You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than… Xbox Live? OK, we might not be willing to repeat some of the trash talk we’ve heard there, but it’s a bit amusing to imagine a bunch of intelligence agents deciding that it’s a good place to do surveillance for terrorists. It’s much easier to imagine they just thought it’d be fun.
The Guardian has drawn attention to documents leaked by Edward Snowden that the NSA has been keeping watch over gaming communities since 2008 and even had agents pose as players in online games. Xbox Live was supposedly the largest target, but other multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft and Second Life were monitored, as well.
For its part, World of Warcraft publisher Blizzard Entertainment said it was unaware of the NSA’s activities, and other companies involved have refused to comment. Apparently, none of the files suggest any actual terrorists were caught, so we hope the NSA operatives at least had fun. Also, if someone could please direct us to the guy who convinced his boss he needed to play online games to do his job, we’d really appreciate it.
Seriously, if you’re one of the people at the NSA who gave this plan the go-ahead, repeat “spy by posing as a player in an online game” to yourself. If it starts to sound suspiciously like “be a player in an online game,” then you’re getting somewhere.
(via Engadget, image via Pure Geekery)
- Maybe the awful VGX awards were just some kind of terrorist torture
- You don’t need to spy; online game streaming is a huge deal
- Watch out, NSA. The space and cyber lawyers (which are real) may not take kindly to this
