Thursday, February 28, 2008

U.S. Intelligence to Use Virtual Worlds to Fight Terrorism

According to a report on data mining put out by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence dated February 15, 2008, a program has been started to identify possible criminals, especially terrorist, in virtual worlds. This program, known as Reynard, is an “effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games . . .”

It is the goal of this program to profile online gaming behavior with the goal of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world. Some of the functions of this program are to automatically identify faces, events and objects in video. There will also be a surveillance system with a threat warning system and a databases to find patterns of bad behavior. Apparently it will begin to link in-game players with blog postings, emails and other information gain through different data mining techniques.

This raises many questions, both practical and ethical. How will this eventually affect game play? Who will have access to this data and how will it be stored? What will happen to information concerning minors (not miners)? Does this mean groups such as the “Second Life Liberation Army” will be more closely watched that a raider guild on a player verse player (PvP) server? Are huge economic alliances such as Band of Brothers (BoB) going to be carefully watched to see if their strong arm in-game tactics show up in the real world? Will gold farming be seen as a type of terrorism?

This is an issue that bears watching for many reasons, but most of all for the online safety concerns. We have heard too many reports in the last couple of years about government data being stolen or lost.

This government report can be found at http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/datamining.pdf

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