Trolls, orcs, and spooks: The breaching of World of Warcraft

When the biggest Internet companies agree on anything, that’s news. When the thing they agree on is taking a strong, direct, unequivocal stance against the federal government? That’s big news. And that’s what happened today.

The great eight

In a signed open letter to the president and congress posted to ReformGovernmentSurveillance.com, AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo all called for Uncle Sam to put a leash on the NSA. Their requests are eminently reasonable.

The letter urges three huge reforms:

1. Limits on data collection. That is, an end to the all-you-can-eat data buffet the NSA has been gorging itself on for the past decade. No more bulk data collection — if you suspect somebody of ill deeds, get a warrant, dammit.
2. Actual oversight. In other words, let’s melt down the rubber stamp that’s been used to approve nearly every request ever made by the surveillance-industrial complex and replace it with a process that considers the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the spooks are overreaching. Essential to that is an adversarial process where someone represents the interests of the not-yet-accused-but-still-spied-upon parties in question.
3. Transparency. Yeah, we know, they’re spies, what they do is secret. But the great eight are asking for the ability to reveal the breadth and depth of intelligence requests, so the public can gauge if it’s Spooks Gone Wild time again.

The letter also calls for international agreements regarding the free flow of information and mutual legal assistance treaties — which speaks as much to the behavior of repressive foreign governments as our own.

Some privacy wonks like Epic’s Marc Rotenberg have pointed out, however, that the companies putting their John and Jane Hancocks to this letter could help out a great deal by not collecting so much personal information or hanging on to it for so long, thus making it a less irresistible target for the spies. On that point, the letter is conveniently mum.

Did I say wow? I meant WOW

Meanwhile, the spook spying scandal gets more and more absurd. As the Guardian’s James Ball reports, the NSA and GCHQ weren’t content with tapping the phones of flesh-and-blood humans — they had to go into the virtual realm. In addition to the Googles, Facebooks, Verizons, and AT&Ts of the world, they targeted World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Xbox Live:

The agency’s impressive arsenal of cable taps and sophisticated hacking attacks was not enough. What it really needed was a horde of undercover Orcs.

That vision of spycraft sparked a concerted drive by the NSA and its UK sister agency GCHQ to infiltrate the massive communities playing online games, according to secret documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Real-life agents have been deployed into virtual realms, from those Orc hordes in World of Warcraft to the human avatars of Second Life. There were attempts, too, to recruit potential informants from the games’ tech-friendly users.

Because if the terrorists attack the IBM Pavilion or Dell Island in Second Life, the loss of virtual life could be catastrophic. People might be forced to re-create their absurdly costumed, indeterminately gendered avatars. Oh, the inhumanity.

This is what happens when you give the kids an unlimited budget for toys and no adult supervision. In fact, as Ball notes, the spooks had to go out of their way to invent a reason to spend their days drinking demon blood and beheading goblins.

One problem the paper’s unnamed author and others in the agency faced in making their case — and avoiding suspicion that their goal was merely to play computer games at work without getting fired — was the difficulty of proving terrorists were even thinking about using games to communicate.

It was apparently a popular idea in the late 2000s, and not just with the NSA. All kinds of spy agencies decided to get in on the fun:

Meanwhile, the FBI, CIA, and the Defense Humint Service were all running human intelligence operations — undercover agents — within Second Life. In fact, so crowded were the virtual worlds with staff from the different agencies, that there was a need to try to “deconflict” their efforts — or, in other words, to make sure each agency wasn’t just duplicating what the others were doing.

Given how sparsely populated Second Life was at that time (and still is), it’s very likely the spooks were spending most of their virtual time spying on each other. Witness: Your tax dollars at work.

Apparently, there was at least one successful outcome to all this virtual role playing. The British secret service managed to crack a crime ring that was selling stolen credit cards inside Second Life: not global terrorism, not some vast dark cabal conspiring to destroy our freedoms, but run-of-the-mill cyber crime. This is why we let them eviscerate due process?

MMORPG monitors

I’m sure as more Snowden documents are revealed, our vision of how the spy complex operates is going to get even more absurd and Strangelovian. What’s next? If you discover you’ve been fined $10,000 for reckless driving in Grand Theft Auto, don’t say I didn’t warn ya.

The only concept possibly more absurd than undercover Orcs is the notion that writing a letter to Congress and the president will do anything at all to rein in the NSA. I’m not convinced that even the great eight have much sway inside the beltway. The only thing that seems to talk there is money. Maybe it’s time to take the NSA’s toys away, or at least the tax dollars it uses to buy them.