WOW - Feds are Data Mining
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 - 2:12pm
How do you feel about this? Seems to me there are few government employees that are addicted to WOW and do not want to pay the monthly fee. 
GWJ Alliance
Dhalvid - 70 Night Elf Warrior
"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."
Plato
They're insane. They want terrorists to play WoW, because then they'll be too busy to make bombs.
"Hmm, I could go blow up the Empire State Building, but... I'm only 10 badges away from that epic chest piece...."
That's just...wow! I'm sorry my american friends, you're government has transferred control of the state to Thrall...
Copingsaw wrote:
Super K - The "Anti-Wipe"
TripleT's avatar has double the intelligence of our current president.
The only thing that needs to be mined is the reason why the majority of this administration isn't in prison.
This is so pointless. I want my money back!
Xbox Live: Irongut | Playstation ID: Irongut_GWJ
Yes it is true, the country is run by morons. Which is why I can never find anyone to vote for, but I can always find someone to vote against.
What really makes me giggle is that when I think of the GWJ Alliance folks, the folks in Unbound and all mine and Bandolyn's friends and co-workers who play WoW, a large percentage are either A)In the military, B)In law enforcement, C)Former military/law enforcement or D)the spouse of a active duty/retired Military or law enforcement member. So what will all that wasted tax payer dollars discover: Too many gun-toting, law abiding citizens play WoW. So stop trying to steal my terocone darnit or I might have to convince the priest that healed me last night to reprogram the bomb he had attached to the plane at work the day before to target your house. And if that fails, I know a nice state trooper who might give you a ticket for being a putz
*Bandolique (70 Combat Rogue)
*Amara (70 Fire Mage)
*Zeus the Good Luck Dog making the Lords of Kara/SSC/TK cry whenever he is around
I realize this is going to scare some people here in MMO-land, but this came up about 2 weeks ago in the P&C forum as well.
Click if you dare
GWJ Alliance on Blackhand
Lunazul - Rouge & GWJ Paparazzo
Lunarel - Druid
Funkenpants wrote:
The reasons they give seem to be a lame way to go about data mining, but going through chat logs may be worthwhile.
It'd be interesting to know jus how much of the seedy underworld would consider corresponding through a MMO. If using code it'd be safer than talking over a cell phone. Of course you'd loose the mobility that a cell phone would give ya but for planning purposes i can see them being used.
Still it'd be funny seeing the disbelief of a straight laced fed having to learn what "wtf! L2p noob!" means
Gamer Tag: Rantyr
WAIT!!!! Is this the first step in the Terrorists finding out about Krindle? What if they get to him before he has a chance to get all of his tanking gear ready to go against Al Qaeda?!?! This could be serious!
Now the Field of Battle is a land of standing corpses;
Those determined to die will live;
Those who hope to escape with their lives will die. - Wu Chi
This program was developed after a spy group noticed a terrorist cell would stop all communications for about 4 hours every Tuesday.
IronClad Online: PurEvil
Well,to interject a possible reason-terrorists rely on a global network of cells of individuals in order to keep possiblity of detection to a minimum. Their lines of communications have increasingly been compromised by the United States to the point of which their leaders are afraid of using cellar technology for fear we will detect them and use it to track them down,i.e. kill them. One possible way to communicate in a non-identifiable fashion would be in MMORPGs that have a global following. Think about how we chat together every day.Think about your officer's meetings.They could also hold their discussions and strategy sessions in WOW-Just like you do.Think about how poorly policed by the GMs WOW is.Blizzard could monitor our conversations I suppose but probably haven't in the past. I 'm not saying that I like the idea of agencies that I know of doing things like this but I can certainly understand the potential need for it.
And I urge you all to remember terrorism is an international concern-not merely a U.S. one.
They struck at the entire world on September 11th.That's my 2 cents.
It's not a question of understanding the context of why the government might think this is a good idea, but more a question of what real value would be derived from it. For example, what is to stop a terrorist group from developing a communication style using MMO lingo like raid, instance, aggro etc. to reference any planning for a real world event, at which case there is nothing of substance to data mine anymore. Even reference to real world locations, is that supposed to register a data 'hit'? How often does that come up amongst a group of close knit guildies, maybe discussing their plans or weekend exploits. Probably pretty often.
I'd guess there is a better chance of the government earmarking trolling pedophiles addicted to starting every other conversation with a/s/l inquiries during such surveillance than terrorists, which wouldnt be a bad thing at all. The average 'general chat' function of an MMO would probably clutter their data mining agents or drive them to insanity.
Ultimately, if we gamerswithjobs are discussing this, isnt it just as likely that terrorist cells would now be aware of such monitoring too? Besides there are plenty of less popular MMO's and non-MMOs that a cell could move to as a replacement communications channel. I suppose Battle.net chat is just as viable a communications option too.
Money spent monitoring WoW is wasted money. There are just too many alternatives.
Xbox Live: Irongut | Playstation ID: Irongut_GWJ
As true as that may be, the sheer logistics of trying to monitor WoW would be a nightmare. From my perspective (someone who's actually employed to data mine, though I do ER charts), I don't see how they expect to find anything. My office of around 50 people reviews about 10,000 medical records per day, and we can't even keep up with the patient load of the 20-25 or so hospitals we're contracted to mine. Most of us sample to get the year's data in (my hospital is 50%, for example, so my team only reviews every other day, and we still have a bit of trouble).
WoW is just too big. You'd need probably an office like mine for each faction, on each server... and you'd still probably fall behind, as my data is straight forward (though very poorly written), and any terrorist using WoW would obviously speak in code. So you'd have an obscene amount of people reviewing chat logs for anything suspicious, then sending anything they found that MIGHT be something to another tier of people who will weed through that data. Even if they stayed only a day or two behind the present day, it'd be a week before anything legitimate was brought to anyone's attention.
And this is completely ignoring the unrecorded, unmoderated private voice chat channels people can use now.
So sorry if I make light fun of the idea of the government wasting money on this, but that's all they're doing. They might get lucky and find something on a few terrorists with this, but it'll probably be too late to do anything about it, unless the persons they're monitoring are extraordinarily stupid.
IronClad Online: PurEvil
Rather than taking this fully to the P&C, I'll just say my own 2 cents: the "War on Terror" can, as we're seeing from the topic of this very thread, be used to justify just about anything the government wants to, whether it be violations of privacy & freedom in the name of safety ("we have to give up our rights before the terrorists take them away!"), wasteful expenditures of money, or outright inefficient silliness (datamining mmo's through government-hired players).
I may have inadvertently foiled one of their master plans the other week when I found myself grouped with a Hazballah and reported the name as being rather close to Hezbollah. It could have been a magnet character for terrorist sympathizers. Who knows how many millions of government dollars I wasted.