Does Anonymity In Virtual Worlds Breed Terrorism?

An Anonymous Coward writes "The Washington Post has an article about the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity's take on the numerous virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life) that have cropped up in recent years. IARPA's thesis is that because the Government can't currently monitor all the communication and interaction, terrorists will plot and scheme in such environments."

Somebody's getting paid for writing this crap @WP

[rant64]

Any more rediculous sensationalist statements? Sjeesj. I don't know about you people, but I'm not living out my life fearing the next, so-called terrorist, action.
 
Bye! Gotta get to work.

Re:Monitor this!

[arivanov]

Are you sure that they cannot? I recall a brilliant joke on the subject from the days of KDS, KGB and Stazi: What is one bulgarian? A bandit. Two bulgarians? A gang Three bulgarians? A gang with an informer. As far as using virtual worlds and so on for terrorism plotting a plot nurtured in Sadville will remain a wankoff. I would be much more worried about a plot nurtured in a cafana with the morning coffee and a Hooka pipe.

Re:Virtual Security

[Crypto Gnome]

Anonymity breeds terrorism. end of sentence.

Oddly enough, last time I looked, your vote was anonymous.

Expect that to be severly curtailed real soon, too.

Fewer legal protections for MMO players

[jjohnson]

Unlike telephone communications or bank records, there are few, if any, regulations covering privacy in MMOs. If terrorists are clever enough to figure out using the drafts folder of a hotmail account for communicating, they're clever enough to figure out that Blizzard probably won't even ask for a subpoena, they'll just record the keystrokes of anyone the NSA asks them to.

What breeds terrorism?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they want to know what breeds terrorism, I have some guidance for them:

• Oil dollars: Terrorism isn't cheap. It takes huge amounts of surplus bucks to fund it. Guess who is providing all those surplus bucks?
• Drug dollars: Terrorism isn't cheap. It takes huge amounts of surplus bucks to fund it. Guess what is the world's #2 opium producing country? Guess what policy we have that causes opium / heroin to sell for such absurd prices, given how cheap it is to produce it?
• Weapons and training: Maybe us providing billions of dollars in weapons, plus our best guerrilla training methods to the mujahadein in Afghanistan wasn't without consequences to us?
• Occupying their countries: You know, if some people with a totally alien form of government came over here to my country and told me I had to live their way with their form of government, and my government had to allow their government to have troops stationed in my country for the next 100 years, and these troops could do whatever they wanted with legal immunity from being tried in my government's courts, what would I do and what kind of label would this occupying government pin on me do you think? To put it more concretely, if some Muslims came over here and told me I had to live under Sharia, you can be sure I would not take that gently.
• Killing lots of them: Maybe Abdul is a normal, well-adjusted, happy, secular guy leading a normal life, having a normal job, not involved in politics or religion or anything, until one day, for no reason at all, a missile or a bomb lands on his house, destroying it and killing his family members. What would be the psychological effect of this on Abdul? Perhaps grieving, withdrawal, depression. Perhaps also anger. Maybe enough anger to want to strap on a bomb vest, or hijack a plane, or shoot up a crowd of anyone he identifies with the guys who dropped the bomb on his family. Maybe Al Queda has some recruiters who understand this logic and make sure to go and talk to people like Abdul every time an American bomb hits some poor shmo's house and kills half his family?
• Human rights abuses: There aren't that many prisoners being held without trial and abused (tortured or whatever) in secret detention centers by the US, but even if it's just a few hundred, each one of those is an abuse, and it's going to be reported over and over in the Arab press. Likewise, I think American troops in Iraq are well behaved by the standards of occupation troops historically, but every single humiliation, rape and murder they do commit (which is not very many, but some) is reported endlessly and makes people angrier and angrier. The amount of reporting and anger isn't necessarily linked to how rare these abuses actually are.

I don't work for the CIA, so what do I know. Maybe none of those things make any difference, and the real problem is WoW and Evercrack and anonymous coward postings on Slashdot. Yeah those must be it. Things like trillions of dollars flowing into economies run by religious fanatics who hate us, occupying their countries and killing them, those aren't even worthy of examination as causes.

Re:Monitor this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Second Life records everything you say in open Chat and IMs, and the company retains that information for a considerable period of time, in case the Government wants to look at it (and for Linden Lab's unknown internal purposes). Anyone who thinks that their communications in Second Life are some kind of secret is pretty clueless.

(I forget how long it is, but at one point Linden Lab explained it. Three months comes to mind, but it might be longer. I imagine if some DHS agency asked them, they would retain it longer, or retrieve it from archival backup media.)

I think the record also includes your movements in the virtual world, and certain actions.

But since the government is also intercepting all Internet traffic at the ISP level, they already have access to your IMs and whatever on virtual worlds or otherwise. Having the virtual world providers filter it into a nice package is just a money saver.

As someone mentioned, Second Life is about the most cumbersome, expensive, slow, unreliable way to communicate that one could imagine. It's also useless as a simulation/training/planning platform. If there are any terrorists on Second Life, it's just so that they can have cybersex.

Re:Farce on Terrorism - Nonsense!

[Builder]

"Generally only small numbers of people are killed by terrorism" - well just 10,500+ since 9/11... no big deal right. You won't care if they kill you then?

10,500 people in 7 years is NOTHING. More people have died from heart attacks in that time. More people have died from car crashes in that time. Want to declare a war on those ?

As for not caring if they kill me, no, I wouldn't. I would rather be killed at the hands of a terrorist tomorrow than live in a world where we sacrifice our freedoms to keep us 'safe'.

I have two statements explicitly in my will... If I burn in on a jump, I do not want anyone to sue the jumpship operator, the rig / canopy company or anyone else. The second one is for release to the press should I die in a terrorism related incident - that states that I am happy to have lived in the environment I did, with the risks commensurate to that, and I wouldn't want to see laws changed, so don't do anything dumb "in my name".

Re:Being a Government breeds Terrorism

[Opportunist]

War is the terror of the strong.
Terror is the war of the weak.

It's just that simple. It's amazing how people can cry for capital punishment with the argument "What if it was your child that was murdered?" and not understand the mindset of a terrorist, who is basically in the same camp.

Re:no more than anonymity in the real world...

[Sique]

Which means, that Vietnam as defending champion (they got the title against the French in 1956) still carries the title.

Re:Back in the day...

[pacinpm]

Back in the day, folks figured out a response: give the snoopers what they want. Many people (me included) put words like 'bomb' etc. into our .sig files, so that even mundane e-mails about boring crap would trigger the sensors and get recorded. I am certain that Uncle Sam really enjoyed my discussions with my room mate about laundry and coffee ("Take out your laundry you freak, and buy some coffee!").

Yes it would work, unless:

1. Government bans such activities because it is disrupting work of government agencies.
2. Government bans encryption (unless using NSA approved algorithms or keys).

From what I read USA is not far from it.

Privacy != terrorism

[AmiMoJo]

"IARPA's thesis is that because the Government can't currently monitor all the communication and interaction, terrorists will plot and scheme in such environments."

Are they seriously trying to imply that we won't be safe unless the government can monitor all communication, all the time? I.e. that any kind of privacy breeds terrorism?

Re:no more than anonymity in the real world...

[msuarezalvarez]

It is not very difficult to imagine USian strategists telling each other precisely that before their involvement in Vietnam... See how well it went.