On September 15, 2008 Wired Magazine blogger Noah Shachtman, reported on a presentation made by Dr. Dwight Toavs of the National Defense University at the National Intelligence Open Source Conference in Washington DC. The presentation describes how World of Warcraft could be used to plot a terrorist attack on the Whitehouse, including using code within private communications and GIS mapping overlays.

I can’t claim to have seen the live presentation to confirm the tone or the supporting information, but Wired does provide a copy of the presentation’s slides on its blog.

It is certainly difficult to believe at first glance that terrorists of any description would sign on to World of Warcraft or any other MMORPG to plot an attack on the Whitehouse (or Buckingham Palace, or the Peace Tower, etc.), however, if we do a little wordsmithing and remove the “Role-Playing Game” part and leave the “Massively Multi-Player Online” part we realize that these platforms are little more than communication tools, with three dimensional modeling capabilities and in some cases monetary exchange facilities. It makes the possibilities presented by Dr. Toav a little more…well…possible.

The article is well written and balanced. Besides presenting Dr. Toav’s presentation, Shachtman also interviewed Steven Aftergood who is a member of the Federation of American Scientists and who monitors the Intelligence Industry. Aftergood raised the point that terrorists employing virtual worlds in their arsenal is a possibility; however, there is no publicly available or verifiable information that offers credibility to that scenario.

To add to that point, in April of this year Philip Rosedale gave testimony in a hearing on Online Virtual Worlds before the Congressional Sub-Committee on Telecommunications and the Internet. He was asked directly by Congresswoman Jane Harman about the ability and likely hood of virtual worlds like Second Life being used in terrorist financing method or a propaganda platform. (For Your Information, the exchange between Congresswoman Harman and Mr. Rosedale happens at about 1hr and 11 minutes if you’d prefer to skip ahead to that section in the recorded testimony).

Rosedale replied that Linden Labs has never seen any evidence that terrorists have used the system. Furthermore he believes that the “tracing” and policing capabilities of platforms like Second Life may discourage money launderers and terrorists from using these systems to do their deeds. Simply put, terrorists and criminals know they can be traced and that records of their conversations can be kept for later review. This will scare them from using this type of platform as opposed to other forums on the Web.

The opposing argument to this point is sure, the policing and tracing activities might make it easier to investigate an incident after it happens but even Rosedale himself states that Second Life does not actively monitor the communications that happen between players without prior predication. Furthermore, Linden Labs keeps records of transactions and conversations for “a few weeks,” not indefinitely.

This approach appears to be how Second Life balances the concerns of the game with the privacy and civil liberties of its users. It’s a difficult balance to maintain indeed.

It is unclear how in-depth other virtual worlds and MMOs monitor their users but if you believe the statistics available at WorldofWarcraftRealms.com over 5 million users have logged on to World of Warcraft in the United States and the European Union in the last 30 days alone. That would take a tremendous amount of CPU and person-power to monitor each communication, especially if the exchange was done in some kind of code.

Finally, lets not forget that in its February 15, 2008 report to US Congress on Data Mining, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated that it has “seeded” a project called Reynard “to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games.”

Clearly this is a debate that some people with some very large budgets are interested in; however, on both sides of the argument everything appears to be theoretical at the moment.

The nature of these things is that the we won’t really know what a likelihood of this type of activity occurring in virtual worlds is until the methodologies of the bad guys are exposed in some sort of public forum like a trial.

With all that in mind, I wonder if five years ago we would have thought about gang members using Facebook messages to utter threats or communicate with each other, which appears to be a trend around the world. Perhaps the study of virtual worlds should be expanded outside of the realms of international terrorism to include its use in domestic criminal activity.