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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (756858)	12/9/2013 4:41:08 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574122

Another NSA Target: World of Warcraft AGENTS SAW GAMES AS A 'TARGET-RICH COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK' By Matt Cantor, Newser Staff newser.com ( Is N. Korean agent Tenchusatsu "hiding in plain sight" on WOW? ) Posted Dec 9, 2013 9:47 AM CST (NEWSER) – It's not just us humans who have faced NSA surveillance: Orcs and elves were also among its targets. The agency, along with its British cousin GCHQ, did some of its spying in the virtual world, through games like World of Warcraft and Second Life, the Guardian reports, based on the latest Edward Snowden documents. A 2008 NSA document labeled the virtual worlds a "target-rich communications network" that could allow targets to "hide in plain sight." The document argued that the games offered terrorists a place to communicate and even shift funds in secret, the New York Times notes. Second Life, for instance, had anonymous texting, in-game calls, and noticeboards in the works that could facilitate covert communications. Amongst the agencies' collection was reams of data from the Xbox Live network. There were enough NSA agents working in the games that officials had to develop a "deconfliction" group, the Guardian notes, in order to prevent accidental snooping on each other. Yet there's no evidence that the agencies' in-game activities stopped any terror—or even that the virtual worlds were being used for such purposes. Notes a cybersecurity expert, games "are built and operated by companies looking to make money, so the players' identity and activity is tracked. For terror groups looking to keep their communications secret, there are far more effective and easier ways to do so than putting on a troll avatar." World of Warcraft maker Blizzard says any surveillance "would have been done without our knowledge or permission."

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (756858)	12/9/2013 7:28:00 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574122

I do, but I'm hoping the left will blink first. If it involves blinking, then you don't know. Look, virtually every time the Right clutches its pearls, points and screams about this or that, it invariably turns out to be nothing. Every once in a while y'all turn up an Anthony Weiner, but usually it turns out to be nothing. Heck, Jean Dixon had a better hit rate than y'all have had over the past few decades. So forgive me if I don't get worked up too much about what seems to be yet another string in assaults on random pedestrians by small groups of under-employed and/or bored young males. This has only been going on for millennia. Should the police be extra-cautious? Sure. But this almost certainly not an epistemic threat to the country.