Spooncraft

That’s right folks, it seems the G-Men might be closer than you think. Time to delete that porn and scrape the hard drive clean, the gov’nant might be watching.

Nah I jest, it’s no creepy conspiracy at all really. Virtual worlds like that of World of Warcraft are home to thousands upon thousands of people in the world. So, wherever there’s this large a group of people it’s not a bad idea to throw the nets in and see what comes out.

That’s what the US Government is looking at doing. In this article, supplied through Wired, it outlines the US intelligence community is going to develop software and the likes in order to try and weed out terrorists in virtual worlds. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence submitted a report to Congress on their plans to use data mining in virtual communities to root out spies. The project will involve sifting through vast amounts of data, looking for suspicious behavior and actions.

The Intelligence Community wants to target MMOs because they typically fall outside the purview of study. The spying project would only use publicly available data. The findings of the endeavor would not be classified. The project will begin with a small effort, and if it proves fruitful may be expanded to a much larger scale.

There’s a lot of worry going around to those in the community that are aware of this development, about personal rights and privacy. Blizzard has yet to make a formal or any response to the topic at all.