NSA and GCHQ Agencies Allegedly Spying On Online Games

There is no escaping the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) from spying you, not even in games it appears. The NSA and GCHQ have “MMORPG Agents” infiltrated in World of Warcraft and Second Life. Why you may ask? To put a stop to terrorism (if any) that might go through the mentioned vast online multiplayer game worlds.

The The New York Times and the Guardian have detailed NSA’s and GCHQ’s point of view regarding online games as a potentially rich source of information, according to documents leaked by NSA’s Edward Snowden. The exact number of agents involved is unknown, along with the means through which they gathered information and the results gained, whether successful or not. The fact still remains that the World of Warcraft and Second life games were monitored, along with the Xbox Live.

But Xbox Live is a huge online service with a lot of personal information, IM features and even VoIP capabilities. We can only assume that, by monitoring Xbox Live, the agencies had access to personal data, private chats and “interesting” conversations. On top of all that, Microsoft did cooperate with NSA in the past.

The document’s main point of view is that the NSA and GCHQ, along with other agencies such as FBI and the CIA, turned eyes towards online gaming as an “opportunity” for potential terrorists to “hide in plain sight.” Blizzard denied in a statement made to Times and The Guardian about giving the agencies permission to spy on their users, while Microsoft and the developer of Second Life, Linden Realms, did not comment on the matter at hand.

The agencies however show no signs of interest in Sony’s PSN, though it is said that the most reasonable explanation for this is that Blizzard, Linden Realms and Microsoft are American companies, whilst Sony is a Japanese company.

Thank you Tom’s Guide for providing us with this information
Images courtesy of planetivy.com and nvate.com/