Second Life & WoW Terrorist Training Camps?

Tech.Luver writes "theinquirer reports that 'Aussie Security experts claim that Second Life and online games such as World of Warcraft are being used to train terrorists. Apparently there are three jihadi terrorists registered and two elite jihadist terrorist groups in Second Life and they use the site for recruiting and training. This is on top of the Second Life Liberation Army.""

ROFLMAO

Oh noes!

How do you kill...that which has no life?

No seriously, I think I saw a video of them training once [youtube.com](nsfw). They're in yer raids, ninjaing your epic loots.

Some people are so damn stupid. What bearing could this possibly have on real life? The only thing I can think of is that you're increasing the fat, out of shape, cheetoes consuming segment of the terrorist population...Scary stuff. They do enough of this "training", we could neutralize them with a gift of free broadband and some jolt cola.

The only way I'll believe that this is real is if we start getting evidence of terrorist attacks on gold farmers.

Re:ROFLMAO

I *REALLY* hope they'll use WoW as a training camp. It's the only way we'll win this "War on Terror". The terrorists will be confused by very different laws of physics in the real world.

I can picture it already ... Terrorist sees an airplane, jumps on a bird thinking it has the same abilities as a netherdrake in WoW and tries to fly to intercept plane and make it crash with his Fireball rank XII spell. Or better, they'll work in gold farming sweatshops trying to "subvert" the "evil" western economies!

Re:ROFLMAO

Come on, put your tinfoil hat on for a moment...

This means that Second Life and WoW have become terrorist-affiliated/terrorist-supporting orgainizations.
That means that everyone subscribing to Second Life or WoW now have financial links to terrorism.
Therefore :
    Everyone on Second Life and WoW is open game for DHS, warrantless wiretaps, asset freezing, etc.

(silly sarcasm, frightening Orwellian reality, or absurd conspiracy theory, you decide.)

Re:ROFLMAO

Come on, put your tinfoil hat on for a moment...

What, you mean you take yours off sometimes?!

Re:ROFLMAO

(put tinfoil hat)
      Linden Labs
      Lin denla bs
      Bin denla ls
      Bin Laden SL
Hurry... someone must advice the CIA! :p

Eh.

But WoW would be useless for that, as compared to a game of "Capture the Flag" played out in the sticks, or even in the cities. It teaches you nothing about real-world communications problems, nothing about the real fear and uncertainty of being in the world, waiting for something to happen, nothing about tactics against humans.

WoW tactics boil down to tactics vs mobs, and tactics vs mobs. In the first you're fighting a bunch of simplistic AI, and in the second you're fighting a bunch of people who know they're not going to lose anything if they die, so they just do the lemming over and over until one side wins...It's a joke.

I can think of a thousand "games" that you could play in the real world that would actually get you useful skills, and useful training. Playing WoW, on the other hand, gives you the wrong kind of reflexes, zero physical conditioning, and no actual experience with moving around in the world.

Re:Eh.

Sorry, sir. This is terrorhype. Logic and reason is in the next room.

Re:ROFLMAO

Why use something as far removed from real life as WOW?

Try
-Counterstrike
-any multiplayer WW2 shooter like Day Of Defeat, Call Of Duty...
-America's Army (get your training sponsored by your enemy ;-)

Much better choices for terrorist training (and I'd still consider them inadequate unless you throw in some real life practice with guns)

Re:ROFLMAO

When the FBI came for the trolls,
I remained silent;
I was not a troll.

When they locked up the orcs,
I remained silent;
I was not an orc.

When they came for the dark elves,
I did not speak out;
I was not a dark elf.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to subscribe.

Re:ROFLMAO

Can I have your stuff ?

I thought

And I thought they were trained in those small trucks (Powell showed us) in Iraq. I was wrong. They are trained in the tubes.

Wow

This is news... The terrorists have less of a life than we do!

Gotta be -1 redundant

...by the time I post this:

If you play wow, you're supporting the terrorists!

Or,

So that's where they kept the WMDs.... In Ironforge!

OMG

Wow, and you know what? There are even MORE terrorists training in this thing we call "real life"! Can you believe it? We'd better end this thing called life before they have a chance to do something!

All kidding aside, I bet there are "terrorists" using any form of communication that is there. Unless we live completely isolationist lives, never being allowed to interact with anyone, ever, people are going to *gasp* get together and talk about things, including terrorism. Focusing on video games is just stupid and a colossal waste of time.

Slow news

You have to wonder about how someone can live with themselves for typing up this garbage, they go to collage do all sorts of stuff... and then this? People are blowing up corporate crap in SL because they don't WANT you there. As for using weapons in WoW to train for Rl? Uh where's my exploding sheep? :P

Alliance or Horde?

The real question here is, "Is the US Military the Alliance or the Horde?"

I'd like to be the first person

Who has been *called* a Second Life terrorist to debunk this rumor.

The SLLA isn't a real "terrorist" organization. It's a bunch of unfunny people who think that exploding picture replicators near buildings in SL comprises some sort of Jacobin revolution. I'm serious. Look at their white paper.

As for real terrorists: frankly, I hope they're practicing in Second Life. Because with all the other, harder-to-track ways they could be communicating information--IRC channels, encrypted and hidden forums, custom IM software, etc--they choose to use a public program in which anyone can access anywhere by default and the company religiously logs any and all chats that pass through their network and make it a point to discipline people on the basis of chatlogs.

So we should be so lucky to have terrorists so stupid that they'd communicate using SL--a clunky graphically terrible product that can't even properly form eyebrows, much less a complex trigger mechanism--as opposed to, say, sending a real video over some other quicker undetectable means.

Re:I'd like to be the first person

Hey, stop with your "facts" and "logic"! Didn't you hear? There are terrorists in WoW and Second Life! Do you know what this means?!?

This countries supply of WoW gold and online poontang is in jeopardy! They are attacking our very way of life! We must mobilize for action! It's not going to be easy. I've heard that the terrorists are employing epic mounts, and exploding sheep technology, as well as second generation teledildonics, but we must not let them prevail!

We will fight them in the empty casinos! We will fight them in the level 60 raid instances that no one does anymore! We shall overcome!

We need an inside man, some human intel...

And we have the perfect operative for the job. Someone who can blend in with the terrorist and provide this intel.

The only agent for this job is none other than LEEROY JENKINS [leeroyjenkins.net]!

Suddenly everything is clear

So that's why the bombs in London and the Glasgow airport attack the other week failed miserably.

They thought their spell of detonation and shield of fire protection worked outside the game too.

You can't make this stuff up

When we had the stories of criminalising people for fictional virtual pr0n in online environments, one of the responses to show how ludicrous this is was to suggest we start criminalising WoW players for virtual murder...

It's sad that everytime someone says "But you can't stop X, otherwise we might as well crack down on Y too, which would be silly", it's not long before Y becomes the Internet taboo which people also want to crack down upon...

Please tell me this story is just a parody?

It's true!

It's true. According to documents recently captured by the CIA, some of the plots they are working on include:

• "Get up to 375 in Goblin Engineering so we can build better improvised explosive devices"
• "Crash epic flying mounts into buildings instead of airliners"
• "Build a Mana Bomb like those blood elves east of Shattrath City have"
• "Stock up on +sneak gear and enchants so we can stealth past the Secret Service and crit-backstab President Bush"
• "Recruit an Enchanter to our cause so we can get Fiery cast on our AK-47's, for the nice glow and DPS increase" (Bin Laden vetoed this one, saying "You can only put enchants on melee weapons, n00b")

WoW trained terrorists

Baffling news today from the West Bank, where officials arrested six terrorists who were attempting to attack a local market. Apparently the terrorists tried to execute their attack by teasing several vicious dogs they found wandering in a nearby alley, then leading the dogs to the market as they ran towards it. Witnesses say that the terrorists ran into the market, waited until the dogs were right on top of them, then attempted to confuse the dogs in various ways. One terrorist wrapped himself in a camoflage cloak and hid behind a fruit vendors stand, while several others simply laid on the ground and played dead. All six terrorists were hospitalized with bite and claw wounds to their face and arms.

somebody call Jack!

ACTUAL bad guys learning and practicing their horrific murder skills in a virtual environment?

Somewhere, Jack Thompson just got a chubby.

Second Life Terrorists

We must remain vigilant: This could be provide all the training would-be terrorists need to run around buying furry porn, attachable penises, and sparkly glowy rotating particle effects in real life.

This is good news...

This is really good news. The military job in Iraq just got easier. Now all the terrorists will be easy to spot. They'll be the ones standing in the middle of the market square holding a big bomb, waiting for 5 minutes for the square to fully render, cursing about lag.

Some Researchers Take This Seriously

In his book about MMOs ("Synthetic Worlds") researcher and "virtual economist" Edward Castronova predicted that terrorists could use virtual worlds as meet-ups for planning and training purposes. The possibility has been discussed at the TerraNova gameblog [blogs.com] (with plenty of skepticism) as well as MetaSecurity [metasecurity.net], which tracks extremist behavior within games and the "security implications of virtual worlds." The guy who runs MetaSecurity, Roderick Jones, has published some research on terrorism and MMOs at a site called MetaTerror [metaterror.com].

Yeah, it seems goofy and far-fetched, but there seems to be no end of surprises about the way folks interact in/with virtual worlds.

HA HA HA...

... and it's not even April 1.

*Terrorist #1: "What do you mean I have a squid on my face?"
*Terrorist #2: screw this guys. we don't even have a prophet in our group. i'm going fishing.

What ever happened to critical thinking?

I just read the entire article from The Australian, and it was only slightly less amusingly inaccurate than the WoW quote from Kevin Zuccato. Unfortunately the "amusingly inaccurate" has quickly turned into frightening. Doesn't it scare you that someone who is in a position of political power and responsibility in "the war on terror" is willing to put their name next to such a laughably inaccurate statement? Is he truly that stupid, or is he just too lazy to bother checking facts? For that matter, what about his staffers? Or the reporter who took the quote, or the editor who gave it the OK for publishing? I mean, we're only talking about the most popular online game in the world here, I'm sure that there must have been an intern somewhere who's played it.

Unfortunately, the lack of critical thinking didn't stop at the thought of sword-wielding orcs on gryphons attacking government buildings, the bits on Second Life weren't much better.

The arguments basically come down to two things:

1. They can launder money through Second Life.
2. They can create elaborate simulations of locations in Second Life with which to practice operations.

The problems with #2 are mostly obvious, i.e., you can't just whip up an accurate model of a government installation (or even a public location) without detailed information about that facility. That means lots of reconaissance, collation of data, etc. If you have all of the info needed to create a realistic simulation in Second Life, then you have all of the info needed to create a realistic simulation in any other environment/medium as well. The issue isn't Second Life, it's the recon data that the terrorists presumably would have. But the reality is that such data is hard to come by, at least in quantities sufficient to be truly useful. So we can just whip out the magical Internet box to fill in the blanks, and suddenly Second Life has gone from being a stupid waste of time to being a Terrorist Training Simulator (TM).

Argument #1 actually does hold some water. It would certainly be possible to use Second Life to transfer funds from individuals in one location to another, or to even launder funds. But anything of the sort would have to happen in a very limited fashion on a very limited scale. Transferring $20,000 via Second Life is bound to attract a lot of attention. Transferring smaller amounts of money would probably be more successful, but also a lot less useful. And frankly, I'm not seeing Second Life as being any easier or more likely to be used for money laundering/xfers than other services like PayPal. But you know, it's that magical Internet box again so critical thinking has to go out the window.

As to "three jihadi terrorists registered and two elite jihadist terrorist groups in Second Life", one has to wonder a little. What makes them elite jihadist groups as opposed to regular jihadist groups? Do they hog all the dungeon raids or something, or does it just make things sound scarier? And how to they know that there are three jihadi terrorists registered? Are they really jihadi terrorists who are trying to recruit for real-world damage? Or are they pimple-faced 14-year olds who just want to smash up bits of peoples' online virtual worlds and are role-playing terrorists as part of "the game"? After all, I doubt that the people playing as prostitutes in Second Life are actually really prostitutes. For that matter, I am confident that most of the "women" in Second Life are actually men, but I doubt that any significant portion of them are transvestites or transexuals.