As if the NSA wasn't nosing its way into our business enough, now we have to contend with the fact that our favourite raiding pal might have been an undercover agent all along, as it turns out the NSA has had so many agents playing World of Warcraft during work hours (supposedly with legitimate reasons in mind, but we just suspect they love 40 man raids) that they had to create a division in the organisation to coordinate them so that they didn't end up trailing the same potential terrorists, or each other.
The thinking behind this, was that terrorists and other undesirables, knowing that their standard methods of communication would be tapped or recorded, would use games like World of Warcraft and others to discuss their terror plots, because why not do some grinding while you're waiting for Osama to finish up his latest porn session?
While this might seem a little far fetched, there is some basis in reality. According the Guardian's report (based on leaked Snowden documents), back in 2008, US authorities tracked a credit card fraudster's information back to a Second Life account, where an in-game agent then liaised with other avatars to get information on the suspect.
It's also clear that all walks of life play games like WoW, from senators and military officers, to the people gamers are always pictured as - nerds in their mom's basement. That offers a very broad swathe of people for organisations like the NSA and the FBI to interact with.
As was traditionally the case though, the US played catchup with intelligence in this instance to the British, with GCHQ leading the charge in video game monitoring. According to the report it made a "vigorous" effort to infiltrate Xbox Live and World of Warcraft and presumably other popular games too.
While I don't doubt that intelligence agencies had real reasons for "infiltrating" (read: signing up for an account) these games, I also wouldn't be surprised if you said 95 per cent of the time the agents spent in there were just playing games with the excuse that they needed to level up to fit in with all the terrorists. Everyone knows you have to kill the Lich King to get into Al Qaeda.
