Tactical facepalm
The NSA has nothing better to do than play World of Warcraft for hours in search of terrorists. In case my 90th level elf* has a box cutter or something. For fuck’s sake.
* I don’t play WoW, so I dunno if there are elves or 90 levels but I flashbacked to my pre-teen days of D&D.
December 10th, 2013 at 7:30 pm
You know damn well there aint 90 level nothing in D&D.
December 10th, 2013 at 7:32 pm
Tons of elves, and lots of player vs player so you can kill them. I figure they’re hippies in real life and deserve it. Email me if you want to try wow. We have a small guild, though most of us have WoW burnout and don’t play much anymore.
December 10th, 2013 at 7:38 pm
this just goes to show the tax-sucking waste pit that our national security apparatus has become. and I want my xbox live subscription free if the NSA is subsidizing it.
December 10th, 2013 at 7:44 pm
World of Warcraft is like a special internet chatroom where nobody is allowed to talk about terrorism, so I don’t know why they’d want to monitor it.
Dude, if spy agencies weren’t VERY early adopters of MMORPGs, they’re even dumber than I thought.
December 10th, 2013 at 7:46 pm
Heck, the PLA is already in there running gold farming operations…
December 10th, 2013 at 9:08 pm
Hey, I saw this on NCIS on TV, when McGee helped decipher a communications method between terrorists who used a relatively unpopular online game to trade info.
So it must be real!
December 11th, 2013 at 4:01 am
I don’t even think classic DnD went up past level 10. In baldur’s gate, level 20 was godlike levels of power. If you were a wizard, you basically turned into a Time Lord sometime around the lower 20s, level-wise.
Yeah, classic DnD wizard spells went up to like level 9 or so. No way there were 90 levels.
December 11th, 2013 at 4:02 am
And yes, I’m really old enough to have played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. My beard is neck and grey.
December 11th, 2013 at 10:54 am
Are they monitoring The Barren’s chat for Chuck Norris jokes?
Each Zone chat would need to be monitored on both sides. This could be done with bots. Except there are quest that cause phasing and removes the player from the general population so those locations chat channels would need monitored.
So 236 wow servers world wide each with 11 battlegrounds, 118 instances and 44+ raids each with their own chat channels. 72 zones as of cataclysm expansion. And two factions doubling all above numbers inside the servers.
Each guild has a chat channel for members and one for officers. 115,640+ chat channels not including guilds or chat channels they just make up. And this does not include Ventrillo, Skype, and Blizzard’s built in VOIP.
They could have learned a lot of Chuck Norris jokes, that is about it.
December 11th, 2013 at 11:43 am
Whoa, the comments got WAY deeper into nerdy stuff than I ever expected. Thumbs up.
(I don’t play WoW, I swore an oath of celibacy from WoW when I was 11 or 12… but played Counterstrike religiously).
December 11th, 2013 at 12:38 pm
@Jmsbrtms or they can just get logs from Blizzard for all that and private messages too.
December 11th, 2013 at 1:20 pm
Blizzard is an entertainment company, not an ISP or otherwise communications provider that you can bully with FISA letters. Would be interesting to see how they gain access to those chat logs without it leaking that they’re getting served regular search warrants.
December 11th, 2013 at 2:47 pm
@Mu I’m sure there is a government lawyer out there that would be willing to write a lengthy opinion that the chat channels in WoW constitute a communication network and is fair game for their FISA antics.
December 11th, 2013 at 6:35 pm
yes they could get the logs, almost 120,000 logs of kids complaining. Even with key word search how long will that take with false positives.