Spy agencies in covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online gaming
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I find the task of finding terrorist communications in MMO's so daunting that I'd never even consider making an attempt at it. However, the NSA is one organization that seems to have nearly infinite resources to throw at impossible problems. This is an organization that is literally trying to "hack the planet"! I seriously doubt they'll ever managed to uncover anything significant, even if they're plugged directly into the servers at Blizzard, etc.. However, at least some spooks get to play WoW for a living on the government's dime!
Seriously... The NSA makes military spending look frugal!
A better option for covert communication would be a more open platform such as Second Life, where you can upload custom content. But, frankly, there are so many options if you have any imagination... If what they're really worried about is recruiting and outreach then they at least only need to worry about reasonably popular alternatives.
Amazing too that we can't find money for food assistance (SNAP) to poor people but we can pay NSA agents for fools' errands in video games. I'm waiting for the revelation that Gen. Alexander's NSA underwrote "The Mists of Pandaria" with tax dollars.
https://twitter.com/NASA_SLS/status/401818661931208704
"I love space exploration, but the expenditure simply cannot be justified when kids die for lack of clean water"
"But as we're discussing children's lives only someone lacking a moral compass would consider it an issue here"
I'm complaining about us wasting money on COMPLETE NONSENSE. If you think "investigating" whether Al Quaeda is communicating versus gnomes jumping on top of the auction house is a valuable use of taxpayer resources, why aren't we investigating whether terrorists are using kebab interval-spacing as a communications medium?
Funding SNAP will feed my fellow hungry humans. Funding the NSA will... Who knows? We just have to take their lying word for it.
Usually I treat posts like yours with a base modicum of respect, but I'd really think twice the next time if I were you.
Precisely. WOW itself is the first level of steganography ("I'm not communicating, I'm gaming"), but one can think of many more, inside and outside of MMOs.
Given proper use of steganography, small groups will always be able to communicate with low risk of detection. But for obvious reasons, you will always have to roll your own scheme, and may end up overlooking aspects that render it insecure.
Your best bet is to read whitepapers on stego. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6843575 for related discussion.
what about "provably secure steganogrpahy"? there seems to be some papers on this. isn't is by definition science, not art?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel
It's important to realize that any system of any size will be packed with covert channels; the thing to do is try to identify them all and drive their bandwidth down to an acceptable level.
https://www.schneier.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?tag=stegan...
One must be careful with it. IIRC, Anna Chapman was a pro among Russian spies, but at one point she got so confused by the steganography software on her laptop that she asked another known spy for help in using it ... before she realized she was talking to a CIA agent trying to figure her out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Chapman
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20009101-38.html
Bruce Schneier's articles -- and his readers' comments -- provide fascinating details and analysis of these topics.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/07/cryptography_...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/07/protecting_e-...
al Qaeda is known to have used steganography within porn videos.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/steganography-how-al...
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/watermark-screenshots-World...
The whole point of steganography is that you're supposed to transmit information while simultaneously concealing the fact that information even exists in the first place.
As long as you have a premeditated code, you can use practically anything to facilitate such communication, and the chances of it being uncovered are dubious.
This does not justify such ridiculous intelligence operations.
That isn't something you can decide by waving your hands at games. WoW is cheap compared to even simple things purchased by the military on a regular basis.
I suppose the bigger bang for the buck would be in the metadata. Knowing who is playing at the same time, or who is looking at each other's profile or whatever.
There would be trillions of possible outlets for such communication, making looking for those specifically in MMO extremely futile.
Terrorism is the root password to everything from our constitution to our tax load. Playing up these charlatans and lifelong federal bureaucrats as some kind of saviors against the mythical hacker terrorist is a little much in my book. These are pork programs that go nowhere and do nothing but enrich the inside players and connected defense contractors.
Agreed.
> Terrorism is the root password to everything.
Terrorism is pretty scary stuff, it's intended to be scary. No way are people in government singing hallelujah everytime innocent people are killed, look we can fund more nefarious shit! They're honestly trying to do the right thing and simply went overboard with collecting too much data.
Could it be that he just supports or believes an opinion you don't?
Think back to 2003 and the run-up to the Iraq war; which was the first time we saw what a domestic propaganda initiative on the internet looked like. Think about how much more sophisticated those tools are today. How defining and shaping issue oriented discourse can be viewed as a zero-sum game where one side "wins" and all other viewpoints are neutralized.
The thing is; once the suspicion has been planted that not all of the people one is talking to are honest participants it is impossible to ignore; impossible to disprove; and very difficult to act against.
Terrorism is a convenient trope to get people to willingly relinquish their liberties, just like "for the children" but with the goal of deploying ubiquitous scanners, drones, and microphones instead of censorship schemes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
I agree with the mission. Just not with their methods.
Hell, you can see this kind of behavior in tower defense games; people build a great power and dare anyone to cross them. The only difference is that real lives are at stake, but I think the government has proven they don't see the real lives in their game. For example, they don't even tally civilian casualties. They only even seem to care about such things because they don't want to anger the public.
I disagree with you on this one. I know this is a crazy conspiracy theory video, but please take the 30 minutes to watch it.
When you say nobody in "government" is excited, you need to refine the meaning of the term "government": Look at the players who have been at the center of this for the last 3 decades: GHW Bush and Carlyle group CIA drugsters.
I'm not scared of acts of terrorism. I am much more concerned about vehicles killing cyclists and, really, the brain dead response the non terrorists will/have had when it comes to terrorism, like taking away our freedoms, wasting my tax dollars, and general stupid panic.
Are there terrorists? Yes, some. But to them it's like a boogeyman under every bed and in every closet.
Would they have caught Anna Chapman if she had met her case handler virtually instead of a coffee shop.
"Hey man, are you watching porn?"
"Hell yeah! Because terrorists are using it to send messages! It's in the Mise-en-scène! I'm doing this for freedom!"
"My God. You're right!"
"Also, I'm pretty sure they're doing the same thing in strip clubs. And with really high-quality whiskey. So...I'm going to need some really high-quality whiskey. And a fist-full of singles."
"Anything you need! You brave bastard!"
"At the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret, Samantha says she lap danced with one of the terrorists. The Terrorists who hijacked a plane and crashed it are said to have stayed and played in Las Vegas." ... "Some big-man terrorist, huh?" Samantha said this week as she took a breather from the two-dozen lap dances she bestows daily upon the lonely at the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret. "He spent about $20 for a quick dance and didn't tip more."
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Agents-of-terror-leave-th...
The article is pretty good in most areas, but an epic fail in this specific small subpart. The solution to the problem is simply follow the cultural trend of redefining what terrorism means. The article fails by listing some actual real terrorists. The article succeeds by listing non-terrorists as terrorists such as academic scientists who are employed in a perfectly legitimate capacity by a government that our government doesn't happen to like at this moment. The article fails by not mentioning that most of the terrorists they're tracking are prank telephone callers, internet bullying, anyone who ever disagrees with anything our government does in any manner or the actions of any individual government employee, anyone who belongs to a religion or no religion at all, political candidates and supporters on whichever is the losing side, teens toilet papering houses, minorities who do illegal things like drive while black in white neighborhoods, you know, new school terrorism as opposed to the old school stuff they used to be concerned with like crashing planes and stuff.
What we really need is a .gov organization oriented against old school terrorism instead of the new school 1984 stuff.
As a followup to my original post we probably need two new .gov agencies not just one. One would focus on state level threats to the country like foreign nuclear scientists, pretty much the pre-1984 style CIA stuff, or at least the fraction of CIA activities that were actually legal. The other would be more police like and focus on nutty individual threats, that aren't national threats, more or less James Bond evil villain type stuff. Both groups might or might not "fit" under the same gov org. Probably neither fits under the existing 1984 organizations, and unfortunately no one is apparently working on those two problems, in favor of the much more exciting "stamp out political dissidents / implement Stasi/SS secret police in the USA" model.
With a side helping of the .gov orgs who used to defend us from "THEM" are now going all 1984 on us, so who, if anyone, is still watching "THEM"? Well... no one, anymore. Which is in itself kinda scary. .gov no longer defends us from that kind of stuff anymore, so the only way to justify spying on foreign nuclear scientists (which used to be a perfectly legit .gov job...) is to mislabel them as terrorists.
If you convert all your police to secret police to spy on political dissidents, who's left to pull over drunk drivers? Well, unfortunately, no one.
> > This is beyond farcical. Does any working at GCHQ or NSA actually have a fully functioning brain?
> Yes they do, and recognize a well paid cushy job when they see one.
This is just beyond insanity.
These agencies should not just be reined in anymore, the need to be abolished and replaced if we are ever to return to an acceptable level of state surveillance.
I spend a lot of time 'in' an online game playing with one of my relatives. We have a collective circle of online friends and we know when something is up with any of our friends. If they have not logged on all day that is a cause of concern. Equally, if someone is going to be away from the game for a few days then they will let everyone know. I doubt they would email the same to everyone in their address book.
With aforementioned relative I know if she is working from home, on business or with time to herself. Her involvement in the game shows that. I know more from her gameplay than I do from emails or from what anyone else in the family has to say. Important family news is relayed in game rather than on the phone or in email. Email might be moved to if something needs to be discussed away from a public forum, but, that first message, in-game is best.
As for online friends, I am not that picky. I have online in-game friends from all over the world and I don't care if they are raving Christian nutters. In real life I would not have time for those that want to quote the bible to me every day, but I will tolerate it in-game, so long as they further my game goals. Therefore I am easier to befriend in-game than in real life.
I get up to things that my friends and family don't get to hear about, they are not to know. However, if I was to be targeted for spying then the in-game communication would show whether I was busy with something else or not. I don't have to conspire with others in-game for the communications to be useful, so I don't think the NSA/GCHQ actually have to be looking for 'bomb plots', just a level of game devotion.
Oh yes it is. This is the readily and deservedly lampoon-ready tail end of snooping on everything without know what you are looking for.
No offense, but it IS that silly.
Look at all the missed opportunities to stop the 9/11 hijackers. Look at the neglected follow-ups prior to the Boston Marathon bombings.
Are we supposed to believe that agencies that ignore or under-prioritize basic law enforcement/counterintelligence warning signs about potential terrorists are somehow going to do something useful with a World of Warcraft chat log?
This is waste, fraud and abuse at best. At worst, it is another example of using the "terrorism" boogeyman to monitor innocent people.
In other news, the NSA to start a new reality TV show: Living Room Security! Find out who's added to a no-fly list this week as we take you live inside your own living room. Brought to you by the Xbox Kinect.
I have no evidence that the NSA has done this.
To the NSA, your user base is just another set of people to monitor, just another set of machines to infiltrate. They don't care about your user's trust.
edit: Here's a 2008 Bruce Schneier post about it: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/searching_for...
I can't understand how this can be true, 48 million players vs. 30,000-40,000 NSA employees[1], number of agents is probably a few orders lower.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#Employ...
Imagine if the city cops decide to crack down on prostitution by posing as johns in a sting, the same night that county sheriffs decide to crack down on prostitution as prostitutes in a sting, and the streets are 90% full of cops arresting each other. LOL all you want, this has happened IRL, also with drug trafficking. There is also something of a meme that the majority of underage girls on chat services are creepy FBI agents.
"Detecting Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing Activity in Second Life and World of Warcraft", Angela S M Irwin, Jill Slay - University of South Australia
Namely games that don't send chat traffic through a centralized server. Perhaps older games that had lackluster releases and are currently ghost towns in terms of active players. If bad guys are trying to fly under the radar, those are probably a smart bet (relatively speaking) compared to games that are popular. Most non-MMOs don't even require an account, let alone billing details.
It would be laughable if firing up some ancient, crappy game that nobody plays is all it takes to dodge dragnet surveillance. On the other hand, I imagine dragnet surveillance never was intended to catch smart people (only blackmail them), and terrorists by definition tend to be dumb.
Obviously if someone is already targeted, reverse engineering game chat protocols becomes irrelevant. Analysts would just read screenshots and key-logger data courtesy of NSA TAO (or whatever GCHQ's equivalent is).
Perhaps these were the targets.
"Sure, I can op you... but we like to know when ops will be around, you know, for coverage so there's always one online, so if you could just let us know when you'll be working (embassy driver) overtime hours..."
"This 'dream' is trying to tell someone something. I just can't figure out what 'yiffing' is..."
"The inf1del n00bz of the Alliance, will be crushed by
our grand Jihad Horde. We will bomb their cities, and rain
death in Arathi Basin on all major servers. Allah is great!"
Basicly, I hate the NSA's spying, but if they want to spy on me in ridiculously convoluted ways... it's better than them being actually competent.
Persephone has a "WWLJD" bracelet. When she's trying to infiltrate Schiller's compound, everyone naturally assumes it stands for "What would Lord Jesus do?" Actually, it's "What would Leeroy Jenkins do?"
I doubt they intended to find anyone directly using this information. Instead, what is more likely is that collecting data in these games might help identify "friends" of people considered suspicious via some other means.
Although now that I think of it, games like WoW and EVE Online do make for quite a milieu. I know that several of my colleagues play such games and with each other.
It certainly chills the spine a bit when you realize that there are people who've had this kind of data for quite some time, using it for who-knows-what...
I feel sorry for them.
Leaving such communication channels unmonitored would pose a potential threat. This behavior is in line with the current state of affairs and should be expected.
Either the NSA/government goes or technology goes.
If we want to attain a sane degree of democracy in our Western world, both can not continue to coexist in their current form.
The only way to get rid of the NSA is to get rid of the threats. The most effective long term way is to work for and achieve a much higher level of peace, tolerance and community than the world currently has.
Sure you can. The existence of real threats does not mean that the NSA is the only means of dealing with them, nor even that it is an effective way of dealing with them even before considering the negative impacts it has, nor, finally -- and this is the key consideration -- that it is a net positive considering the benefits it provides against the threats against the direct threat it produces to freedom.