Bill Schneider, Urban Airship, Location & Context World with Jeff Frick @theCUBE #theCUBE #LoconWorld #SiliconANGLE #UrbanAirship he NSA, and its UK sister the GCHQ, have both seen operatives spending long hours in front of computer screens and under headphones listening to the chatter of a million wiretaps, Skype calls, and cell phone conversations—but what hasn’t been revealed until now is how much time the spy agencies have spent in the virtual worlds of video games. Now, secret documents leaked by the infamous whistleblower Snowden have revealed the progressive push by the snooper elite into the “virtual” lives of gamers. These files were obtained by The Guardian and are being published on Monday in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica. According to the files, the NSA and GCHQ have sent operatives into the strange worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life in order to get a bead on what potential terrorists (or at least hardcore raiders) were talking about in the land of Azeroth. After all, video games have long become a powerful social tool for individuals seeking to get into the life of a supermodel, elf, or orc—and as a result, so could criminals. “We are unaware of any surveillance taking place,” said a spokesman for Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif., which makes World of Warcraft. “If it was, it would have been done without our knowledge or permission.” World of Warcraft is the largest MMO to ever be built and has seen in its heyday over 11 million players—now down to around 7 million it’s still a juggernaut in the industry. Why spy on gamers? Analysis of the document published by The Guardian provides a good example of the psycology of why spy agencies saw in 2008 a reason to get into the virtual world and video game gig: it’s where the people are at. The NSA document, written in 2008 and titled Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments, stressed the risk of leaving games communities under-monitored, describing them as a “target-rich communications network” where intelligence targets could “hide in plain sight”. Games, the analyst wrote, “are an opportunity!”. According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a “deconfliction” group was required to ensure they weren’t spying on, or interfering with, each other. If properly exploited, games could produce vast amounts of intelligence, according to the NSA document. They could be used as a window for hacking attacks, to build pictures of people’s social networks through “buddylists and interaction”, to make approaches by undercover agents, and to obtain target identifiers (such as profile photos), geolocation, and collection of communications. The best part of the information gathered from the document is that playing in virtual worlds to gather intel on criminals and terrorists became so popular amidst the FBI, NSA, CIA, GCHQ (to name a few alphabet soup) that there became a real possibility of accidentally stepping on each others toes or spying on one another. Thus the necessity of the “deconfliction” group.