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NSA Surveillance of online games


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Interesting. As part of the Snowden leaks its appears intelligence is monitoring online games like WoW, 2nd Life and I'd guess Eve.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/nsa-and-gchq-agents-spied-on-online-gamers-using-world-of-warcraft-and-second-life-8993432.html

 

We are a small close knit community and I think its unlikely we are harboring any fanatics of the bad kind.  I certainly know we have the good guys playing these games.  As a Director of the British Space Corps and our arms length manufacturing Harland and Wolff Corp I knew Vile Rat of the goons in Eve.  He was ex-SEAL and Info Officer for the Libya Embassy and was killed protecting the Ambassador.  BoB also had a large number of people from the forces of several countries.  I know our Eve management in several Corps were obsessive about our own security and infiltration of hostiles from Russia, Serbia and China. Our favorite act was to sucker in an obvious outsider, get them to fly their goodies out to sovereign 0.0 and then out them and gank them and confiscate their gear.

 

I hate to think the really bad guys are in there too.  I suppose its what happens when we play games in a worldwide manner.

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.... Our favorite act was to sucker in an obvious outsider, get them to fly their goodies out to sovereign 0.0 and then out them and gank them and confiscate their gear.

 

I hate to think the really bad guys are in there too.  I suppose its what happens when we play games in a worldwide manner.

I'm not sure what exactly this is all about? You and your guild mates targeted someone that was a "suspected" OUTSIDER and ganked/robbed them of their stuff under a flag of friendship?

 

Huh???

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Example - applicant to Corp claims to be from London or LA but IP suggests they are in the Ukraine. Gank.

Except now someone is using a VPN to 'hide' their actual location... oh, I know, GANK, right? *shaking my head*

 

That is the exact reason I always despised EVE but to each his own I suppose *shrugs*

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Guys, this is actually done in a much easier manner than you realize. Certain "components" of networking appliances and equipment actually already have the back doors built in (courtesy of Cisco and other network hardware companies build this functionality in their hardware). All they have to do is use a facility like the newest version, built no less than a 30 minute drive from my house. The Feds use these data centers to collect and process HUGE amounts of data, then query against it for what they need. So while many people have the tinfoil hats already on before I posted. But it may make many more go grab the roll from the kitchen, when they find out that this has been happening for well over a decade now (Pre-911). The only real difference now is that storage capacity has become very cheap, and has increased exponentially along with Moore's Law, and the tools for searching the data they collect have become more sophisticated and advanced.

 

Games are simply another form of human socialization that the Fed's monitor. While something as small as this emulator is still likely stashed on some nameless server someplace, I'd be willing to bet we have little to worry about. Internet anonymity has been dead and buried a long time ago. Its just taken the public this long to figure this out.

 

I am not saying what they (Fed's/NSA) are doing is right. In fact as a Systems Admin, I happen to believe quite the contrary. But the only thing we as a public can do about this is to push the politicians to put controls on the NSA via new laws, governing the scope of their data collection. Until this happens, they will likely continue to collect whatever data they wish. This was the topic of a local news story recently (with that datacenter in our backyard, we see stories about this regularly) that even the "experts" at the local University, tend to agree with. But until something is taken on in a legal sense, little can be done to curtail these activities.

 

One crack in the design I suspect they will discover, is that collecting data in the manner that they do, requires a blank paycheck and huge amount of resources. Something that won't likely stay the same with the world economy in the condition it is today.

 

Sorry for the long post. :)

 

-Overt.

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