The NSA Is Looking For Terrorists…In Video Games?!
Leeroy Jenkins had better learn to keep his mouth shut.
Once upon a time, being paranoid about the National Security Agency overreaching their surveillance duties was just the pastime of sandwich board-wearing drifters, or people who worked with noxious chemicals and thought communists were controlling Chess King. Since then, just about every irrational fear we’ve ever had about our “right to privacy” has proven to be true, now that we know they are monitoring and listening in on our private telephone calls, social networking activities, and encrypted emails. At this point, we’re pretty sure they’ve even found a way to monitor the calls of kids using homemade walkie-talkies made out of tin cans and string, because America isn’t safe until the NSA knows for sure that fourth grade girls have cooties. Just when you thought the NSA couldn’t go further off the deep end, they grabbed their pick axes and jackhammers and started making the deep end even deeper, after it was revealed that NSA agents are actually listening in on the chatter of video games.
The Guardian (the newspaper that first broke the story of the NSA’s massive monitoring network from whistleblower and 3rd-rate Harvey the Rabbit impersonator Edward Snowden) revealed that the NSA has dispatched “real-life agents” into online communities such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, to make sure that the bad guys aren’t using them as a safe haven for global communication. An internal NSA document described these communities as a “target-rich communications network,” but there’s always the possibility that it’s just a clever loophole in the “72-virgins” clause of the suicide bomber’s contract.
So, maybe the bad guys are using video game networks to chat with their evil brethren, but let’s think about this another way. If the terrorists’ communication networks are so decimated that they have to use one filled with 6-year-olds who know more colorful curse words than a drunken longshoreman and nerds who think the Lord of the Rings trilogy should have won the Oscar for Best Documentary, then doesn’t that already make us the winners in the War on Terror?
Read This Next
