NSA. Now in World of Warcraft

Apparently, the money of American taxpayers is so tightly squeezed in all places that our (or rather) their beloved NSA is entertained to the fullest. The editions of the New York Times and the Guardian are pleased with the new revelations of Edward Snowden , now it turns out that the NSA and GCHQ have been active (and probably still work) on the Warcraft, Second Life, and Xbox Live gaming networks.

Intelligence agents created characters to keep tabs on other players, to identify suspects in using MMOPRG as cover for criminal communication, for example, to organize terrorist cells and coordinate attacks. Attempts were made to recruit experienced gamers who have authority and are able to exert some influence among their “social groups”. The number of orcs undercover was so great that they had to create a special coordination group to prevent cases of agents spying on each other.

In addition to pumping characters and completing game quests, GCHQ intercepted and saved dumps of game traffic for subsequent more detailed analysis. In addition, the NSA has organized surveillance of chats on the Xbox Live network, which includes more than 48 million players.

According to a published report, when used properly, online games can be extremely useful for intelligence. For example, they can be used as “windows” for conducting targeted hacker attacks, used to build a user's social graph and his psychological portrait. Cameras and microphones usually work on game consoles, in theory this can allow collecting biometric information, as well as monitoring the player in the real world.

The published documents gave the world new masterpieces of design and photoshop from the special services:







Was it possible to identify at least one terrorist or reveal a criminal cell is not reported.