The Bush administration seems to think that Osama Bin Laden is in Pakistan. They are wrong. He is cowering behind the auction house in Orgrimmar. From there he leads a vast terror network stretching from Kalimdor to the Eastern Kingdom and even into Outland. When he and his followers aren't plotting the downfall of the West they are raiding Molten Core. As ridiculous as all of this sounds, that is what the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity group, a US government funded program, has come to believe.

The Washington Post did a story on the initiative back in February and Wired had a followup today on their Threat Level blog.

The gist of the report, which can be read here, is that Big Brother needs to infiltrate online games so that he can keep his vigilant eyes out for terrorists using them to recruit for or organize attacks. The report names several systems to look at, most notably, World of Warcraft and Second Life. While the report stresses the possibility of cyberterrorism, it leaves the door open for any sort of attack.

While no specific action was asked for, except to conduct more research, one could easily draw this sort of thinking out to its obnoxious conclusions.

Should IARPA seek to mine the chat logs of MMOs they are in for a truly monumental task. Sad news being that most of the chats sent are authored by bots and sound something like: "WTS Epic Lootz!1!1!!!" And most of the rest involved arcane dialects unique to each game: "Prots pls!1!1! Kthx." I can't help but thinking that there isn't much useful intelligence relating to national security to be gleaned from this sort of banter.

Players spreading the infamous World of Warcraft plague could easily be considered terrorists since what they did was, in effect, suicide attacks using biological agents. Would the government put them in Gitmo for that? Probably not. But they would likely have an awkward time next time they flew in the US.