NSA spies on furries, gamers, via SL

[Pi]

From https://www.propublica.org/article/world-of-spycraft-intelligence-agencies-spied-in-online-games we also learn that they are doing similar spycraft on WoW and other MMORPGs. What the christ?

This is just boggling, really. The whole surveillance-state has gotten out of hand if they think furries are worth tracking.

[Ketsuban]

I wouldn't say it's about furries being worth tracking per se. My understanding is the NSA's approach has always been to try and grab everything and figure out what's meaningful later. They can't train systems to filter signal from noise if they don't know what noise looks like compared to signal, so they need to try and understand everything that happens between people online, furries included.

[greaseyote]

>furries aren't fursuiting
>furries having "occupations" in the first place

Your tax dollars at work, people!!!

[GreenReaper]

Apparently they haven't picked up on the fact that in most cases, furries' RL job is making VR models for other furries. :-)

[Pi]

For those of you with a terminal need to read papers, have a link to the actual funding paperwork for this NSA project, codenamed "Reynard".

Just about the only thing of note in this mess is that the government has figured out that male players pick female avatars:

As an example, a study of personal space use in Second Life demonstrated that male/female avatar dyads stood closer together than female/female and male/male avatar dyads⁹. This observed VW phenomenon is similar to the use of personal space that has been observed in the RW, at least in Western cultures. However, a methodological limitation of the study is that the RW genders of the Second Life avatars were not known by the researchers.

[ColonThree]

I'm more surprised that they managed to find someone in SL with some creepy fursuit-esque panda avatar instead of an actual panda avatar.

I can only imagine the soul-crushing indignity of being at a place like the NSA IARPA, and having to spend time investigating furries on SL. No doubt they had to discard the powerpoint slides discussing the RW-VW relationship of virtual animal dongs.

[rodox_video]

You COULD read some shit into this if you wanted. It's standard intelligence practice to find and exploit the sexual hangups of your targets. Trouble is, what kind of target would be hanging out in second fucking life? The odds of you finding a militant Wahabi or whatever there are even less than you finding one at your local Hometown Buffet. And yet, from their study of personal space it almost feels like they were trying to do just that.
The reason the Guardian and friends even put this slide out is that the NSA hanging out here can really only mean one thing - that the entire focus from start to finish is on western or domestic parties. Which, uh, no shit.

[rodox_video]

oh and before i forget:

(it's from this slide)

[LordNagetiere]

http://i.imgur.com/qaS4BOz.jpg

Oh god, leave it to some government drone to put a 'NOFORN' classification on a Top Secret document, because just in case one wasn't clear, Top Secret documents shouldn't be shown to Foreign Nationals. NOFORN pretty much only exists on it's own in training military/fresh government drones of how to handle actual classified materials. Labeling something as 'NOFORN' is like putting a 'caution: hot' warning sticker on a flamethrower, or a no smoking sign inside an oil tank.

That said, I believe there was real concern that even with the 'tools' the NSA has, games like SL use encryption for chat that is in part based off the software of the game itself. There's no website you can hack into to get WoW chatlogs, you have to be on WoW. It would make sense for people plotting things to communicate with such a game, but I'd assume SL and WoW would just be too American in that regard. Maybe some game more Russian or Asian would be the means.

So they have to be in SL, and they might as well blow taxdollars doing pointless research while they're there. Also, from the outside, SL might look like an easy way to launder money, with it's own currency, but I believe the interaction is one way mostly. Real money => Lindens, not vice versa. I could be wrong, but SL is run very much like a ponzi scheme in some ways.

[ColonThree]

Real money => Lindens, not vice versa. I could be wrong

There are some people that happily make a living off of SL, converting all their L$ from sales back into real money. I'm sure there are some e-prostitutes in SL making a fortune by cybering with desperate furries.

[mexxy]

Sorry, my fault >.<