Agency explores feasibility of virtual worlds as terrorist havens

Over at Wired today, the eagle-eyed Ryan Singel has a story about a new U.S. government initiative intended to root out terrorists working and playing in virtual worlds.

As Singel writes, the so-called Data Mining Report (click here for PDF) from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence includes information about "Reynard," a "seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the Intelligence Community."

The Data Mining Report continues, suggesting, "The cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral, and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world."

This leads me to several thoughts.

First, it is by no means a new theory that terrorists either might someday use, or perhaps already are using, virtual worlds to gather, train, look for love or whatever else might occur to them. Of course, it's only a theory. No one has yet proven anything untoward is happening or will happen.

That doesn't mean it can't happen, but to date there's been no proof.

Still, the possibility is certainly there, and it can't hurt to have the government spend a little time and money investigating techniques for rooting out any potential terrorist activity in environments like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 4, Second Life, or elsewhere.

Secondly, I have to quibble with the report's assertion that "the cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied."

In 2003, I wrote my first story about the State of Play conference, a confab held at New York Law School that looked into, among other things, the cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds. Since then, there have been dozens of such conferences, symposiums, meetings, and gatherings to look into this exact subject. Just because no one from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence chose to attend those meetings doesn't mean the discussions weren't happening.

Still, to my knowledge, there hasn't been any in-depth study about how to find and eradicate terrorists in virtual worlds, and there's been no doubt in my mind that such efforts would come along one day soon. And I bid the government the best of luck in finding such evil-doers, because who wouldn't?

But what's important is that virtual worlds not be painted with the brush of terrorism before there's any actual evidence that such activity is going on there.

So, I'd like to urge the people working on Reynard to tread carefully and be sure about what they're looking at. If they're not familiar with virtual worlds, they will certainly encounter behavior that is well outside the norm--and it could be tempting to categorize someone dressed as a jihadi as actually being one. Yet it may just be a 14-year-old from Dubuque having some (admittedly poorly expressed) fun with his or her friends.

[rnieves1977]

Virtually impossible to do this

Terrorist training would most likely be done using games like CounterStrike which allows users to create their own environments including models of actual real world buildings and these environments can be run on private servers. So no one would know except those running the game. I don't think that MMORPGs or MMO games in general would be a good place to pick up terrorists anyhow, seems TOO public, unless of course that games theme was terrorism...

[R. U. Sirius]

Oh geez....

the only thing people in Second Life care about is virtual sex with their permanently elongated yoyo's proudly displayed as they walk around naked in the public squares.

As for WoW, my guess is it is a bunch of adolescent teens pretending they are Patton or Rambo.

The other virtual world known as Fox news is probably a bigger threat to democracy and freedom.

[rnieves1977]

understatement of the year

"The other virtual world known as Fox news is probably a bigger threat to democracy and freedom."
has got to be the understatement of the year

[n3td3v]

I have no problems with this

The UK government i know monitor virtual world's for paedophiles rings, and have arrested and shut down certain world's because of it.

I don't see why we can't do it for terrorist's, maybe the general public are looking at this the wrong way.

read this link:
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30100-1290719,00.html

[PzkwVIb]

If they are only monitoring

virtual "public" spaces then okay. But anything more in depth would require a warrant. Unlike so many Brits I have heard from, we care about our civil rights. Whenever we question like this comes up some Brit always asks what the problem is. If you all do that then the movie "V" isn't a fantasy. It is a prophecy.

[xcrusader]

virtual terrorism

oh what a marvelously civilized world we would have if the only acts of terrorism occured in second life.

[scdecade]

Monitoring for dissent

This so called study has absolutely nothing to do with terrorism or preventing crime. In order to create a model of what terrorist behavior looks like they'd need a dependent variable. The dependent variable would indicate whether or not the presence of terrorism exists or not for a given set of virtual world data related to an authenticated indentity. This means they must already have identified an actual act of terrorism to use as the prototype for developing behavioral indicators. Better yet they'd need dozens of confirmed terrorist incidents along with the associated data to have any sort of confidence in the predictive power of the model. As we've all been told ad nauseum there haven't been any acts of terrorism in the US since 9/11.

Avoidence: so simply it's stupid.

So what is this really? It's just another government data dragnet. Having all the data allows the government to quickly identify centers of dissent. That's all this is about. The government wants to know who's saying what to whom about what the government is doing. Communication nodes are easily identified and a National Security Letter is quickly sent. The center of gravity of any group can be easily managed.

[Len Bullard]

Such Models Do Exist

Actually, having looked into that some years ago, such models can be created and do exist. This isn't different from the same models of behavior used by your local police to ferret out confidence men, burglars, etc. Profiling for that is a well-established technique.

There are multiple variables but also multiple and reasonably easy detectable behaviors. The observations don't send them to your house. They raise the probability of the need for more observation, so the 'predictability' thresholds are much lower.

The essential term is 'probable cause' for observation. This has a different set of operational requirements depending on where one is in the world. The rights of a US citizen inside US borders are different from the rights of a person outside those borders under US law.

The obvious problem is a person inside a virtual world has a physical location and a virtual location. The murky legal bit is what laws to apply if any and who has jurisdiction.

But can such models be effectively applied? Yes, they can. It is standard police work. This is nothing new.

[mikeburek]

Perspective

Well, if you go to other places in the world, their "terrorist" (to them the US) would already be doing that.

[mikeburek]

Government registration

Also, this would lead to everyone having to do some type of government registration to get online and open up all your activity to logging by the government.

[mikeburek]

Imaginary world

Isn't one great thing about games that you can pretend be someone else? Or that you get to do something totally not acceptable in the real world?

So if you're tense one day, you have the choice of fragging some people online, or you could go on rampage with a chain saw. Maybe that day they are watching your character and think you are extremely violent. In a few minutes, you have the cops at your door.

Or what if there is a lan party and everyone is playing a racing game. Does this show up as a lot of potential speeders? So then the DoD sends a heads-up to the local police to set a few speed traps outside.

[inachu]

This is super silly stupid!

This is so CIA can go in and force game moderators to make paying customer delete any nic name found desirable to muslim people.

You know......
CIA sitting behind a GM at Blizz HQ.....
GM walks up to character...
Sorry but we know you are a legal paying customer but we do not want BONGHITSBURKA in the virtual world of WOW........... CIA only want the spin to be 100% all the time in the favor of neocons.

[Gamer4Life82]

Crumbling Constitution

I really hate this we the people have to draw the line its only getting worse as we let them snake there way into our everyday decisions we are giving up are rights without a fight and as I recall a lot of people gave up there lives for we today could have these rights we so blatantly disregard we keep letting them make laws like this and in 20 to 50 yrs were living in the movie Demolition Man with one obvious difference they the World power, Us government, NWO whatever you want to call them will have weapons and you better believe it wont be a little electric baton. According to a new law there trying to pass you could be arrested or imprisoned in a camp for being a enemy combatant of the state for raising your voice see it on www.youtube.com Alex Jones conspiracy theorist talk show in Texas also see the videos of the FEMA camps they are getting ready for us its no joke people and its pretty terrifying. A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
John Adams
US diplomat & politician (1735 - 1826)
Please don't be fooled into believing that they cannot or will not get Info on you that can and will be used against you in the court of law or any other way they see fit because they can they will and they do. Should have voted Ron Paul he could have stopped us from heading where Mr Adams is talking about above.

[mrcoder]

Americas Army game too

I think the terrorists would want realistic training

They will want to learn weapons on Americas Army

Swords and sorcery not so much

Somebody call the ARmy and get a statement

Dont want our ARmy training the terrorists with our own training systems

Oh wait a sec...

Ali Mohamed, Staff Sgt, US Army
JFK Special Warfare School, cica 1980s
Training videos
Unauthorized trip to Afghanistan
Triple agent
Expelled from Egyptian Army for extremism
Trained the 9/11 hijackers in commando techniques
"Most dangerous man I ever met." -- US Atty Patrick Fitzgerald

Google it
Read Triple Cross

[Dalkorian]

Don't you get it yet?

The East German Stasi haven't disbanded, they just moved under
the control of fuhrer bushit. Sieg heil. Papers please.

[inachu]

Wylie Cyote will be in Abu Graib prison.

This is little more than just freedom taken away but it is slapping you in the face as they do it.

This is purely a neocon agenda for American Imperialism that which is an oxymoron in itself as People must come to USA to have the american way of life and neocons want the americna way of life exported for a price..... american blood.