Sister Morphine wrote:Seriously though, I assume it's less a matter of intelligence agencies believing that your average gamer is secretly plotting to commit acts of terrorism and more that they thought it worth checking that people already involved in extremist organisations weren't using gaming communities as a means of communication. It seems reasonable to assume that people who are up to no good are constantly looking for novel ways to communicate.
Former NSA agent John Pescatore, who is presently director of emerging technologies at the SANS Institute, said the NSA's effort to mine intelligence data from online gaming networks is not all that surprising. "Years ago, law enforcement and the intelligence community were concerned about criminal and terrorist use of online services like AOL or Compuserve," he said. "So, I'm not surprised they would look at the online gaming world -- they are just another form of online service."
Article
Whether or not they found anything, or even went about the task particularly competently in the first place is open to question, but I can't really blame them for wanting to check.
Ah, Mr Prescatore, former Gartner dude... there's a whole other subject right there.
Under that definition, any and all communication is worth checking, isn't it? It used to be tapping phone lines, which really meant monitoring inbound and outbound communication to/from a person of interest. That broadened to include monitoring data connections to/from a destination. That, in-turn, broadened because someone can go into an Internet cafe, or wherever, and communicate. The land-line equivalent is tapping every phone in the US because the target could possibly use a payphone, hotel phone, or really, any phone to make a call... so, tap them all.
The idea is to capture everything, and ask for permission later.
Everything means exactly what it sounds like.
Where pesky laws get in the way, offload it to private companies, or find other ways to get it done.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/snowden ... -1.2456886Because that's what friends are for. Or...
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/12/06 ... tive-says/http://www.zdnet.com/nsa-spies-on-its-o ... 000023454/http://rt.com/news/nsa-snowden-spying-us-australia-767/The big problem is that the NSA is doing things beyond what their 'friends' could have possibly imagined.
http://www.dw.de/us-lawmakers-push-for- ... a-17246049Germany is pissed, as are most NATO countries, because the NSA was tapping them while they thought they were helping the NSA tap everyone else! It's ludicrous.
So, if you're fine with tapping everything, everywhere, all the time, then it's all good.
To say that you can't really blame them for wanting to check because
maybe some perhaps-extremists were potentially doing
something based on wild-assed guesses... that's looking at a tiny slice of the issue and saying, "Meh, whatevs".
Me? I think I'll start a new public-cloud-based service called /dev/NSA. For a small fee, I'll pipe your everything right over there. I mean, if you don't have anything to hide, you'll subscribe! Hey, it even rhymes.
You heard it here first!
Blehblah's NSA-as-a-Service*
Because if you don't have anything to hide, you'll subscribe!*Slightly associated with http://foaas.com/
A quantum state of signature may or may not be here... you just ruined it.