World of Warcraft players and users of Xbox Live have been targeted by the NSA according to a report that surfaced yesterday.
The paper, published in this instance by the Guardian, is called 'Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments' (GVEs). It's another of the Edward Snowdon leaks, and paints a picture of America's National Security Agency monitoring the servers of titles like World of Warcraft in order to chase down leads on terrorist cells using the GVEs to communicate. We've highlighted several sections from the report below:
Many GVEs allow convergent technologies to intermingle such as XboxLive which can be run via an Xbox 360 gaming console and/or connect via a PC to normal MSN chat. Second Life offers the ability to anonymously text a GSM phone (SMS) and soon they will offer anonymous voice calls so that phone numbers do not have to be known by either party and won't show up in collection.
Al Qaida terrorist target selectors and GVE executable have been found associated with Xbox Live, Second Life, World of Warcraft and other GVEs in PINWALE network traffic, TAO databases and in forensic data.
GVEs are an opportunity! We can use games for: CNE exploits, social network analysis, HUMINT targeting, ID tracking (photos, doc IDs), shaping activities, geo-location of target and collection of comms. These applications and their servers are trusted by their users and makes a connection to another computer on the internet, which can then be exploited. Through target buddylists and interaction found in the game and on gaming websites, social networks can be diagrammed and previously unknown SIGINT leads and connections and terrorist cells discovered.
Recommendation: Protocol Exploitation, SLF and TAO should begin profiling their databases and the GVEs for collection and exploitation possibilities. CT SIGDEV along with CT TOPIs will study the collected traffic to find and track targets of interest. We need to develop a viewer database that allows linguist/analysts to view/experience voice/text/video traffic together to archive the GVE data associated with reporting.
This document comes at the same time as a variety of major online companies (including Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Twitter) have written an open letter to the American government demanding changes to the laws regulating government surveillance. You can read their calls for reform here.
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