The average World of Warcraft player has a number of annoyances to deal with during his day-to-day exploits in Azeroth -- gold farmers, gold sellers, ninja-looters, and overzealous paladins, to name a few. Unfortunately for subscribers, another soon-to-be-unpopular community is about to hit Blizzard's servers: Big Brother (that is to say, government intelligence agencies, not the reality TV show).
Wired reports that U.S. intelligence is planning on developing a data mining program using World of Warcraft that will help root out violent extremists that play MMOs. The ultimate goal of the "Reynard project" is to develop software that is capable of "automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world." On one hand, we can see why they'd want to keep an eye on a community that's 10 million strong (fun fact -- there's 142 countries with a smaller population than WoW). On the other, we're not sure we want The Man looking over our shoulder every time we craft a Big Iron Bomb.
Reader Comments (69)
Posted: Feb 23rd 2008 11:12PM (Unverified) said
...Why aren't they paying more attention to FPSes?
Posted: Feb 24th 2008 12:55AM Shunnabunich said
But didn't you notice? They're using a Mac in that picture. :)
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Posted: Feb 24th 2008 12:01PM (Unverified) said
they don't want to go back, they tried and kept getting headshot...
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Posted: Feb 24th 2008 2:15AM beez1717 said
this will cause some international problems.....
Posted: Feb 24th 2008 2:19AM Trojan said
I don't know about you, but I'm suspicious of anybody who DOESN'T play WoW. I mean, what do they do with all that free time? Plot the downfall of America, that's what!
Posted: Feb 24th 2008 2:47AM Gaming 4 Jesus said
Once they're in WoW, all their terrorist schemes will be put on hold until they organize a raid to blow up Archimonde.
Posted: Feb 24th 2008 3:18AM Gwr said
IMO terrorists playing wow is and killing boars is way better than terrorists doing RL stuff and killing people....so why mess with them there?
just cuz tehy duldnt get real ozama now they wana get cyber jihadz?
just cuz tehy duldnt get real ozama now they wana get cyber jihadz?
Posted: Feb 24th 2008 3:38AM (Unverified) said
Nothing new. I still find it funny that one of the flags for someone being a terrorist is that they order pizzas. Now we know why, they are too busy playing WoW to cook.
Posted: Feb 24th 2008 4:00AM (Unverified) said
land of the free?
forget it!
forget it!
Posted: Feb 24th 2008 5:14AM (Unverified) said
Stormwind general chat -
Mr Terror: LFM for USAraid, Plane hijackers and suicide bombers, lvl 60. /w
Mr Terror: LFM for USAraid, Plane hijackers and suicide bombers, lvl 60. /w
Posted: Feb 24th 2008 5:57AM (Unverified) said
There is a real problem with terrorism all over the world and I can only see this as a real help. WOW players are sucked into their own world, and as such, they are more at risk to manipulation to the terrorists.
This is a battle of ideas, and most gamers, as can be seen on this blog, are liberal surrender monkeys. Come on. Can't you see the danger. This is war.
This is a battle of ideas, and most gamers, as can be seen on this blog, are liberal surrender monkeys. Come on. Can't you see the danger. This is war.
Posted: Feb 24th 2008 7:33AM usagi704 said
Can't you see that you are nothing but a dumb fucking apologist for the current administration?! I have news for you: this "war on terror" will be just as successful as the "war on drugs," in other words, not successful. All it will do is harm and criminalize more innocent people than anything else.
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Posted: Feb 24th 2008 8:18AM (Unverified) said
Wow.
I really feel sorry for our futures when the youth of today cannot see the truth. Stop playing linguistics.
This is bigger than the war on drugs. Bigger than any war in history. It's about freedoms.
These terrorists are jealous of our freedoms. Can't you see that.
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I really feel sorry for our futures when the youth of today cannot see the truth. Stop playing linguistics.
This is bigger than the war on drugs. Bigger than any war in history. It's about freedoms.
These terrorists are jealous of our freedoms. Can't you see that.
Posted: Feb 24th 2008 10:38AM (Unverified) said
People say sarcasm doesn't transfer well into written word. I think people are generally just really, really bad at detecting it.
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Posted: Feb 24th 2008 10:57AM Papa said
One billion Chinese!!!
Posted: Feb 24th 2008 11:58AM (Unverified) said
People are completely misreading this, and then flying off the handle in the comment section. This project is a test to see if programs used to detect suspicious behavior could work in the real world, not a surveillance program. No where has it been said that they are going to make arrests based off of this program's findings. What merits suspicious behavior in a video game is entirely different than in the real world. Would I would like to see is Blizzard's thoughts on this.
Posted: Feb 24th 2008 12:29PM Batzarro The worlds WOrst Detect said
Meh. While It's all well an good to keep vigilance, I thinks L33t is not the language you oughta be learning to catch terrorists...
Posted: Feb 25th 2008 3:04PM (Unverified) said
MY DICK FEELS LIKE SQUIRRELS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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