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NSA and GCHQ spied on WoW / Second Life and Xbox players and used covert players to extract informa
CalmOceans
Member UncommonPosts: 2,437
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It's not a matter of "supporting them". We know now that all the big companies are forced to comply (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc.), and have no choice in the matter. Microsoft has likely been doing so for much longer than the others, since Windows is the biggest platform, and has been for ages.
I wonder what information they extracted from WoW. Lolz and uber-pwnage?
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
My guess is they wiretapped the network and when they needed to extract specific information they had an NSA player infiltrate the guild or became friends with the player until they got the info they needed.
I'm not surprised about Xbox Live, it's fully tapped by the NSA just like Skype.
So is your cell phone, home phone, personal emails, work emails etc etc. I think it's a joke when people are like "I'm not buying an xbox one cause the NSA will watch me" come on give up your phone, your emails, you tablets and computers, just a ridiculous thought process if you ask me.Given that, according to the full article, it's doubtful whether the NSA actually found any terrorist cells in WoW or SL, it seems quite credible that this was just an elaborate line of bullshit some ops came up with in order to get their employers to pay their WoW subs.
even your gaming PC may be compromised
http://www.afr.com/p/technology/intel_chips_could_be_nsa_key_to_ymrhS1HS1633gCWKt5tFtI
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Yes, because otherwise visiting internet leaves no trails, oh wait IP and MAC address. I think it's pretty clear that if NSA has spied internet hubs regulary(you know machines that run mostly Unix or Linux, Linux supports NSA headline!) they have information of any network.
I still think whole WoW thing is more fantasy stuff than reality, maybe they tried it but seriously that would need so much manpower to snoop stuff compared to other stuff. Also what kind a terrorist plans they think finding inside WoW guilds, suicide bombing of Anduin Wrynn
.
But hey it's Guardian, they have political agenda to show NSA bigger than it really is(because no left political agency would be snooping it citizens, oh crap Communism). Overall whole thing is just so funny because we have heard these rumors for last 20 years and more. So finding people that think they can be anonymous in internet is just hilarious.
It's not hard for them I imagine. Just monitoring the player reveals if their target is at home or not, that alone is probably very valuable.
The people at the NSA are human just like everyone else, which means they are lazy and prefer to goof off over working. This quote form the article pretty much sums it up:
"One problem the paper's unnamed author and others in the agency faced in making their case – and avoiding suspicion their goal was merely trying to play computer games at work without getting fired – was the difficulty of proving terrorists were even thinking about using games to communicate."
Basically they were trying to think up how they could work up an "online games scare" in order to get paid to play WoW all day.
similar stuff has happened before but for research
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/02/aaas-60tb-of-behavioral-data-the-everquest-2-server-logs/
EQ2 fan sites
I think it's interesting that with Google, Microsoft and other 'tech giants', the spy agencies can just take the data they want. With video games they have to insert actual people even though MMORPG players are monitored much more closely than people using any Google or Microsoft service.
That close monitoring explains why MMORPGs are not really good places to conduct clandestine business. I can't decide if that's good or bad.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
A red flag should have gone up when every single person who this was mentioned to said, "Yes, yes I will play video games all day for the good of the country."
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Actually, they are likely better places to conduct such activity than any other online service would be. It's a closed/private system, and I would imagine that the data flow to and from something like a WoW server isn't the most friendly thing to "decode" and filter through without some serious custom code written.
It puts them in a situation where they have to use "human intelligence" (real people) just like they do when needing to get information out of foreign lands.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
It puts them in a situation where they have to use "human intelligence" (real people) just like they do when needing to get information out of foreign lands.
Blizzard doesn't log everything players are doing only to make the information incomprehensible. It is bound to be very organized so Blizzard can do useful things with it. If the NSA or equivalent British agency obtained the information it would be very organized because it has to be to be useful. The quantity of information would not be a road block. These are organizations that are monitoring and creating meaningful data from five billion cell phone location signals on a regular basis. They also had no issue processing nearly all information provided by Google outside of the country, in addition to apparently hacking Google and Microsoft's secure servers and simply bypassing their encryption at the same time they were processing all those cell phone location and identity records. These are gargantuan operations.
I'm thinking it's more along the lines of the agencies sending out feelers to see if there's actually anything there. Why spend the time, money and resources on collecting all of Blizzard's data, if there's no indication that there's anything there? So step one is to send in human intelligence to see if there's anything worth looking at, besides gold farmers.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
This should surprise no one.
I remember reading as such years ago - that "federal agents" monitored WoW because it was being used as a chat room for "terrorists" and they would just substitute an in-game place for a real place, and talk about their plans rather openly.
Apparently killing Onyxia is against the national interest.
If what you are saying was true, then there wouldn't be much need for "boots on the ground" human intelligence. 99.9999999% of the chat data logged would be completely useless to the government. Then you start factoring in "coded" language and stuff, and that data stream becomes even more difficult to deal with.
I do agree with you that they would likely need to have a reason to be looking at a particular game anyway. Such as getting intelligence that certain persons of interest are playing the game in the first place.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Nope. You can run the game as a non-administrator. In order for a root kit to work, it would either have to completely bypass the system's security, which is a big no-no, or you have to start the game as an administrator. Much of the game runs server side to handle security.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Blizzard doesn't log everything players are doing only to make the information incomprehensible. It is bound to be very organized so Blizzard can do useful things with it. If the NSA or equivalent British agency obtained the information it would be very organized because it has to be to be useful. The quantity of information would not be a road block. These are organizations that are monitoring and creating meaningful data from five billion cell phone location signals on a regular basis. They also had no issue processing nearly all information provided by Google outside of the country, in addition to apparently hacking Google and Microsoft's secure servers and simply bypassing their encryption at the same time they were processing all those cell phone location and identity records. These are gargantuan operations. I'm thinking it's more along the lines of the agencies sending out feelers to see if there's actually anything there. Why spend the time, money and resources on collecting all of Blizzard's data, if there's no indication that there's anything there? So step one is to send in human intelligence to see if there's anything worth looking at, besides gold farmers.
If what you are saying was true, then there wouldn't be much need for "boots on the ground" human intelligence. 99.9999999% of the chat data logged would be completely useless to the government. Then you start factoring in "coded" language and stuff, and that data stream becomes even more difficult to deal with.
I do agree with you that they would likely need to have a reason to be looking at a particular game anyway. Such as getting intelligence that certain persons of interest are playing the game in the first place.
There's no reason to think that human agents are not needed. Gathering and processing location and personal connection information doesn't give any particular insight into what people are talking about, just that they are related or near each other. Having that information for a billion people doesn't really tell anyone which of those people are the important ones. I would bet there are more spies now than there have ever been before. If nothing else it takes real people to go kidnap the interesting people so you can have them decode things for you.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
As much as I hate the Gov and the NSA/DHS, this is actually a smart move.
Why would a criminal organization risk getting caught planning something on a Cell phone when the whole group can get WoW subs, create a guild and start planning in some backroom in Stormwind.
Its brilliant actually
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