13 ms·

Spy agencies in covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online gaming

202 points by r0h1n 13y ago

groupthinker 13y ago
Interesting to see that Linden Labs weren't just complicit, they were actively promoting the idea to the NSA.
rolux 13y ago
These two comments on theguadian.com sum it up rather aptly: > > This is beyond farcical. Does any working at GCHQ or NSA actually have a fully functioning brain? > Yes they do, and recognize a well paid cushy job when they see one.
- walshemj 13y ago
  GCHQ is not well paid ;-)
tokenadult 13y ago
This ought to finally get the script kiddies up in arms about government surveillance.
VLM 13y ago
"the difficulty of proving terrorists were even thinking about using games to communicate" The article is pretty good in most areas, but an epic fail in this specific small subpart. The solution to the problem is simply follow the cultural trend of redefining what terrorism means. The article fails by listing some actual real terrorists. The article succeeds by listing non-terrorists as terrorists such as academic scientists who are employed in a perfectly legitimate capacity by a government that our government doesn't happen to like at this moment. The article fails by not mentioning that most of the terrorists they're tracking are prank telephone callers, internet bullying, anyone who ever disagrees with anything our government does in any manner or the actions of any individual government employee, anyone who belongs to a religion or no religion at all, political candidates and supporters on whichever is the losing side, teens toilet papering houses, minorities who do illegal things like drive while black in white neighborhoods, you know, new school terrorism as opposed to the old school stuff they used to be concerned with like crashing planes and stuff. What we really need is a .gov organization oriented against old school terrorism instead of the new school 1984 stuff.
- salient 13y ago
  I'm hoping one of the results from the NSA reform will be that we'll properly name who and what exactly is a terrorist. The government spies on everyone, and then to justify their spying they're calling all of them potential terrorists. That line of thinking must go.
  - VLM 13y ago
    Yes the funny part is the scientist they labeled as a terrorist is not a terrorist at all, but is a perfectly legitimate surveillance target. They not only have the wrong label for the wrong people, they have the wrong label for the right people. As a followup to my original post we probably need two new .gov agencies not just one. One would focus on state level threats to the country like foreign nuclear scientists, pretty much the pre-1984 style CIA stuff, or at least the fraction of CIA activities that were actually legal. The other would be more police like and focus on nutty individual threats, that aren't national threats, more or less James Bond evil villain type stuff. Both groups might or might not "fit" under the same gov org. Probably neither fits under the existing 1984 organizations, and unfortunately no one is apparently working on those two problems, in favor of the much more exciting "stamp out political dissidents / implement Stasi/SS secret police in the USA" model.
- menubar 13y ago
  I think what you're trying to say is, since they have no proof of terrorists using virtual worlds to communicate, they have no legal reason to be spying on those innocent people who use them legitimately.
  - VLM 13y ago
    Redefine and water down what it means to be labeled as a terrorist such that harmless mainstream people are now given that label, and by definition anything that's mainstream will of course be used by terrorists. With a side helping of the .gov orgs who used to defend us from "THEM" are now going all 1984 on us, so who, if anyone, is still watching "THEM"? Well... no one, anymore. Which is in itself kinda scary. .gov no longer defends us from that kind of stuff anymore, so the only way to justify spying on foreign nuclear scientists (which used to be a perfectly legit .gov job...) is to mislabel them as terrorists. If you convert all your police to secret police to spy on political dissidents, who's left to pull over drunk drivers? Well, unfortunately, no one.
ChrisAntaki 13y ago
> A later memo noted that among the game's active subscribers were "telecom engineers, embassy drivers, scientists, the military and other intelligence agencies". Perhaps these were the targets.
- VLM 13y ago
  If not targets, an idea not discussed so far is bribery victims? "Sure, I can op you... but we like to know when ops will be around, you know, for coverage so there's always one online, so if you could just let us know when you'll be working (embassy driver) overtime hours..."
calewis 13y ago
When I read this I just though of the Penguin Party scene from Four Lions, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-SrlQ9tlI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-SrlQ9tlI. Turns out these morons get there ideas from satirical black comedies.
- walshemj 13y ago
  Or the laundry verse where the external assets experimented with using WOW to communicate. Persephone has a "WWLJD" bracelet. When she's trying to infiltrate Schiller's compound, everyone naturally assumes it stands for "What would Lord Jesus do?" Actually, it's "What would Leeroy Jenkins do?"
deleted 13y ago
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officemonkey 13y ago
Terrorists: we will Candy Crush you.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  This just in. Head of Al Qaeda has this to say: "The inf1del n00bz of the Alliance, will be crushed by our grand Jihad Horde. We will bomb their cities, and rain death in Arathi Basin on all major servers. Allah is great!" General Alexander wasn't able to comment, because he was apparently speed leveling his Paladin. Anonymous sources cite that his palandin is still level 30 and that quote: "Keith is quite a newb. He doesn't know that he can insta level his Paladin.".
kabdib 13y ago
Online games are interesting to infiltrate because they can be a conduit for downloaded code; a lot of the clients are native code with the capability for remote execution (e.g., for anti-cheat challenges). I have no evidence that the NSA has done this. To the NSA, your user base is just another set of people to monitor, just another set of machines to infiltrate. They don't care about your user's trust.
cokernel_hacker 13y ago
From what little has been confirmed, the system we know about works "better" the more connections you feed into it. I doubt they intended to find anyone directly using this information. Instead, what is more likely is that collecting data in these games might help identify "friends" of people considered suspicious via some other means. Although now that I think of it, games like WoW and EVE Online do make for quite a milieu. I know that several of my colleagues play such games and with each other. It certainly chills the spine a bit when you realize that there are people who've had this kind of data for quite some time, using it for who-knows-what...
eudox 13y ago
See also Andrea Sharpton's notes on Linden Lab and its opposition to allowing users to chat over OTR: http://pastebay.net/1371265 http://pastebay.net/1371265
beloch 13y ago
MMO's are packed with possible communication channels in addition to chat. Ever wonder if that annoying gnome in the auction hall is jumping in morse code? Could signals be sent with bids? Could a character's inventory contents be arranged to leave a message to someone else who shares the login info? Is that nonsense coming from what you presume to be a bot-controlled gold-farming crew really nonsense? When a game goes to great lengths to simulate a world, the possibilities for covert communication are nearly limitless! I find the task of finding terrorist communications in MMO's so daunting that I'd never even consider making an attempt at it. However, the NSA is one organization that seems to have nearly infinite resources to throw at impossible problems. This is an organization that is literally trying to "hack the planet"! I seriously doubt they'll ever managed to uncover anything significant, even if they're plugged directly into the servers at Blizzard, etc.. However, at least some spooks get to play WoW for a living on the government's dime! Seriously... The NSA makes military spending look frugal!
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  I can't wait to see a title that reads "Newest NSA revelations show that the Al Qaeda transmits information through MMO 'World of Warcraft' with in-game Gnomes jumping in morse code".
  - rasur 13y ago
    This reminds me of the kids chat world used in the comedy-terrorism film "4 Lions".
  - saraid216 13y ago
    Eh, I don't find it terribly hard to imagine that America is the Kingdom of Azeroth and Al Qaeda are the Forsaken. Just map place names and unit compositions and you have a fairly large vocabulary already. Wouldn't even make it hard to just swap out different races for the current code key.
- podperson 13y ago
  It's plausible if they simply subvert the servers. If you take World of Warcraft, say, the options are basically text chat and voice chat. (Sure, you can send morse code or whatever, but that kind of sophistication generally assumes a more detailed communication has already taken place and applies everywhere -- "let the phone ring three times and then hang up", steganography, etc.) A better option for covert communication would be a more open platform such as Second Life, where you can upload custom content. But, frankly, there are so many options if you have any imagination... If what they're really worried about is recruiting and outreach then they at least only need to worry about reasonably popular alternatives.
FBT 13y ago
It is always great when evil is incompetent. I dislike that the NSA, GCHQ, etc. are spying on everyone and violating everyone's basic dignities, but it's great that they waste time doing so in rather insane ways, e.g. by playing video games. Basicly, I hate the NSA's spying, but if they want to spy on me in ridiculously convoluted ways... it's better than them being actually competent.
- zacinbusiness 13y ago
  That's a good point. This has to be one of the most Rube Goldberg ways I've ever heard of someone trying to collect intelligence. Did that teenager really have sex with my mother? Or is that some sort of code! Or is he just mad that I fragged his team and broke his streak? Or was the streak itself some sort of code!
eamsen 13y ago
If you have to monitor all online communication, then infiltrating private message boards by means of technology or human interaction is essential. An in-game chat is just an additional communication protocol next to email, Skype, etc. Leaving such communication channels unmonitored would pose a potential threat. This behavior is in line with the current state of affairs and should be expected.
JonSkeptic 13y ago
>The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which boasts more than 48 million players. In other news, the NSA to start a new reality TV show: Living Room Security! Find out who's added to a no-fly list this week as we take you live inside your own living room. Brought to you by the Xbox Kinect.
- yk 13y ago
  The Xbone is always on and has a unblinking camera eye. And the worst part is, I am running out of 1984 jokes.
- uchi 13y ago
  Strangely, for once I wouldn't be very mad if they put angry, profane Call of Duty children on no fly lists.
Cthulhu_ 13y ago
tl;dr, NSA analysts want to play WoW during working hours. Can't blame 'em.
coldcode 13y ago
Even if this was a legitimate concern to the NSA, if you don't cover every game you wouldn't catch any possible terrorist. If I were a smart terrorist, I'd just simply use a fairly obscure game unlikely to be targeted.
- mynameismiek 13y ago
  You mean, like, Furcadia? "This 'dream' is trying to tell someone something. I just can't figure out what 'yiffing' is..."
zacinbusiness 13y ago
God I wish I worked for the NSA. "Hey man, are you watching porn?" "Hell yeah! Because terrorists are using it to send messages! It's in the Mise-en-scène! I'm doing this for freedom!" "My God. You're right!" "Also, I'm pretty sure they're doing the same thing in strip clubs. And with really high-quality whiskey. So...I'm going to need some really high-quality whiskey. And a fist-full of singles." "Anything you need! You brave bastard!"
- jnbiche 13y ago
  I hope I just upvoted you but I was laughing so hard I may have hit the down button by accident.
  - zacinbusiness 13y ago
    I go where I'm needed :-)
    - nealabq 13y ago
      You brave bastard!
- teamgb 13y ago
  The truth is, there probably is a budget for this. "At the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret, Samantha says she lap danced with one of the terrorists. The Terrorists who hijacked a plane and crashed it are said to have stayed and played in Las Vegas." ... "Some big-man terrorist, huh?" Samantha said this week as she took a breather from the two-dozen lap dances she bestows daily upon the lonely at the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret. "He spent about $20 for a quick dance and didn't tip more." http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Agents-of-terror-leave-their-mark-on-Sin-City-2873407.php http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Agents-of-terror-leave-th...
- VladRussian2 13y ago
  "The things I'm gonna do for my country."
deleted 13y ago
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timbro 13y ago
I think it's becoming very clear now: Either the NSA/government goes or technology goes. If we want to attain a sane degree of democracy in our Western world, both can not continue to coexist in their current form.
- notaspy 13y ago
  Too late. The national conversation is already insane, with a pandoras's box nature that will not be reversed. The West is fucked, and like any spoiled asshole, is going to wreak the game (life on Earth) for everyone else. God/Allah/ca$h have mercy on our stupid fucking lives.
- a3n 13y ago
  But you can't get rid of the NSA when there are real threats in the world. It's just not going to happen, because there actually are real threats (the number is debatable), and the existence of more than an anomaly of threats will always be justification for NSA and their ilk. The only way to get rid of the NSA is to get rid of the threats. The most effective long term way is to work for and achieve a much higher level of peace, tolerance and community than the world currently has.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > But you can't get rid of the NSA when there are real threats in the world. Sure you can. The existence of real threats does not mean that the NSA is the only means of dealing with them, nor even that it is an effective way of dealing with them even before considering the negative impacts it has, nor, finally -- and this is the key consideration -- that it is a net positive considering the benefits it provides against the threats against the direct threat it produces to freedom.
    - a3n 13y ago
      I'll concede that getting rid of the NSA regardless of threats is within the realm of possibility. But it's very unlikely. Maybe more unlikely than world peace.
ccozan 13y ago
Next in press: "The real life of Leeroy Jenkins"
7952 13y ago
This sounds like it is actually closer to traditional spy work than most of the revelations we have heard recently. If you tell an NSA agent (or anyone online) something they will know what you tell them. It is more worrying if they are leaving vulnerabilities un-patched as this could allow anyone to exploit the same methods. Are foreign governments using this to spy on Americans?
deleted 13y ago
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r721 13y ago
>According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a "deconfliction" group was required to ensure they weren't spying on, or interfering with, each other. I can't understand how this can be true, 48 million players vs. 30,000-40,000 NSA employees[1], number of agents is probably a few orders lower. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#Employees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#Employ...
- prawks 13y ago
  Say there are a couple hundred servers in various games they're observing and participating in (not an absurd number given that one person with a 40-hour week could play quite a bit), it's reasonable to assume multiple agencies might overlap servers.
  - r721 13y ago
    Well, I was just hinting on overspending: if a few agents are watching one target it's miscommunication and mild overspending, but when there's a whole "deconfliction group" it's overspending squared.
    - VLM 13y ago
      Aside from overspending you might want to look into existing BATF sting operations. If the majority of the criminal activity in an area is law enforcement sting operations trying to catch the small fraction of actual criminals, then you need a deconfliction group or the vast majority of arrests will be law enforcement agents arresting each other. Imagine if the city cops decide to crack down on prostitution by posing as johns in a sting, the same night that county sheriffs decide to crack down on prostitution as prostitutes in a sting, and the streets are 90% full of cops arresting each other. LOL all you want, this has happened IRL, also with drug trafficking. There is also something of a meme that the majority of underage girls on chat services are creepy FBI agents.
      - r721 13y ago
digitalengineer 13y ago
I suppose HN is also infiltrated. Those damn 'hackers' must be reading Hackers News, right? I hear some are even 'small government' types. I can understand why people think that must be the reason every NSA article disappears of the frontpage after 40 comments...
throwawaykf 13y ago
Relevant (from 2010): "Detecting Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing Activity in Second Life and World of Warcraft", Angela S M Irwin, Jill Slay - University of South Australia http://ro.ecu.edu.au/icr/5/ http://ro.ecu.edu.au/icr/5/
Theodores 13y ago
This is not as silly as it appears. I spend a lot of time 'in' an online game playing with one of my relatives. We have a collective circle of online friends and we know when something is up with any of our friends. If they have not logged on all day that is a cause of concern. Equally, if someone is going to be away from the game for a few days then they will let everyone know. I doubt they would email the same to everyone in their address book. With aforementioned relative I know if she is working from home, on business or with time to herself. Her involvement in the game shows that. I know more from her gameplay than I do from emails or from what anyone else in the family has to say. Important family news is relayed in game rather than on the phone or in email. Email might be moved to if something needs to be discussed away from a public forum, but, that first message, in-game is best. As for online friends, I am not that picky. I have online in-game friends from all over the world and I don't care if they are raving Christian nutters. In real life I would not have time for those that want to quote the bible to me every day, but I will tolerate it in-game, so long as they further my game goals. Therefore I am easier to befriend in-game than in real life. I get up to things that my friends and family don't get to hear about, they are not to know. However, if I was to be targeted for spying then the in-game communication would show whether I was busy with something else or not. I don't have to conspire with others in-game for the communications to be useful, so I don't think the NSA/GCHQ actually have to be looking for 'bomb plots', just a level of game devotion.
- Zigurd 13y ago
  > This is not as silly as it appears. Oh yes it is. This is the readily and deservedly lampoon-ready tail end of snooping on everything without know what you are looking for.
- MrZongle2 13y ago
  This is not as silly as it appears. No offense, but it IS that silly. Look at all the missed opportunities to stop the 9/11 hijackers. Look at the neglected follow-ups prior to the Boston Marathon bombings. Are we supposed to believe that agencies that ignore or under-prioritize basic law enforcement/counterintelligence warning signs about potential terrorists are somehow going to do something useful with a World of Warcraft chat log? This is waste, fraud and abuse at best. At worst, it is another example of using the "terrorism" boogeyman to monitor innocent people.
dobbsbob 13y ago
Wasn't Topiary busted because of using Xbox live? Wonder about that informant now
rl3 13y ago
I wonder if NSA has reversed chat protocols for non-MMO games in order to facilitate broad, keyword-based intercept directly from player network traffic. Namely games that don't send chat traffic through a centralized server. Perhaps older games that had lackluster releases and are currently ghost towns in terms of active players. If bad guys are trying to fly under the radar, those are probably a smart bet (relatively speaking) compared to games that are popular. Most non-MMOs don't even require an account, let alone billing details. It would be laughable if firing up some ancient, crappy game that nobody plays is all it takes to dodge dragnet surveillance. On the other hand, I imagine dragnet surveillance never was intended to catch smart people (only blackmail them), and terrorists by definition tend to be dumb. Obviously if someone is already targeted, reverse engineering game chat protocols becomes irrelevant. Analysts would just read screenshots and key-logger data courtesy of NSA TAO (or whatever GCHQ's equivalent is).
bassclef 13y ago
i thought this was an onion article.. america has become quite sad.
- notaspy 13y ago
  The United States is collapsing, and the show will take a while. I'd say sit back and enjoy, but in this show most of us die, and those who don't will wish they did.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    The passive spectator stance is part of what causes this, not really a sane reaction to it. It's not a show, it's the result of our (in)actions.
DanBC 13y ago
They have to monitor the cesspool of XBox Online screeching 14 year olds? I feel sorry for them.
_delirium 13y ago
I thought this was reasonably public information for a few years now. IARPA (basically the intelligence agencies' version of DARPA) has had a series of public grant calls since the late 2000s for research on various kinds of data-mining in MMOs and virtual worlds, ranging from behavior modeling to transaction tracking. Of course, they didn't say precisely why they were interested in such research, but one could surmise... edit: Here's a 2008 Bruce Schneier post about it: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/searching_for_t.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/searching_for...
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
I grew up in a world in which the Stasi infiltrating church groups was seen as state security going beyond the pale. This is just beyond insanity. These agencies should not just be reined in anymore, the need to be abolished and replaced if we are ever to return to an acceptable level of state surveillance.
randomway1234 13y ago
I would LOVEEEEE to get paid by the government to play video games. Sign me up!
adnans 13y ago
Some poor NSA analyst was caught playing WoW in work and had to develop this enormous ploy to explain his actions as a way to capture chat terrorist traffic in-game. It just blew up from there.
mbuchanan 13y ago
Or... you find players that are obsessive 1st person shooter players, you cross reference their mental health history and access to guns. That pops up Adam Lanza in Newtown. You engage him and coerce him. hmm..
JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Most important question not answered: were the Alliance or Horde?
natch 13y ago
I wonder about the financial impact on gaming companies once users get creeped out by this. Nice job, NSA.
ommunist 13y ago
Well, this is a good excuse for gaming MI5 analysts, and probably a reason for their recent Russian vacancies, someone has to play Russian MMORPGs (just kidding). But seriously speaking - do you remember that American spy killed in Tripoli before the Lybian war (if memory serves)? He was a huge authority in EVE Online as it turned out.
BrandonMarc 13y ago
As always, Randall Monroe had a pithy comic about such monitoring: xkcd 1223 "Dwarf Fortress" http://xkcd.com/1223/ http://xkcd.com/1223/

202 points by r0h1n 13y ago

Interesting to see that Linden Labs weren't just complicit, they were actively promoting the idea to the NSA.

rolux 13y ago

These two comments on theguadian.com sum it up rather aptly: > > This is beyond farcical. Does any working at GCHQ or NSA actually have a fully functioning brain? > Yes they do, and recognize a well paid cushy job when they see one.

walshemj 13y ago
GCHQ is not well paid ;-)

tokenadult 13y ago

This ought to finally get the script kiddies up in arms about government surveillance.

VLM 13y ago

"the difficulty of proving terrorists were even thinking about using games to communicate" The article is pretty good in most areas, but an epic fail in this specific small subpart. The solution to the problem is simply follow the cultural trend of redefining what terrorism means. The article fails by listing some actual real terrorists. The article succeeds by listing non-terrorists as terrorists such as academic scientists who are employed in a perfectly legitimate capacity by a government that our government doesn't happen to like at this moment. The article fails by not mentioning that most of the terrorists they're tracking are prank telephone callers, internet bullying, anyone who ever disagrees with anything our government does in any manner or the actions of any individual government employee, anyone who belongs to a religion or no religion at all, political candidates and supporters on whichever is the losing side, teens toilet papering houses, minorities who do illegal things like drive while black in white neighborhoods, you know, new school terrorism as opposed to the old school stuff they used to be concerned with like crashing planes and stuff. What we really need is a .gov organization oriented against old school terrorism instead of the new school 1984 stuff.

salient 13y ago
I'm hoping one of the results from the NSA reform will be that we'll properly name who and what exactly is a terrorist. The government spies on everyone, and then to justify their spying they're calling all of them potential terrorists. That line of thinking must go.
- VLM 13y ago
  Yes the funny part is the scientist they labeled as a terrorist is not a terrorist at all, but is a perfectly legitimate surveillance target. They not only have the wrong label for the wrong people, they have the wrong label for the right people. As a followup to my original post we probably need two new .gov agencies not just one. One would focus on state level threats to the country like foreign nuclear scientists, pretty much the pre-1984 style CIA stuff, or at least the fraction of CIA activities that were actually legal. The other would be more police like and focus on nutty individual threats, that aren't national threats, more or less James Bond evil villain type stuff. Both groups might or might not "fit" under the same gov org. Probably neither fits under the existing 1984 organizations, and unfortunately no one is apparently working on those two problems, in favor of the much more exciting "stamp out political dissidents / implement Stasi/SS secret police in the USA" model.
menubar 13y ago
I think what you're trying to say is, since they have no proof of terrorists using virtual worlds to communicate, they have no legal reason to be spying on those innocent people who use them legitimately.
- VLM 13y ago
  Redefine and water down what it means to be labeled as a terrorist such that harmless mainstream people are now given that label, and by definition anything that's mainstream will of course be used by terrorists. With a side helping of the .gov orgs who used to defend us from "THEM" are now going all 1984 on us, so who, if anyone, is still watching "THEM"? Well... no one, anymore. Which is in itself kinda scary. .gov no longer defends us from that kind of stuff anymore, so the only way to justify spying on foreign nuclear scientists (which used to be a perfectly legit .gov job...) is to mislabel them as terrorists. If you convert all your police to secret police to spy on political dissidents, who's left to pull over drunk drivers? Well, unfortunately, no one.

ChrisAntaki 13y ago

> A later memo noted that among the game's active subscribers were "telecom engineers, embassy drivers, scientists, the military and other intelligence agencies". Perhaps these were the targets.

VLM 13y ago
If not targets, an idea not discussed so far is bribery victims? "Sure, I can op you... but we like to know when ops will be around, you know, for coverage so there's always one online, so if you could just let us know when you'll be working (embassy driver) overtime hours..."

calewis 13y ago

When I read this I just though of the Penguin Party scene from Four Lions, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-SrlQ9tlI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-SrlQ9tlI. Turns out these morons get there ideas from satirical black comedies.

walshemj 13y ago
Or the laundry verse where the external assets experimented with using WOW to communicate. Persephone has a "WWLJD" bracelet. When she's trying to infiltrate Schiller's compound, everyone naturally assumes it stands for "What would Lord Jesus do?" Actually, it's "What would Leeroy Jenkins do?"

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

officemonkey 13y ago

Terrorists: we will Candy Crush you.

Ygg2 13y ago
This just in. Head of Al Qaeda has this to say: "The inf1del n00bz of the Alliance, will be crushed by our grand Jihad Horde. We will bomb their cities, and rain death in Arathi Basin on all major servers. Allah is great!" General Alexander wasn't able to comment, because he was apparently speed leveling his Paladin. Anonymous sources cite that his palandin is still level 30 and that quote: "Keith is quite a newb. He doesn't know that he can insta level his Paladin.".

kabdib 13y ago

Online games are interesting to infiltrate because they can be a conduit for downloaded code; a lot of the clients are native code with the capability for remote execution (e.g., for anti-cheat challenges). I have no evidence that the NSA has done this. To the NSA, your user base is just another set of people to monitor, just another set of machines to infiltrate. They don't care about your user's trust.

cokernel_hacker 13y ago

From what little has been confirmed, the system we know about works "better" the more connections you feed into it. I doubt they intended to find anyone directly using this information. Instead, what is more likely is that collecting data in these games might help identify "friends" of people considered suspicious via some other means. Although now that I think of it, games like WoW and EVE Online do make for quite a milieu. I know that several of my colleagues play such games and with each other. It certainly chills the spine a bit when you realize that there are people who've had this kind of data for quite some time, using it for who-knows-what...

eudox 13y ago

See also Andrea Sharpton's notes on Linden Lab and its opposition to allowing users to chat over OTR: http://pastebay.net/1371265 http://pastebay.net/1371265

beloch 13y ago

MMO's are packed with possible communication channels in addition to chat. Ever wonder if that annoying gnome in the auction hall is jumping in morse code? Could signals be sent with bids? Could a character's inventory contents be arranged to leave a message to someone else who shares the login info? Is that nonsense coming from what you presume to be a bot-controlled gold-farming crew really nonsense? When a game goes to great lengths to simulate a world, the possibilities for covert communication are nearly limitless! I find the task of finding terrorist communications in MMO's so daunting that I'd never even consider making an attempt at it. However, the NSA is one organization that seems to have nearly infinite resources to throw at impossible problems. This is an organization that is literally trying to "hack the planet"! I seriously doubt they'll ever managed to uncover anything significant, even if they're plugged directly into the servers at Blizzard, etc.. However, at least some spooks get to play WoW for a living on the government's dime! Seriously... The NSA makes military spending look frugal!

rfnslyr 13y ago
I can't wait to see a title that reads "Newest NSA revelations show that the Al Qaeda transmits information through MMO 'World of Warcraft' with in-game Gnomes jumping in morse code".
- rasur 13y ago
  This reminds me of the kids chat world used in the comedy-terrorism film "4 Lions".
- saraid216 13y ago
  Eh, I don't find it terribly hard to imagine that America is the Kingdom of Azeroth and Al Qaeda are the Forsaken. Just map place names and unit compositions and you have a fairly large vocabulary already. Wouldn't even make it hard to just swap out different races for the current code key.
podperson 13y ago
It's plausible if they simply subvert the servers. If you take World of Warcraft, say, the options are basically text chat and voice chat. (Sure, you can send morse code or whatever, but that kind of sophistication generally assumes a more detailed communication has already taken place and applies everywhere -- "let the phone ring three times and then hang up", steganography, etc.) A better option for covert communication would be a more open platform such as Second Life, where you can upload custom content. But, frankly, there are so many options if you have any imagination... If what they're really worried about is recruiting and outreach then they at least only need to worry about reasonably popular alternatives.

FBT 13y ago

It is always great when evil is incompetent. I dislike that the NSA, GCHQ, etc. are spying on everyone and violating everyone's basic dignities, but it's great that they waste time doing so in rather insane ways, e.g. by playing video games. Basicly, I hate the NSA's spying, but if they want to spy on me in ridiculously convoluted ways... it's better than them being actually competent.

zacinbusiness 13y ago
That's a good point. This has to be one of the most Rube Goldberg ways I've ever heard of someone trying to collect intelligence. Did that teenager really have sex with my mother? Or is that some sort of code! Or is he just mad that I fragged his team and broke his streak? Or was the streak itself some sort of code!

eamsen 13y ago

If you have to monitor all online communication, then infiltrating private message boards by means of technology or human interaction is essential. An in-game chat is just an additional communication protocol next to email, Skype, etc. Leaving such communication channels unmonitored would pose a potential threat. This behavior is in line with the current state of affairs and should be expected.

JonSkeptic 13y ago

>The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which boasts more than 48 million players. In other news, the NSA to start a new reality TV show: Living Room Security! Find out who's added to a no-fly list this week as we take you live inside your own living room. Brought to you by the Xbox Kinect.

yk 13y ago
The Xbone is always on and has a unblinking camera eye. And the worst part is, I am running out of 1984 jokes.
uchi 13y ago
Strangely, for once I wouldn't be very mad if they put angry, profane Call of Duty children on no fly lists.

Cthulhu_ 13y ago

tl;dr, NSA analysts want to play WoW during working hours. Can't blame 'em.

coldcode 13y ago

Even if this was a legitimate concern to the NSA, if you don't cover every game you wouldn't catch any possible terrorist. If I were a smart terrorist, I'd just simply use a fairly obscure game unlikely to be targeted.

mynameismiek 13y ago
You mean, like, Furcadia? "This 'dream' is trying to tell someone something. I just can't figure out what 'yiffing' is..."

zacinbusiness 13y ago

God I wish I worked for the NSA. "Hey man, are you watching porn?" "Hell yeah! Because terrorists are using it to send messages! It's in the Mise-en-scène! I'm doing this for freedom!" "My God. You're right!" "Also, I'm pretty sure they're doing the same thing in strip clubs. And with really high-quality whiskey. So...I'm going to need some really high-quality whiskey. And a fist-full of singles." "Anything you need! You brave bastard!"

jnbiche 13y ago
I hope I just upvoted you but I was laughing so hard I may have hit the down button by accident.
- zacinbusiness 13y ago
  I go where I'm needed :-)
  - nealabq 13y ago
    You brave bastard!
teamgb 13y ago
The truth is, there probably is a budget for this. "At the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret, Samantha says she lap danced with one of the terrorists. The Terrorists who hijacked a plane and crashed it are said to have stayed and played in Las Vegas." ... "Some big-man terrorist, huh?" Samantha said this week as she took a breather from the two-dozen lap dances she bestows daily upon the lonely at the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret. "He spent about $20 for a quick dance and didn't tip more." http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Agents-of-terror-leave-their-mark-on-Sin-City-2873407.php http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Agents-of-terror-leave-th...
VladRussian2 13y ago
"The things I'm gonna do for my country."

deleted 13y ago

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timbro 13y ago

I think it's becoming very clear now: Either the NSA/government goes or technology goes. If we want to attain a sane degree of democracy in our Western world, both can not continue to coexist in their current form.

notaspy 13y ago
Too late. The national conversation is already insane, with a pandoras's box nature that will not be reversed. The West is fucked, and like any spoiled asshole, is going to wreak the game (life on Earth) for everyone else. God/Allah/ca$h have mercy on our stupid fucking lives.
a3n 13y ago
But you can't get rid of the NSA when there are real threats in the world. It's just not going to happen, because there actually are real threats (the number is debatable), and the existence of more than an anomaly of threats will always be justification for NSA and their ilk. The only way to get rid of the NSA is to get rid of the threats. The most effective long term way is to work for and achieve a much higher level of peace, tolerance and community than the world currently has.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > But you can't get rid of the NSA when there are real threats in the world. Sure you can. The existence of real threats does not mean that the NSA is the only means of dealing with them, nor even that it is an effective way of dealing with them even before considering the negative impacts it has, nor, finally -- and this is the key consideration -- that it is a net positive considering the benefits it provides against the threats against the direct threat it produces to freedom.
  - a3n 13y ago
    I'll concede that getting rid of the NSA regardless of threats is within the realm of possibility. But it's very unlikely. Maybe more unlikely than world peace.

ccozan 13y ago

Next in press: "The real life of Leeroy Jenkins"

7952 13y ago

This sounds like it is actually closer to traditional spy work than most of the revelations we have heard recently. If you tell an NSA agent (or anyone online) something they will know what you tell them. It is more worrying if they are leaving vulnerabilities un-patched as this could allow anyone to exploit the same methods. Are foreign governments using this to spy on Americans?

deleted 13y ago

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r721 13y ago

>According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a "deconfliction" group was required to ensure they weren't spying on, or interfering with, each other. I can't understand how this can be true, 48 million players vs. 30,000-40,000 NSA employees[1], number of agents is probably a few orders lower. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#Employees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#Employ...

prawks 13y ago
Say there are a couple hundred servers in various games they're observing and participating in (not an absurd number given that one person with a 40-hour week could play quite a bit), it's reasonable to assume multiple agencies might overlap servers.
- r721 13y ago
  Well, I was just hinting on overspending: if a few agents are watching one target it's miscommunication and mild overspending, but when there's a whole "deconfliction group" it's overspending squared.
  - VLM 13y ago
    Aside from overspending you might want to look into existing BATF sting operations. If the majority of the criminal activity in an area is law enforcement sting operations trying to catch the small fraction of actual criminals, then you need a deconfliction group or the vast majority of arrests will be law enforcement agents arresting each other. Imagine if the city cops decide to crack down on prostitution by posing as johns in a sting, the same night that county sheriffs decide to crack down on prostitution as prostitutes in a sting, and the streets are 90% full of cops arresting each other. LOL all you want, this has happened IRL, also with drug trafficking. There is also something of a meme that the majority of underage girls on chat services are creepy FBI agents.
    - r721 13y ago

digitalengineer 13y ago

I suppose HN is also infiltrated. Those damn 'hackers' must be reading Hackers News, right? I hear some are even 'small government' types. I can understand why people think that must be the reason every NSA article disappears of the frontpage after 40 comments...

throwawaykf 13y ago

Relevant (from 2010): "Detecting Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing Activity in Second Life and World of Warcraft", Angela S M Irwin, Jill Slay - University of South Australia http://ro.ecu.edu.au/icr/5/ http://ro.ecu.edu.au/icr/5/

Theodores 13y ago

This is not as silly as it appears. I spend a lot of time 'in' an online game playing with one of my relatives. We have a collective circle of online friends and we know when something is up with any of our friends. If they have not logged on all day that is a cause of concern. Equally, if someone is going to be away from the game for a few days then they will let everyone know. I doubt they would email the same to everyone in their address book. With aforementioned relative I know if she is working from home, on business or with time to herself. Her involvement in the game shows that. I know more from her gameplay than I do from emails or from what anyone else in the family has to say. Important family news is relayed in game rather than on the phone or in email. Email might be moved to if something needs to be discussed away from a public forum, but, that first message, in-game is best. As for online friends, I am not that picky. I have online in-game friends from all over the world and I don't care if they are raving Christian nutters. In real life I would not have time for those that want to quote the bible to me every day, but I will tolerate it in-game, so long as they further my game goals. Therefore I am easier to befriend in-game than in real life. I get up to things that my friends and family don't get to hear about, they are not to know. However, if I was to be targeted for spying then the in-game communication would show whether I was busy with something else or not. I don't have to conspire with others in-game for the communications to be useful, so I don't think the NSA/GCHQ actually have to be looking for 'bomb plots', just a level of game devotion.

Zigurd 13y ago
> This is not as silly as it appears. Oh yes it is. This is the readily and deservedly lampoon-ready tail end of snooping on everything without know what you are looking for.
MrZongle2 13y ago
This is not as silly as it appears. No offense, but it IS that silly. Look at all the missed opportunities to stop the 9/11 hijackers. Look at the neglected follow-ups prior to the Boston Marathon bombings. Are we supposed to believe that agencies that ignore or under-prioritize basic law enforcement/counterintelligence warning signs about potential terrorists are somehow going to do something useful with a World of Warcraft chat log? This is waste, fraud and abuse at best. At worst, it is another example of using the "terrorism" boogeyman to monitor innocent people.

dobbsbob 13y ago

Wasn't Topiary busted because of using Xbox live? Wonder about that informant now

rl3 13y ago

I wonder if NSA has reversed chat protocols for non-MMO games in order to facilitate broad, keyword-based intercept directly from player network traffic. Namely games that don't send chat traffic through a centralized server. Perhaps older games that had lackluster releases and are currently ghost towns in terms of active players. If bad guys are trying to fly under the radar, those are probably a smart bet (relatively speaking) compared to games that are popular. Most non-MMOs don't even require an account, let alone billing details. It would be laughable if firing up some ancient, crappy game that nobody plays is all it takes to dodge dragnet surveillance. On the other hand, I imagine dragnet surveillance never was intended to catch smart people (only blackmail them), and terrorists by definition tend to be dumb. Obviously if someone is already targeted, reverse engineering game chat protocols becomes irrelevant. Analysts would just read screenshots and key-logger data courtesy of NSA TAO (or whatever GCHQ's equivalent is).

bassclef 13y ago

i thought this was an onion article.. america has become quite sad.

notaspy 13y ago
The United States is collapsing, and the show will take a while. I'd say sit back and enjoy, but in this show most of us die, and those who don't will wish they did.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  The passive spectator stance is part of what causes this, not really a sane reaction to it. It's not a show, it's the result of our (in)actions.

DanBC 13y ago

They have to monitor the cesspool of XBox Online screeching 14 year olds? I feel sorry for them.

_delirium 13y ago

I thought this was reasonably public information for a few years now. IARPA (basically the intelligence agencies' version of DARPA) has had a series of public grant calls since the late 2000s for research on various kinds of data-mining in MMOs and virtual worlds, ranging from behavior modeling to transaction tracking. Of course, they didn't say precisely why they were interested in such research, but one could surmise... edit: Here's a 2008 Bruce Schneier post about it: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/searching_for_t.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/searching_for...

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

I grew up in a world in which the Stasi infiltrating church groups was seen as state security going beyond the pale. This is just beyond insanity. These agencies should not just be reined in anymore, the need to be abolished and replaced if we are ever to return to an acceptable level of state surveillance.

randomway1234 13y ago

I would LOVEEEEE to get paid by the government to play video games. Sign me up!

adnans 13y ago

Some poor NSA analyst was caught playing WoW in work and had to develop this enormous ploy to explain his actions as a way to capture chat terrorist traffic in-game. It just blew up from there.

mbuchanan 13y ago

Or... you find players that are obsessive 1st person shooter players, you cross reference their mental health history and access to guns. That pops up Adam Lanza in Newtown. You engage him and coerce him. hmm..

JoeAltmaier 13y ago

Most important question not answered: were the Alliance or Horde?

natch 13y ago

I wonder about the financial impact on gaming companies once users get creeped out by this. Nice job, NSA.

ommunist 13y ago

Well, this is a good excuse for gaming MI5 analysts, and probably a reason for their recent Russian vacancies, someone has to play Russian MMORPGs (just kidding). But seriously speaking - do you remember that American spy killed in Tripoli before the Lybian war (if memory serves)? He was a huge authority in EVE Online as it turned out.

BrandonMarc 13y ago

As always, Randall Monroe had a pithy comic about such monitoring: xkcd 1223 "Dwarf Fortress" http://xkcd.com/1223/ http://xkcd.com/1223/