Virtual Worlds and Second Lives'
Asymmetric Threats?
London, UK - 5th March 2008, 21:40 GMT
Dear ATCA Colleagues
[Please note that the views presented by individual contributors
are not necessarily representative of the views of ATCA, which is neutral.
ATCA conducts collective Socratic dialogue on global opportunities and threats.]
The US government has begun a project -- codenamed Reynard
-- to develop ways to spot extremists who are using virtual worlds like
Second Life, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 4 and others. Reynard, a data-mining
project from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA),
is an exploratory effort to monitor activity in virtual worlds and online
games and then model what extremist activity in those worlds would look
like. The Office of the Director of the National Intelligence (ODNI) recently
released a Congressionally mandated report on various data-mining projects
of which Reynard is just one. It is known that the CIA and other US Agencies
have a presence in Second Life and that IARPA has investigated Linden Lab's
world as well.
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ATCA: The Asymmetric Threats
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