US Government Exploring Terrorism in MMOs

I came across an interesting report in Wired.com about a document from the Department of Homeland Security about several initiatives in cyber-world. One project is called Reynard which "is a seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the Intelligence community."

How do you feel about this? I feel mostly lukewarm. I imagine they might look into GW for it is a "large-scale online game", but since there is no raiding/PKing, I imagine that the data they obtain from us playing our game is not very helpful. However, I also have begun playing WoW, and when I begin raiding, I don't want my government to think I'm a terrorist.
Links:
Wired Article
The Actual Document

I'm quite sure they don't care about small, cult-favorite, BFB club-based games.

GW players have nothing to worry about.

(And I have a feeling that you actually found out about this from Wowinsider.com)

yeah gw has no worry. thats why im glad us goverment doesnt catch me in here

That probably refers to a variety of things. Secret communications because no one thinks to look in a game, gold buying used for terrorist funding, things like that. How many times have you heard GW refered to as a glorified 3-D chat room, anyway? Personally, I have no problem with it since I'm not a terrorist, nor am I doing anything that could be construed as terrorism.

I would be very surprised if, after a successful and major attack where terrorists used computer games as a communications tool, the government didn't take a lot of flak for not looking into online games beforehand. Terrorists are very creative about how they do things, there's no reason to leave any stone unturned if it could save a life.

Now... off I go to the CIA so I can get a job playing GW all day.

People get worked up all the time over this type of stuff, at this point it is along the lines of a bill proposed in Congress and sitting in sub committee. Many in the agency can propose (and regularly do) such things. Very very very few ever make it past the phase talked about - that is a report sitting on someones desk gathering dust, yet because of the Freedom of Information act must be posted as an official govt document. At best it has enough funding for someone to figure out it is stupid.

Another way to put it - in school I assume they still each people how to "brainstorm" for project ideas. When you do this how many of them are not that bright? The "project" in question is one of them, the system rewards people sending in tons of ideas due to the near crap shoot what a congress critter will get a bug in the butt to fund.

Not that this has ever stopped people from fretting over them and a good general bout of bashing the US intelligence community. Nor do many people seem to like to believe it, for reasons unknown to me they prefer the fictional system wherein they can get all worked up (usually they quote other people who have no idea what is happening). But hey, what do I know - I only worked in a DoD/DoE facility for 5 years and turned in my fair share of similar things. I'm sure whomever you find knows more about it, especially since my field was in High Performance Computing and I was never as in touch as the moonbats that the govt has been within days of "silencing" now for several decades (them being *directly* privy of some high end secret stuff). Either that or I'm an operative of these people trying to push focus away from the really secret stuff.

Gasp!

12characters

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10259296

/faceplants myself
Should have searched first. My bad.
Anyway, I guess the whole 3-D chatroom makes all the more sense. I understand the government wanting to monitor chatter on MMO's but I feel about that the same way about wire-tapping and email-snooping: I'd prefer if the government not look at my stuff.

Already a thread on this subject in OT&A. Please use that thread.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10259296