videos on YouTube: YouTube.com/@DrAndrewDoan
*The views expressed are of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the U.S. Navy, DHA or Department of Defense.
LOL!!!!
"The brightest future will always be based on a forgotten past. You can't go on well in life until you let go of your past failures and heartaches." "The first step toward change is acceptance." "Once you accept yourself, you open the door to change. That's all you have to do." "Change is not something you do, it's something you allow."- Will Garcia
Yes LOL! Thanks for that good laugh, Mel.
Acceptance. When I am disturbed, it is because a person, place, thing, or situation is unacceptable to me. I find no serenity until I accept my life as being exactly the way it is meant to be. Nothing happens in God’s world by mistake. Acknowledge the problem, but live the solution!
There is no way for their army of gamers to be in every place in game, not to mention that there is a lot of things even gamers can't see like pm's. Data base access is higher than in game gamers, and can see every interaction. If they can read all the account of Microsoft and Version with their super computers then there is absolutely no reason for them to maintain even a single wow account.
Yes Andy I have heard of it, but only from other gamers and people who sell accounts, not from any other business. Does the NSA have to buy phone plans with Version and yap all day in order to copy ever single phone call into their computers? Not a single account!
This sounds like a "functional gamer" who got a job at the NSA and needed to explain staying all night at work which getting nothing done other than level accounts. No other explanation will suffice.
I do however fully understand their need to read the messages and transactions from above, although I think it is a breach of privacy and moral ethics and I think the hoard should cancel their alliance with the USA.
leveling in steps, serenity, sponcys, sponsors, exercise, and sleep, (sanity has been downsized) sober from all electronic games since 11/19/2010