Ever played World of Warcraft? Then America's NSA and CIA may have been spying on you

There are a lot of things for World of Warcraft players to worry about, from in-game monsters to fellow-gamer annoyances. But here’s are a couple things I bet most players don’t think about much when logging into Azeroth: terrorists and spies.

Unfortunately, and ridiculously, it appears that they should worry. According to ProPublica and the New York Times, new documents released by American NSA leaker Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA and the CIA were both collecting intelligence and conducting operations within World of Warcraft, as well as Second Life and Microsoft online gaming service XBox Live. According to the documents, the UK intelligence service GCHQ is also active in some of these services.

The documents don’t note any successful terrorist-thwarting happening as a result of spying on game worlds, and ProPublica’s article quotes experts as saying that games wouldn’t be a particularly good way for terrorists to communicate. But the American spy agencies obviously disagree; and one of the leaked documents says that “Al Qaida terrorist target selectors” have already been found in some of the games (including WoW) and cites other targets of in-game spying as including Chinese hackers.

Blizzard, for its part, says it was unaware that intelligence agencies were operating inside World of Warcraft and that it did not cooperate with them.

The documents also show that the American intelligence agencies are concerned about the potential for terrorists and enemy states to develop or modify video games for use as recruiting tools.

The question that may be on your mind, though, is: were they spying on me? The answer to that is difficult to pin down, but the fact that Chinese hackers are specifically listed as in-game targets for WoW surveillance indicates that the American agencies definitely were (and probably still are) operating on Asian servers. Southeast Asian gamers probably aren’t off the hook either considering that many Southeast Asian countries have significant Muslim populations and American spy agencies tend to be focused most on threats from Islamic terrorist groups. Indonesian servers, for example, were likely targeted for surveillance to track potential Jemaah Islamiyah targets, as that group has been linked to al-Qaeda.

(Whether or not any Asian terrorist groups actually use WoW is another question entirely, though.)

Of course, unless you’re actually using WoW to organize a terrorist plot, you probably have nothing to worry about. Still, it’s a bit creepy to learn some of the other players in our favorite MMORPGs may be agents of the CIA or the NSA, and that somewhere in Langley there may be a file that contains data about the conversations you’ve had and the things you’ve done in the world of Azeroth.

(via ProPublica)