Will Oremus | Slate | Social Reader | December 9, 2013
In Joseph Heller’s absurdist war novel Catch-22, a pair of military Criminal Investigation Division officers covertly infiltrate an Army hospital to try to figure out who’s been signing the name Washington Irving on censored letters from the troops to loved ones back home. Among a series of blunders, one C.I.D. man comes to suspect the second C.I.D. man of the crime. They never do find the real culprit, but at least they get to spend part of the World War 2 lounging around the hospital instead of out in the line of fire.
In real life, meanwhile, the Guardian revealed today that the NSA and British spies have been covertly infiltrating World of Warcraft, Second Life, and other online multiplayer video games to try to catch terrorists. Secret briefings from 2007 and 2008 show agents expressing great enthusiasm for video games as a “target-rich communication network” affording bad guys “a way to hide in plain sight.” At one point, the Guardian reports:
According to the briefing documents, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a “deconfliction” group was required to ensure they weren’t spying on, or interfering with, each other. …
But the documents contain no indication that the surveillance ever foiled any terrorist plots, nor is there any clear evidence that terror groups were using the virtual communities to communicate as the intelligence agencies predicted.
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