China says the NSA probably spied on Chinese World of Warcraft players

In the months since the American NSA’s PRISM surveillance program was first revealed, it has become clear that the scope of the snooping was extremely broad. Recently, China’s State Council’s Internet News Research Center released a report that summarizes its investigation of the USA’s snooping in great detail.

The section on games is brief, and mostly summarizes the reporting Western outlets like The Guardian and the New York Times have done on the NSA’s operations in games like World of Warcraft and Second Life, where agents posed as players to conduct surveillance and collected player data. But, as the Chinese report observes, “these two games have more players in China [than any other country].” And since one of the main points of the report as a whole is that China was a main target for the USA’s snooping campaign, it’s likely safe to assume that Chinese WoW players were subject to NSA surveillance.

So, Chinese gamers, the next time someone in your family tries to make you feel bad for wasting time playing WoW, just remind them that some poor NSA agent in America probably wasted even more time watching you play WoW.

(via 17173)