NSA. Now in World of Warcraft

Apparently, the money of American taxpayers is so tight in all places that our (or rather, their) beloved NSA is having fun to the fullest. The New York Times and the Guardian are pleased with the new revelations of Edward Snowden , and now it turns out that the NSA and GCHQ were actively working (and, for sure, are still working) in the game networks of Warcraft, Second Life, and Xbox Live.

Intelligence agents created characters to monitor other players, identify those suspected of using the MMOPRG as a cover for criminal communication, for example, for organizing terrorist cells and coordinating 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 under-cover orcs was so large that they had to create a special coordination group that prevented the spying of agents after each other.

In addition to pumping characters and performing game quests, GCHQ intercepted and saved game traffic dumps for later more detailed analysis. In addition, the NSA organized surveillance of Xbox Live chat rooms, which includes more than 48 million players.

As stated in a published report, with proper use of 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. On game consoles, cameras and microphones usually work, in theory this may allow collecting biometric information, as well as tracking a player in the real world.
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Published documents gave the world new masterpieces of design and photoshop from the special services:







Whether it was possible to identify at least one terrorist or uncover a criminal cell is not reported.