{"id":186602,"date":"2013-12-09T20:32:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-10T01:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/12\/09\/your-tax-dollars-at-work-2\/"},"modified":"2013-12-09T20:32:00","modified_gmt":"2013-12-10T01:32:00","slug":"your-tax-dollars-at-work-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/12\/09\/your-tax-dollars-at-work-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Tax Dollars at Work"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"border: 1px solid black; float: right; margin: 0px 10px; padding: 5px; text-align: center; width: 342px;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"258\" marginheight=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"http:\/\/graphics8.nytimes.com\/bcvideo\/1.0\/iframe\/embed.html?videoId=100000002591862&amp;playerType=embed\" title=\"New York Times Video - Embed Player\" width=\"332\"><\/iframe><br \/><i>Yeah, whoever wrote proposal this is <b>still<\/b> laughing<\/i><\/div>\n<p>It has been disclosed that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/world-of-spycraft-intelligence-agencies-spied-in-online-games\/\">the NSA and the CIA were aggressively monitoring<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and  British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft  and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the  online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to  newly disclosed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.propublica.org\/documents\/item\/889134-games\">classified documents<\/a>.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">Fearing that terrorist or criminal networks could use the games to  communicate secretly, move money or plot attacks, the documents show,  intelligence operatives have entered terrain populated by digital  avatars that include elves, gnomes and supermodels.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">The spies have created make-believe characters to snoop and to try to recruit informers, while also collecting data and contents of communications between players, according to the documents, disclosed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. Because militants often rely on features common to video games \u2014 fake identities, voice and text chats, a way to conduct financial transactions \u2014 American and British intelligence agencies worried that they might be operating there, according to the papers.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">Online games might seem innocuous, a top-secret 2008 NSA document warned, but they had the potential to be a \u201ctarget-rich communication network\u201d allowing intelligence suspects \u201ca way to hide in plain sight.\u201d Virtual games \u201care an opportunity!,\u201d another 2008 NSA document declared.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">But for all their enthusiasm \u2014 so many CIA, FBI and Pentagon spies were hunting around in Second Life, the document noted, that a \u201cdeconfliction\u201d group was needed to avoid collisions \u2014 the intelligence agencies may have inflated the threat.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I kind of think that the pitch for the program went like this:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/cmlD8rT.gif\" width=\"500\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Even if you do not have privacy issues with NSA spying, the fact that they were <b>paying people to play video games<\/b> indicates that they have <b>way<\/b> too big a budget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yeah, whoever wrote proposal this is still laughing It has been disclosed that the NSA and the CIA were aggressively monitoring: Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1010,1087,1102,997,1066,982,1025],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-gaming","category-intelligence","category-internet","category-privacy","category-stupid","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186602"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}