Just how many people hanging out in Second Life are intelligence operatives, anyway?

Revelations about some of the NSA's mind-numbingly massive surveillance operations have been trickling out for months now. We've learned of cell phone tracking and collection of cellphone metadata, tracking of internet usage, of back doors inserted into programs holding confidential details, thus putting both commercial and private users at risk, not to mention the agency's avowal that its mission is to collect "everything" about everybody. Today's revelation, though, is a real head-scratcher, though I suppose it falls under the collect everything about everybody rubric: the NSA and other intelligence agencies has been spending who knows how much on infiltrating Xbox games and Second Life. Here's a bit of The Guardian's introduction to the revelation:

To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something. 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.

The files were obtained by the Guardian and are being published on Monday in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica.

The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which has more than 48 million players. 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.

Online gaming is big business, attracting tens of millions of users worldwide who inhabit their digital worlds as make-believe characters, living and competing with the avatars of other players. What the intelligence agencies feared, however, was that among these clans of elves and goblins, terrorists were lurking.

The NSA document, written in 2008 and titled Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments, stressed the risk of leaving games communities under-monitored, describing them as a "target-rich communications network" where intelligence targets could "hide in plain sight".

The New York Times dryly noted:

The documents do not cite any counterterrorism successes from the effort, and former American intelligence officials, current and former gaming company employees and outside experts said in interviews that they knew of little evidence that terrorist groups viewed the games as havens to communicate and plot operations.

Games “are built and operated by companies looking to make money, so the players’ identity and activity is tracked,” said Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, an author of “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know.” “For terror groups looking to keep their communications secret, there are far more effective and easier ways to do so than putting on a troll avatar.”

The surveillance, which also included Microsoft’s Xbox Live, could raise privacy concerns. It is not clear exactly how the agencies got access to gamers’ data or communications, how many players may have been monitored or whether Americans’ communications or activities were captured.

One American company, the maker of World of Warcraft, said that neither the N.S.A. nor its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters, had gotten permission to gather intelligence in its game. Many players are Americans, who can be targeted for surveillance only with approval from the nation’s secret intelligence court. The spy agencies, though, face far fewer restrictions on collecting certain data or communications overseas.

The whole thing sounds like a scheme generated by employees who brainstormed a way to get paid for spending all the working hours playing games, don't you think? I mean, consider this passage in the  Guardian article:

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.

A 2007 invitation to a secret internal briefing noted "terrorists use online games – but perhaps not for their amusement. They are suspected of using them to communicate secretly and to transfer funds." But the agencies had no evidence to support their suspicions.

The same still seemed to hold true a year later, albeit with a measure of progress: games data that had been found in connection with internet protocol addresses, email addresses and similar information linked to terrorist groups.

"Al-Qaida terrorist target selectors and … have been found associated with Xbox Live, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and other GVEs [games and virtual environments]," the document notes. "Other targets include Chinese hackers, an Iranian nuclear scientist, Hizballah, and Hamas members."
However, that information was not enough to show terrorists are hiding out as pixels to discuss their next plot. Such data could merely mean someone else in an internet cafe was gaming, or a shared computer had previously been used to play games.

 Despite the lack of evidence that terrorists were using gaming for nefarious ends, it turns out that so many intelligence agencies were involved in infiltrating virtual environments that they actually had to hold meetings to reveal to one another which avatars belonged to infiltrators:

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.

Eventually the NSA started worrying about the content of the games they were monitoring. (Isn't that always the way?)  Here's The Guardian: "Much like the pressure groups that worry about the effect of computer games on the minds of children, the NSA expressed concerns that games could be used to "reinforce prejudices and cultural stereotypes", noting that Hezbollah had produced a game called Special Forces 2." Turns out that the US Army has done the same thing. What's next, do you think? An NSA-generated game in which an NSA agent saves the world because the NSA has vacuumed up everything about everybody? Anyway, I figure this particular revelation can only help recruitment efforts at the NSA's Gaming Monitoring Division. Aren't unlimited "black" budgets a wonderful thing? Why bother with funding the things that make a population strong and thriving (good education for all, decent housing for all, medical care for all, healthful food for all) when you have so much money to blow that you can even afford to allocate some of it to looking for terrorists spending their off-hours playing games? How I love living in the future!