To be fair, the last several months have had a near daily flood of information that part of me didn't want to miss by trying to nail down any one set of specifics. I've been watching the near daily revelations of Edward Snowden with the same sick fascination one would properly expect of a train wreck, particularly one of this magnitude.
For years, I've been following a lot of the topics that the Snowden Files address, but always with the degree of removal that good investigative journalism imposes: you get a clearer picture, but you know that there’s probably information even the journos missed. I've long been opposed to the post-9/11 surveillance state policies that have warped and twisted the world into the shape it’s in now. And for good or ill, we've seen far more than even I could have even begun to imagine, and I've got a very good imagination. For example, the fact that half the alphabet soup agencies on the Federal Register blew time and taxpayer money hunting for terrorists in Azeroth.
Now, the Feds weren't just sitting around in World of WarCraft and asking how to mine for fish. They were also staking out Second Life as well, which is far weirder on a number of levels.
Of course, the curse of having a very good imagination is that once an idea gets planted, it could go in almost any direction possible. If WoW and Second Life were being staked out, why not Guild Wars 2? Champions Online? Hell, if I wanted a good place to find the tinfoil hat people, The Secret World would be the Christmas gift that kept on giving.
Why stop at the MMOs? Let’s get real paranoid.
Diablo III’s always-on connection would have made for an equally viable spot to eavesdrop. Path of Exile would have been another one. The lobbies for Call of Duty and Battlefield would be perfectly logical places to look, particularly if you’re concerned about terrorists honing their shooting skills and working on their small unit tactics. If the Feds found out tomorrow that a terror cell had been coordinating and planning operations through playing America’s Army, I'm quite certain that the irony would melt the Internet down to slag.
This is not the first instance of video games being cast as accomplices to atrocity, and it likely won’t be the last, either. What makes this different is that you have a highly coordinated effort to intrude into a game space looking for potential criminals, not to find evidence after the fact.
This suggests one of two highly disturbing scenarios.
Nothing could be more likely to completely destroy consumer confidence in the currently operating batch of MMOs if somebody had sat down and deliberately calculated it for a couple of decades.
As players, we assume that there is a certain level of monitoring within the game, but the expectation is that such monitoring is happening as part of the company’s management of the environment. There are GMs in MMOs to catch cheaters, address abusive behavior, and generally try to “maintain the experience” within the environment. Ultimately, though, they are the equivalent of security guards in amusement parks. They do not have the power to arrest. They do not have the power to investigate outside of the confines of their games. They are not cops nor are they expected to be.
There’s a line from the movie The Hurt Locker which I keep finding more and more trenchant the more shit like this comes out. “If he wasn't an insurgent, he sure as hell is now.” Am I saying that there will be a broad insurgency against the United States government over spying in WoW? Of course not. But for a few decidedly disturbed individuals, this could be just the peg they've been looking to hang their hat on. More importantly, though, it’s got the potential to cause the sort of disaffection which can ultimately lead to a broad insurgency. Worse, if there weren't terrorists in MMOs before, they've sure as hell got the idea to go there now.
It’d be a particularly stupid or incredibly ballsy terrorist to try and use something like WoW, but there’s all manner of MMOs out there and that the NSA probably wasn't monitoring. Even worse, there are undoubtedly people out there who will get it in their head to troll the NSA.
For a thoroughly paranoid NSA analyst, how do you know that in-game message full of weird characters isn't intel being passed between terrorist cells? To us, it might be a badly formatted gold farming message, or it could be somebody trolling the goons at the NSA. I do not believe the NSA is constitutionally or institutionally capable of looking at something and not thinking, “Yup, terrorists.” Not anymore. It’s a perfect circlejerk.
This whole business isn't the “insidious encroachment by men of zeal” that Louis Brandeis warned about so many years ago. This isn’t a panic response. This is institutional paranoia that has run wild and gone completely unchecked for so long that nobody within the institution has the ability to discern reality anymore and nobody outside has the power or means to slap them back to their senses. And I find the bromides that are trotted out to justify this persistent and unconscionable behavior to be totally unconvincing.Of course, America has enemies. That much hasn't changed since the Declaration of Independence was signed. It’s only the nature of the enemies that have changed. And up to this point, with some notable exceptions, we've faced off against those enemies without completely screwing the American public in the bargain. Yes, the NSA is supposed to be listening in for signals coming from foreign sources. Anybody who thinks that they were only listening to the Soviets during the Cold War is being either incredibly naive or inexcusably stupid. Absolutely, friendly governments spy on each other. Look at how many people America busted over the years for espionage being run by Israel, notionally one of our allies. Maybe not as many as were run by the Soviets during the Cold War, but I’m having a hard time thinking of a case in the last century where America made a big deal about charging British or French agents with espionage. Sure, the NSA is supposed to be the nation’s codebreaker. That means they find new ways to break the codes, not use their power to gimp the codes from the beginning. There are probably always going to be those people, from nation-states to single individuals, who have desires and interests inimical to the United States.
For the last 12 years, there has been a madness that has gripped the entire government.
Doesn't matter if Bush started it and Obama continued it. What matters is that it has persisted for so long, it will grow increasingly hard to get rid of it. It has created the mindset that every single person in the world will ultimately become a terrorist. In this, it’s not too hard to see the potential of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that people will ultimately be driven to cause, as Jean Baudrillard described, “real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.”
If the ongoing war against “media pirates” has been any indication, it’s that the big organization is ultimately doomed to lose. The little guy is generally faster to act and tactically smarter. When a media format becomes overly restrictive, people move away from using it. The Xbox One had people running away in droves when Microsoft announced its DRM controls. The same is true for nations. When they become overly restrictive, people move away from being a part of it. Whether that process is emigration or violent revolt is not something that can be easily predicted on a person-by-person basis. This business with infiltration of MMOs might seem harmless, even ridiculous, but it might well be the tipping point moves somebody from thinking and towards acting.
- Axel Cushing
