With the NSA looking for terrorists on video games, it's now time to be afraid

Michelle Quinn mercurynews.com The expanding digital net of our nation's security agencies appears to have stretched to the point of absurdity. What else are we to make of the news that our spies infiltrated online games like "World of Warcraft" and "Second Life" to hunt for terrorist plots -- without any evidence that's where the terrorists were plotting? It makes the National Security Agency and the other three-letter outfits look ridiculous and frankly scarier... The virtual world initiative appears to have been nutty right from the beginning. The NSA and its British counterpart launched their efforts on what appears to be a hunch that terrorists were using "Second Life" and the other sites, according to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to the New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica. The agents pretended to be players, tried to recruit informers and collected data and conversations. But according to the Snowden documents, there were so many agents from American intelligence agencies on "Second Life" that the bosses worried that spy avatars were colliding into each other -- and maybe spying on each other. A "deconfliction" group was created to keep avatars and identities straight... Probably like many Americans, I had been worn down by the drip-drip of the Snowden revelations. But the video game spying is both surprising and revelatory. The foray into gaming is the most solid evidence we have that there are few controls on what our security agencies do. They can go on a digital fishing expedition with no real target in mind. The documents make scant mention of people's rights to privacy or legal constraints such as getting a warrant. There is no weighing of risks and benefits. It's all about what interesting games spies can play, not whether they should. Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees. "This shows that the NSA wants a world in which there is no privacy, no spaces outside the watchful eye of the government, and without oversight," he told me. to read more click here: mercurynews.com