NSA Sent Undercover Agents to Spy on 'World of Warcraft'

[bogeyman]

The National Security Agency has been monitoring online games including World of Warcraft, Second Life and video games on Xbox Live, sometimes even using undercover agents disguised as trolls or orcs.

http://mashable.com/2013/12/09/nsa-gchq-world-of-warcraft-games/

It seems they are into every aspect of our lives, unless of course you use a typewriter.

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Holy crap, Bogey!

Thanks for the info. I've wondered about this for a long time because WoW collects a HUGE amount of information about players.
Imagine being a 5 year player and talking in trade chat every day. Everything you said collected by the NSA in a folder under some desert, lol.

I was posting in the Prism "email genome" NSA front thread right when you shared this (weird huh? lmao)

Thank you for tipping us off about Blizzard... their software is pretty disappointing anyway, honestly.
It's all some creepy front looks like -- monitoring kids, intelligence levels, etc. Behavior, habits...

they know what you eat
how you speak
if you cyber or not
if you've illegally bought gold from the chinese or supplied it to them
if you are a hacker
if you used a bot
if you met someone online and dated them
how much time you are on and when


I could go on for eternity about how much they know.
It's a virtual world and has much of the factors of the real world at play, and more!


I guess they can even tell if you are a lone wolf or not based on your wow play, heh :( !!!

[Milneman]

I just crapped my Second Life account after almost 10 years....cant be arsed anymore. It was amazing building, but the people are just....white bread.

Warcraft...well....all I can say is, if the NSA is in there, they're in there playing instead of doing their job. That makes more sense to me.


:jaw:

Ok so if you're interested in what kind of things the NSA is looking at when they log into Second Life.....V O I L A ! ;)

sOh8zeH8mtM

:twitch:

Seriously....NSA....in SL....to monitor.....riiiiight.

[Hervé]

Same info from RT viewpoint:

NSA, GCHQ 'planted agents' into World of Warcraft, Second Life to spy on gamers (http://rt.com/news/nsa-uk-spy-world-warcraft-942/)

Published time: December 09, 2013 12:29
Edited time: December 10, 2013 08:32
Get short URL (http://rt.com/news/nsa-uk-spy-world-warcraft-942/)


http://rt.com/files/news/21/6e/e0/00/wow-world-of-warcraft.si.jpg

World of Warcraft (Image from todofondosdejuegos.com)



The NSA and the UK’s GCHQ spying agencies have collected players’ charts and deployed real-life agents into online World of Warcraft and Second Life games, a new leak by whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed.

An NSA document from 2008, titled “Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments,” was published (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/nsa-spies-online-games-world-warcraft-second-life?CMP=twt_gu) Monday by The Guardian in partnership with The New York Times and ProPublica.

In the report, the agency warned of the risk of leaving games communities under-monitored and described them as a "target-rich communications network" where intelligence targets could “hide in plain sight.”

The document showed that the US and UK spy agencies were collecting large amounts of data in the Xbox Live console network, which has more than 48 million players.

Real-life agents have been deployed into the World of Warcraft multiplayer online role-playing game and the virtual world of Second Life, in which people interact with each other through avatars.

The NSA and GCHQ also tried to recruit potential informants among the gamers, the report said.

A visitor plays the computer game "World of Warcraft" at the world's biggest high-tech fair, the CeBIT (AFP Photo / Nigel Treblin)

The NSA had so many agents inside the games that a special "de-confliction" group was set up to make sure they wouldn’t hamper each other’s operations.

If analyzed properly, the online games can become a major source of intelligence data, the unnamed author of the paper stressed.

They could be used to build pictures of the players’ social networks, obtain their photos and geographical locations, as well as gather their communications. The games were also a convenient window for hacking attacks, the report said.

However, the document provided no information about terrorist plots uncovered via online games surveillance, or any proof of terrorist organizations using them for communication.

The document only stated that: “Al-Qaeda terrorist target selectors… have been found associated with XboxLive, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and other GVEs [Games and Virtual Environments].”

Other NSA targets mentioned in the report include “Chinese hackers, an Iranian nuclear scientist, Hezbollah and Hamas members.”

The paper provides only one example when spying in online games managed to produce a piece of usable intelligence data.

After the closure of a website, which sold stolen credit cards details, GCHQ managed to follow and establish contact with the swindlers, as they moved their business to Second Life.


http://rt.com/files/news/21/6e/e0/00/000_par1251621.jpg
Screen grab shows a player entering the virtual campaign headquarters of French comunist party "PCF", located on the "Second life" on-line game. (AFP Photo)


The World of Warcraft creators from Blizzard Entertainment said that they had not given permission to NSA or GCHQ to gather intelligence inside the game, and were “unaware of any surveillance taking place.”

Microsoft and Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, declined to comment on the issue when approached by Guardian journalists.

According to the document, the NSA bosses took some persuading to launch the surveillance program in XboxLive, Second Life and World of Warcraft amid concerns that those behind the program only wanted to play games at their desks during working hours.

Concerns that the games could be used to “reinforce prejudices and cultural stereotypes” were also expressed in the Snowden-leaked document.

It mentioned the ‘Special Forces 2’ game, which was developed by the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, and was used as a “radicalizing medium” to recruit and train “suicide martyrs.”

But the document acknowledged that Hezbollah had only taken a leaf out of the book of the US Army, which produced a free-to-download game for its recruitment page.

The surveillance operations raise concerns about gamers’ privacy, as the ways used to access people’s data and how much communications data is harvested are unspecified, the Guardian said.

It was not clear how the NSA could avoid spying on innocent American citizens, whose nationality and identity were hidden behind their virtual avatars.

Snowden’s revelations of vast domestic and international surveillance and data collection by the US and the UK have been making headlines since June.

For nearly a decade, the NSA used a warrantless web surveillance system with a near-limitless ability to spy on anyone’s phone calls, e-mails, search history and more, obtaining information from major Internet giants like Google, Apple and Facebook.

The leaks about the American intelligence services spying on emails and tapping phones of world leaders has provoked scandals between Washington and a number of countries in Europe, Latin America and Asia.

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

This is incredible @_@

It kinds of makes me think about what happened in Norway.
Andersnordic sure wasn't stopped by either agency,
didn't they know he was a f'n racist thug with delusions of Freemasonic grandeur?

Just saying!

edit: remember the list of mass murderers we made on here close to a year ago,
showing how many of them were WoW addicts and Cod addicts?

Anders Brievik (wow/cod)
Able Seaman Donovan (GTA)
James Holmes (wow/etc)
Jared Loughner (wow)
Wade Michael Page (not sure if he played)

I KNOW there were more names of recent mass murderers who played WoW and still were not stopped or hindered in any way, in fact I personally believe they might have been cherry picked to do those crimes.

end edit: (sorry)

This is something from my Blog:


http://nuclearnuttery.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/war-in-heaven-ii-reposting-my-letter-to-blizzard-entertainment-regarding-the-quality-of-their-product-data-mining-links-to-surveillance-and-darpa-research/

http://nuclearnuttery.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/fite.png?w=908

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/wow-pvpachievements.jpg

WAR IN HEAVEN: DREAMS ARE GOD’S HOUSE — Declaration of Information War Against Blizzard Entertainment (World of Warcraft/VIVENDI) THE WAR IS ON NOW
Posted on May 11, 2011 by nuclearnuttery

http://nuclearnuttery.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/sickolol.png?w=908

(the following is an email I wrote to blizzard)

“William”, c/o Blizzard i.e. Vivendi (hi demo divers!)

It is not your interpretation of the intention of the game that offends me, or your astute judgment of human character.

In fact you are quite right that many people are not taking adequate care of their children, but they are born with the instinct. Instinct can be destroyed via Pavlovian conditioning, a term familiar to most, if not all.

These people, these whom you call “irresponsible and unintelligent”, constitute the majority of your customer base.

It is the science of the psychology and where your customers are right now that offend me and have inspired this vendetta against your company policy.

You, the keepers and the watchers of the house, keep comfortably distant from the people inside and watch them play, but you don’t care about them at all.

You know their names and their numbers, and the details of when they come into your house and when they leave.

You know who their best friends are, what they say to them and why, how they feel about that, and how often,
but you are a black hole.

That aside, certain people are well aware of what certain qualities of light and a/c power can do to the human impulse center.

I wonder if you know how many others are aware.

I wonder if you know how many are aware of the data mining and the invasion of privacy and the transfer of information that goes on between your company and others.

The number of people who know the secret to the game’s addictive nature is about to get bigger, your game will be likened to a drug,

and even Ozzy Osbourne came to your 2009 Blizzcon and said “you have no soul” right on stage to the whole of your “zombie horde”.

Musicians give, but you take. You take their time and give themYvirtual gold, and virtual titles.

You take all those ideas and never give anything back unless it will increase sales and numbers of people attracted to your product.

The people mean nothing to you at all, you just want more and more to come into that world and forget about the real one.

I am one of the people who is willing to say that “massively multiplayer” brain alteration through A/C current and false imprinting is dangerous water,
damnable water, contaminated water.

You slaves can keep towing the party line. I warn you, there are sharks in those waters and someday you who took the paycheck from Blizzard will understand what you really took from us.

Y after thinkiou can say that it is the customer’s fault, but really, the customer is almost always right after thinking this hard and this long.

Your business is identifying the weakness of your target and pretending to offer something useful in exchange for everything they’ve got.

The information you mine from them is the gold in your pocket.

It is one of the sickest ploys I have ever seen; members of your business network have infected our political system with it, and be sure that people will care once informed.

You are very good at trying to shut people up with false guilt, but the truth is, out of all those billions of dollars your company rakes in every year, not one drop of it goes toward improving the real world in any way shape or form that people in my area have seen. And this is a pretty progressive town. I think people here will care because they are politically active when signs start going up and people see them.

I think that is what you people are afraid of, is mobility. You are afraid people will stand up and say, **** you, this is a waste, you need to get a life beyond preying on people for money.

I read about the company employees being unhappy with the direction of policy and game shaping. They did not approve of the direction you took.

I think I will tell that story a few more times. Along with all the research linking insomnia and dream loss with flicker rates of monitors and the radiation given by nearby hardware.

This message is way ahead of your time, to you who reads this first, but someday you might understand how deep into **** creek you people swam.

This email is going public tonight. You Vivendi people are decent psychologists (the only qualification is a fascination with pain) but give terrible advice in terms of the world picture.

You cannot put a man into a box that size and expect him to stay inside for the duration — your pet “teach the computer human emotion and how to talk” project is going to go boom if people get upset.

You will never be able to contain the human spirit in that tiny little thing, and if you try the only thing that will come out of it is more hunger.

And nature simply abhors a vacuum. Your “product” is a sad joke that got too popular too fast, just like every other big money idea in this country lately.
It is a thing that you put money into and it calls you a hero while your family sits in total darkness.

The world will know how the most intelligent players, if not how the most feeling ones, view this issue and your psychology.
They might help me find a cure for it.

Very Sincerely,
Rachel

http://nuclearnuttery.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/mmos.png?w=736&h=1024

[Calz]

Never did WOW.

Played more than I care to admit of other online games but always popped for Archon Armor +100 resist plus 50% bonus to government suckups ...

Still alive despite playing *hardcore* (once you die you die).


Alright ... I hate being serious ... wtf could the ptb/w/spooks/nsa system gain from any information gleened there???


Well ... of course I prefer lightning damage as opposed to fire ... there yah go ...


(sorry ... this borders between laughable and pathetic ... and I simply step aside and let the fools responsible take credit ...)

[Milneman]

Calz the one thing I really noticed in SL at least is that there's lots of egos that try and put big ideas together and then they end up....gone...and stuff is abandoned.

There's a masonic lodge, or was, that disappeared. Churches come, and go, along with nightclubs, political party headquarters, you name it. The one thing I've gleaned from my time in SL is the majority are normal people with big issues who should probably be spending their money on food or clothing rather than digital ideas of what they think they should be like.

Here's the deal. Linden Lab comes up with this great platform, and I still think its fantastic for re-creating buildings, and creating new models of potential buidlings. I have a freeware program I can use now, have my own island simulator on my computer, can just upload blueprints of various houses, then build them and get a real feeling for what was going through the architect's mind...and from an artistic point of view, it's amazing what you can create.

The thing is, when Phillip Rosedale (omg hottie alert) walked away, things started to go downhill and move towards a more economic stand for Linden Labs, like they're upping their game so they can move the company into a position to be able to sell it and make a bundle...if that's possible.

They're making a killing. Here's some figures for you to think about.

1 full simulator, and island, with 15,000 primitive object capabilities, costs between $300-$500 US "used", and about $1000 "new", which is just a fancy way to say I'm going to push this button "X" and an island will pop up on a server somewhere, and for 20 minutes work or less, I've made $1000 US. And now, I can charge $295 US per month to keep it up and running. I was doing this. For creating, but also for escaping. And I think the vast amount of people in SL are just...trying to find a way to get away from the reality of life they're too afraid, or lazy to face...but anyway, back to the numbers.

1 simulator, including start-up costs (let's say new, just for kicks), $4000/ first year, $3000 after that. For little, or no work on Linden Lab's side.

Multiply that by....20,000.

Sitting down? That's between $60,000,000 and $80,000,000 US per year.

And then you include the revenues from the cheaper "mainland" sims...at about $900,000 US....

And that's down from the 25,000 private sims they had going in 2010.

....ok bottom line? I decided it was time to save to go towards a real tiny house instead of a fake big house, even if the fake big house was FLIPPIN GORGEOUS.



Can you say, "baaaaa!" ?

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

http://us.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2013/12/10/tsr-todd-nsa-spying-on-online-gamers-world-of-warcraft.cnn.html

Trying to link the CNN video about WOW and 2nd Life

Grr i can't make it visible, you'll have to click the link :(

[ghostrider]

So invading a video game and spying on users is going to make america safer ??? millions of dollars spent to play video games ... hmmmm xbox must be a real threat to our way of life huh ...The is nothing outside the reach of the NSA , now kids aren't even safe from them , at home , online playing a game and on the other end is an overpaid , colledge educated , spy trolling you and baiting you trying to see where your loyalty is and how far you will go ...they have no shame in their game ...wish we could spy on them and record them and look at any and everything they are involved in , see how they like it ...

[Milneman]

TES!

All I'm gonna say is if the NSA tries to spy on me while I"m playing duplicate contract bridge? Oh snap, bring it on. Bring. It. On.

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

wanted to share a few things with you guys about world of warcraft and masonry.

in the recent WoW expansion Mists of Pandaria, there is a place near Jade Forest called the Veiled Stair. there is an NPC, the last scion of the Black Dragonflight (son of satan lol), named "Wrathion" and also known as "the Black Prince" (sound familiar lol).

anyhow there is a legendary questline (kind of a big deal lmao) in the game that leads the player to a site near the black prince called "Mason's Folly" where you can view the Stairs to Nowhere, the Discarded Tools, and receive fat loot for doing the devil's bidding in game.

if ya don't believe me just look it up and make sure to see the pics.
also read about the famous WoW player Anders Brievik who was also a Mason and ended up losing his mind n shooting up a summer camp.

the Hammer of Folly is left near the Mason's Folly shrine as a reminder of the bluntness and ineffective of force, trust in the powers of this world, and to be careful not to trust too fondly in the ambition of Princes.

:tape: :usa2:

http://wowpedia.org/The_Hammer_of_Folly



The Hammer of Folly
Binds when picked up
"The very hammer that built the stairs to nowhere."
Sell Price: 100g


http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/wowpedia.org/thumb/3/3b/Mason%27s_Folley.jpg/800px-Mason%27s_Folley.jpg?version=13fc9234ebbac9841ec7650fb9c1ca33

http://wowpedia.org/File:Mason%27s_Folley.jpg

http://www.gameusd.com/threads/Illuminati-in-World-of-Warcraft-wut.html


p.s. please google Cheshire "freemasons arms" "folly" and read about the place that opened this year in england

[Omni]

They are interested in societal engineering, therefore they are interested in all data/conversations. I have played wow on and off since it came out. Had my fair share of 'hardcore raiding'... It does make me question if an awakening is even happening witnessing the mindsets in wow. /2 chat or 'trade' chat is a phenomenon in itself... I only log on nowadays to chat in trade about stuff trying to wake up some young people. I get very angry people targeting me on there for talking about conspiracy... However I am ending my sub in oct when it runs out. Think I've had my fair share of gaming and my time gaming is pretty much over. I played hardcore for many years in various genre. Was actually ranked #1 in the world in a first person shooter in my hayday, and lead a 'clan' to a record of 93Wins-1loss. Our 1 loss came to a clan named "GOD" and we hadn't played in months, shouldn't have even tried playing lol. I would have loved to see my record be 92-0 instead of 93-1.. Oh well...

It doesn't surprise me the NSA tracks wow conversations. This isn't the first time I have heard it either...

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

About one week ago in trade chat on a server I visit, we actually had a talk about the future of America, the government, Kennedy, all kinds of stuff.
Usually people would say shut up, but this time it was different. Some of the kids are able to feel the extreme global tension right now and were willing to talk about it.

Especially the European players who are on the west coast servers. They aren't afraid to talk about uranium and oil, etc.

[TargeT]

your still playing ?

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Sad to say yeah a bit.
It's a cheap pastime 8( at least until the expansion hits.

Might be an ideal time to 'get rid' of my account for good -- $ :P

p.s. do you also?

[TargeT]

haha, I agree... I play an MMORPG also, but knowing your strong (seemingly) anti-wow feelings I'm surprised to see you there again.

as for the OP... good lord, SIGN ME UP! I'll play games and listen for "terrorists" haha... what a job... :wacko: