MMO's are packed with possible communication channels in addition to chat. Ever wonder if that annoying gnome in the auction hall is jumping in morse code? Could signals be sent with bids? Could a character's inventory contents be arranged to leave a message to someone else who shares the login info? Is that nonsense coming from what you presume to be a bot-controlled gold-farming crew really nonsense? When a game goes to great lengths to simulate a world, the possibilities for covert communication are nearly limitless!
I find the task of finding terrorist communications in MMO's so daunting that I'd never even consider making an attempt at it. However, the NSA is one organization that seems to have nearly infinite resources to throw at impossible problems. This is an organization that is literally trying to "hack the planet"! I seriously doubt they'll ever managed to uncover anything significant, even if they're plugged directly into the servers at Blizzard, etc.. However, at least some spooks get to play WoW for a living on the government's dime!
Seriously... The NSA makes military spending look frugal!
I simply do not believe that the NSA actually catches anyone using these advanced methods. The few terrorist prosecutions we've seen released almost always involve some low-hanging nut soliciting someone online for bomb materials with zero "gnome morse code" or other gimmicks. The idea that you can datamine everything running over the internet is a fool's errand and this errand is costing us billions in wasted tax dollars and millions of instances of violated human rights. Meanwhile, organizations like NASA are clearly underfunded.
Terrorism is the root password to everything from our constitution to our tax load. Playing up these charlatans and lifelong federal bureaucrats as some kind of saviors against the mythical hacker terrorist is a little much in my book. These are pork programs that go nowhere and do nothing but enrich the inside players and connected defense contractors.
> The idea that you can datamine everything running over the internet is a fool's errand and this errand is costing us billions in wasted tax dollars and millions of instances of violated human rights.
Agreed.
> Terrorism is the root password to everything.
Terrorism is pretty scary stuff, it's intended to be scary. No way are people in government singing hallelujah everytime innocent people are killed, look we can fund more nefarious shit! They're honestly trying to do the right thing and simply went overboard with collecting too much data.
Pardon my cynicism but your second statement makes you sound like a shill for those same people. Making such terrible actions sound like well-intentioned 'overstepping' only excuses such horrendously insidious activity (which is deserving of nothing but the strongest criticism).
The pernicious thing about a culture of shills and agent provocateurs is that it undermines trust in others and civil society in general. It leads to endless questioning of motives and to a complete stoppage of debate on some topics.
Think back to 2003 and the run-up to the Iraq war; which was the first time we saw what a domestic propaganda initiative on the internet looked like. Think about how much more sophisticated those tools are today. How defining and shaping issue oriented discourse can be viewed as a zero-sum game where one side "wins" and all other viewpoints are neutralized.
The thing is; once the suspicion has been planted that not all of the people one is talking to are honest participants it is impossible to ignore; impossible to disprove; and very difficult to act against.
Actually, I do think some of them are happy when it happens. Why is that so far fetched? For example, the leaders that jumped at the chance for WWI were clearly not hoping for peace. They wanted an excuse for a war. It does happen. Could it happen that there are extremists in the NSA just waiting for someone to pick a fight with them? Of course.
Hell, you can see this kind of behavior in tower defense games; people build a great power and dare anyone to cross them. The only difference is that real lives are at stake, but I think the government has proven they don't see the real lives in their game. For example, they don't even tally civilian casualties. They only even seem to care about such things because they don't want to anger the public.
Do you really believe that "doing the right thing" is the primary goal, or the secondary? Obviously that's how it's sold to the public, but it's hard to deny that espionage isn't the real goal.
If preventing deaths was anywhere close to the primary goal they'd be funneling money towards stopping traffic accidents.
Terrorism is a convenient trope to get people to willingly relinquish their liberties, just like "for the children" but with the goal of deploying ubiquitous scanners, drones, and microphones instead of censorship schemes.
Terrorism is pretty scary stuff, it's intended to be scary.
I'm not scared of acts of terrorism. I am much more concerned about vehicles killing cyclists and, really, the brain dead response the non terrorists will/have had when it comes to terrorism, like taking away our freedoms, wasting my tax dollars, and general stupid panic.
>No way are people in government singing hallelujah everytime innocent people are killed, look we can fund more nefarious shit!
I disagree with you on this one. I know this is a crazy conspiracy theory video, but please take the 30 minutes to watch it.
When you say nobody in "government" is excited, you need to refine the meaning of the term "government": Look at the players who have been at the center of this for the last 3 decades: GHW Bush and Carlyle group CIA drugsters.
I get the same impression. To me this all seems like an organization having the same delusions as John Nash when he tried to find geometric patterns in the movement of pigeons. They are so self-consumed in their intelligence community bubble chamber that they are convinced that there are all sorts of terrorists to be found in in every single corner of every place that ever was.
Are there terrorists? Yes, some. But to them it's like a boogeyman under every bed and in every closet.
> MMO's are packed with possible communication channels in addition to chat. Ever wonder if that annoying gnome in the auction hall is jumping in morse code? Could signals be sent with bids? Could a character's inventory contents be arranged to leave a message to someone else who shares the login info? Is that nonsense coming from what you presume to be a bot-controlled gold-farming crew really nonsense?
Precisely. WOW itself is the first level of steganography ("I'm not communicating, I'm gaming"), but one can think of many more, inside and outside of MMOs.
Given proper use of steganography, small groups will always be able to communicate with low risk of detection. But for obvious reasons, you will always have to roll your own scheme, and may end up overlooking aspects that render it insecure.
Funny that you mention steganography and WoW. Turns out that Blizzard watermarks your screen as you play with information like your server, user info, etc.
Not adding to the discussion in any way, but I really enjoyed scanning through this, knowing the information had already been decoded, and seeing people post 'you're all morons, it's just a jpg artifact!'
Of course you can use online gaming as an avenue of steganography.
The whole point of steganography is that you're supposed to transmit information while simultaneously concealing the fact that information even exists in the first place.
As long as you have a premeditated code, you can use practically anything to facilitate such communication, and the chances of it being uncovered are dubious.
This does not justify such ridiculous intelligence operations.
Is anyone aware of articles or books that deal with the creation of these types of systems? I'm guessing some sort of cryptography text would lead to it, but the last sentence of your post has me particularly interested. What kind of considerations need to be made when creating such a system, especially in today's age?
Nope, cryptography != steganography. The situation with stego, currently, is much the same as the situation with crypto was before the invention of public key encryption: truly high-grade stego is only available to governments, mostly because nobody knows how to do it in a secure way. In other words, stego is an art, not a science, just like crypto was before PKE. There are no good texts as far as I'm aware.
Passing information through channels not explicitly intended to carry that information is called a covert channel attack. Lots of links from the wikipedia page:
It's important to realize that any system of any size will be packed with covert channels; the thing to do is try to identify them all and drive their bandwidth down to an acceptable level.
If you have organized group you can probably use methods like codebook with Huffman coding to reduce message length a lot. Plain text is very sparse form of communication, compared to good codebook which suits the needs.
Btw. This is over 20 years old stuff. MUDs in very early 90s were used for all kind of communication. - Nuff said.
Also utilizing chaffing and winnowing allows you to use almost any kind of service to transfer your data. You'll just hide it in the junk. Only receiver will know what's meaningful and what's not.
One must be careful with it. IIRC, Anna Chapman was a pro among Russian spies, but at one point she got so confused by the steganography software on her laptop that she asked another known spy for help in using it ... before she realized she was talking to a CIA agent trying to figure her out.
There was a sad time where one (or more) of the gold sellers was suiciding their characters such that the bodies on the ground formed the letters for a URL. It was a very strange thing to see but if you were flying above the dead bodies you could pretty clearly see the URL.
Amazing too that we can't find money for food assistance (SNAP) to poor people but we can pay NSA agents for fools' errands in video games. I'm waiting for the revelation that Gen. Alexander's NSA underwrote "The Mists of Pandaria" with tax dollars.
I'm not complaining about space exploration expenditures when we still haven't accomplished world peace.
I'm complaining about us wasting money on COMPLETE NONSENSE. If you think "investigating" whether Al Quaeda is communicating versus gnomes jumping on top of the auction house is a valuable use of taxpayer resources, why aren't we investigating whether terrorists are using kebab interval-spacing as a communications medium?
Funding SNAP will feed my fellow hungry humans. Funding the NSA will... Who knows? We just have to take their lying word for it.
Usually I treat posts like yours with a base modicum of respect, but I'd really think twice the next time if I were you.
The inline "reply" link doesn't show up until a while after a comment has been posted; but you can simply use the permalink for the comment, there you will always find a reply box.
There's got to be a name for when someone complains about a tiny expenditure, and compares it with an unrelated huge societal issue. You can criticize anything this way: we're delivering mail while people starve. We're giving people parking tickets while killer asteroids go undetected.
It's plausible if they simply subvert the servers. If you take World of Warcraft, say, the options are basically text chat and voice chat. (Sure, you can send morse code or whatever, but that kind of sophistication generally assumes a more detailed communication has already taken place and applies everywhere -- "let the phone ring three times and then hang up", steganography, etc.)
A better option for covert communication would be a more open platform such as Second Life, where you can upload custom content. But, frankly, there are so many options if you have any imagination... If what they're really worried about is recruiting and outreach then they at least only need to worry about reasonably popular alternatives.
>MMO's are packed with possible communication channels in addition to chat. Ever wonder if that annoying gnome in the auction hall is jumping in morse code? Could signals be sent with bids?
There would be trillions of possible outlets for such communication, making looking for those specifically in MMO extremely futile.
> I find the task of finding terrorist communications in MMO's so daunting that I'd never even consider making an attempt at it.
I suppose the bigger bang for the buck would be in the metadata. Knowing who is playing at the same time, or who is looking at each other's profile or whatever.
Privacy concerns aside, this is a "half a loaf of bread is equivalent to no bread at all" argument. Yes, catching progressively more sophisticated signals gets progressively harder. That doesn't mean basic mining is useless. It reminds me of the argument that banning soda sales in schools is useless because kids could just go to a store across the street. They could, and some will, but taking care of the path of least resistance can go a surprisingly long way.
This is why it's literally impossible to track and analyze all real-time possible channels. Even if you have equal computing power analyzing every world activity, the ability to interpret every "hit" or suspicious pattern (which I think would be impossible to see.. e.g. the morse code used would likely be encrypted / non-standard ... which would lead to needing 1000x the computing power at minimum to even put a dent in keeping up in pattern tracking real-time). You'd be much better off spending that money on taking care of people, being kind, compassionate, etc..
> Seriously... The NSA makes military spending look frugal!
That isn't something you can decide by waving your hands at games. WoW is cheap compared to even simple things purchased by the military on a regular basis.
A WoW subscription maybe, but the computing power to analyze character actions to extract meaning (such as the jumping example above) and the people come up with that idea is not cheap.
You can send bits of information like that, but not that many. Sending a message like a time or gps coordinates would be easy, but having a full conversation would be very time consuming and require a ton of those short messages. It is also difficult to decode, especially manually.
But it could be a good way for a case officer to keep in contact with a source none of that hanging about in parks dead letter drops and embarrassing wifi enabled rocks.
Would they have caught Anna Chapman if she had met her case handler virtually instead of a coffee shop.
I can't wait to see a title that reads "Newest NSA revelations show that the Al Qaeda transmits information through MMO 'World of Warcraft' with in-game Gnomes jumping in morse code".
Eh, I don't find it terribly hard to imagine that America is the Kingdom of Azeroth and Al Qaeda are the Forsaken. Just map place names and unit compositions and you have a fairly large vocabulary already. Wouldn't even make it hard to just swap out different races for the current code key.
"Hell yeah! Because terrorists are using it to send messages! It's in the Mise-en-scène! I'm doing this for freedom!"
"My God. You're right!"
"Also, I'm pretty sure they're doing the same thing in strip clubs. And with really high-quality whiskey. So...I'm going to need some really high-quality whiskey. And a fist-full of singles."
The truth is, there probably is a budget for this.
"At the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret, Samantha says she lap danced with one of the terrorists. The Terrorists who hijacked a plane and crashed it are said to have stayed and played in Las Vegas."
...
"Some big-man terrorist, huh?" Samantha said this week as she took a breather from the two-dozen lap dances she bestows daily upon the lonely at the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret. "He spent about $20 for a quick dance and didn't tip more."
"the difficulty of proving terrorists were even thinking about using games to communicate"
The article is pretty good in most areas, but an epic fail in this specific small subpart. The solution to the problem is simply follow the cultural trend of redefining what terrorism means. The article fails by listing some actual real terrorists. The article succeeds by listing non-terrorists as terrorists such as academic scientists who are employed in a perfectly legitimate capacity by a government that our government doesn't happen to like at this moment. The article fails by not mentioning that most of the terrorists they're tracking are prank telephone callers, internet bullying, anyone who ever disagrees with anything our government does in any manner or the actions of any individual government employee, anyone who belongs to a religion or no religion at all, political candidates and supporters on whichever is the losing side, teens toilet papering houses, minorities who do illegal things like drive while black in white neighborhoods, you know, new school terrorism as opposed to the old school stuff they used to be concerned with like crashing planes and stuff.
What we really need is a .gov organization oriented against old school terrorism instead of the new school 1984 stuff.
I'm hoping one of the results from the NSA reform will be that we'll properly name who and what exactly is a terrorist. The government spies on everyone, and then to justify their spying they're calling all of them potential terrorists. That line of thinking must go.
Yes the funny part is the scientist they labeled as a terrorist is not a terrorist at all, but is a perfectly legitimate surveillance target. They not only have the wrong label for the wrong people, they have the wrong label for the right people.
As a followup to my original post we probably need two new .gov agencies not just one. One would focus on state level threats to the country like foreign nuclear scientists, pretty much the pre-1984 style CIA stuff, or at least the fraction of CIA activities that were actually legal. The other would be more police like and focus on nutty individual threats, that aren't national threats, more or less James Bond evil villain type stuff. Both groups might or might not "fit" under the same gov org. Probably neither fits under the existing 1984 organizations, and unfortunately no one is apparently working on those two problems, in favor of the much more exciting "stamp out political dissidents / implement Stasi/SS secret police in the USA" model.
I think what you're trying to say is, since they have no proof of terrorists using virtual worlds to communicate, they have no legal reason to be spying on those innocent people who use them legitimately.
Redefine and water down what it means to be labeled as a terrorist such that harmless mainstream people are now given that label, and by definition anything that's mainstream will of course be used by terrorists.
With a side helping of the .gov orgs who used to defend us from "THEM" are now going all 1984 on us, so who, if anyone, is still watching "THEM"? Well... no one, anymore. Which is in itself kinda scary. .gov no longer defends us from that kind of stuff anymore, so the only way to justify spying on foreign nuclear scientists (which used to be a perfectly legit .gov job...) is to mislabel them as terrorists.
If you convert all your police to secret police to spy on political dissidents, who's left to pull over drunk drivers? Well, unfortunately, no one.
I grew up in a world in which the Stasi infiltrating church groups was seen as state security going beyond the pale.
This is just beyond insanity.
These agencies should not just be reined in anymore, the need to be abolished and replaced if we are ever to return to an acceptable level of state surveillance.
I spend a lot of time 'in' an online game playing with one of my relatives. We have a collective circle of online friends and we know when something is up with any of our friends. If they have not logged on all day that is a cause of concern. Equally, if someone is going to be away from the game for a few days then they will let everyone know. I doubt they would email the same to everyone in their address book.
With aforementioned relative I know if she is working from home, on business or with time to herself. Her involvement in the game shows that. I know more from her gameplay than I do from emails or from what anyone else in the family has to say. Important family news is relayed in game rather than on the phone or in email. Email might be moved to if something needs to be discussed away from a public forum, but, that first message, in-game is best.
As for online friends, I am not that picky. I have online in-game friends from all over the world and I don't care if they are raving Christian nutters. In real life I would not have time for those that want to quote the bible to me every day, but I will tolerate it in-game, so long as they further my game goals. Therefore I am easier to befriend in-game than in real life.
I get up to things that my friends and family don't get to hear about, they are not to know. However, if I was to be targeted for spying then the in-game communication would show whether I was busy with something else or not. I don't have to conspire with others in-game for the communications to be useful, so I don't think the NSA/GCHQ actually have to be looking for 'bomb plots', just a level of game devotion.
Look at all the missed opportunities to stop the 9/11 hijackers. Look at the neglected follow-ups prior to the Boston Marathon bombings.
Are we supposed to believe that agencies that ignore or under-prioritize basic law enforcement/counterintelligence warning signs about potential terrorists are somehow going to do something useful with a World of Warcraft chat log?
This is waste, fraud and abuse at best. At worst, it is another example of using the "terrorism" boogeyman to monitor innocent people.
Some poor NSA analyst was caught playing WoW in work and had to develop this enormous ploy to explain his actions as a way to capture chat terrorist traffic in-game. It just blew up from there.
>The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which boasts more than 48 million players.
In other news, the NSA to start a new reality TV show: Living Room Security! Find out who's added to a no-fly list this week as we take you live inside your own living room. Brought to you by the Xbox Kinect.
Online games are interesting to infiltrate because they can be a conduit for downloaded code; a lot of the clients are native code with the capability for remote execution (e.g., for anti-cheat challenges).
I have no evidence that the NSA has done this.
To the NSA, your user base is just another set of people to monitor, just another set of machines to infiltrate. They don't care about your user's trust.
I thought this was reasonably public information for a few years now. IARPA (basically the intelligence agencies' version of DARPA) has had a series of public grant calls since the late 2000s for research on various kinds of data-mining in MMOs and virtual worlds, ranging from behavior modeling to transaction tracking. Of course, they didn't say precisely why they were interested in such research, but one could surmise...
>According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a "deconfliction" group was required to ensure they weren't spying on, or interfering with, each other.
I can't understand how this can be true, 48 million players vs. 30,000-40,000 NSA employees[1], number of agents is probably a few orders lower.
Say there are a couple hundred servers in various games they're observing and participating in (not an absurd number given that one person with a 40-hour week could play quite a bit), it's reasonable to assume multiple agencies might overlap servers.
Well, I was just hinting on overspending: if a few agents are watching one target it's miscommunication and mild overspending, but when there's a whole "deconfliction group" it's overspending squared.
Aside from overspending you might want to look into existing BATF sting operations. If the majority of the criminal activity in an area is law enforcement sting operations trying to catch the small fraction of actual criminals, then you need a deconfliction group or the vast majority of arrests will be law enforcement agents arresting each other.
Imagine if the city cops decide to crack down on prostitution by posing as johns in a sting, the same night that county sheriffs decide to crack down on prostitution as prostitutes in a sting, and the streets are 90% full of cops arresting each other. LOL all you want, this has happened IRL, also with drug trafficking. There is also something of a meme that the majority of underage girls on chat services are creepy FBI agents.
Yeah, it's bureaucracy gone wild: one criminal per fifty employees. But I guess it's even less than so in this case: no convicted criminals, so many agents that a "deconfliction group" (how many employees were in that "group"? 3-5? 10?) was needed.
I suppose HN is also infiltrated. Those damn 'hackers' must be reading Hackers News, right? I hear some are even 'small government' types. I can understand why people think that must be the reason every NSA article disappears of the frontpage after 40 comments...
"Detecting Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing Activity in Second Life and World of Warcraft", Angela S M Irwin, Jill Slay - University of South Australia
I wonder if NSA has reversed chat protocols for non-MMO games in order to facilitate broad, keyword-based intercept directly from player network traffic.
Namely games that don't send chat traffic through a centralized server. Perhaps older games that had lackluster releases and are currently ghost towns in terms of active players. If bad guys are trying to fly under the radar, those are probably a smart bet (relatively speaking) compared to games that are popular. Most non-MMOs don't even require an account, let alone billing details.
It would be laughable if firing up some ancient, crappy game that nobody plays is all it takes to dodge dragnet surveillance. On the other hand, I imagine dragnet surveillance never was intended to catch smart people (only blackmail them), and terrorists by definition tend to be dumb.
Obviously if someone is already targeted, reverse engineering game chat protocols becomes irrelevant. Analysts would just read screenshots and key-logger data courtesy of NSA TAO (or whatever GCHQ's equivalent is).
> A later memo noted that among the game's active subscribers were "telecom engineers, embassy drivers, scientists, the military and other intelligence agencies".
If not targets, an idea not discussed so far is bribery victims?
"Sure, I can op you... but we like to know when ops will be around, you know, for coverage so there's always one online, so if you could just let us know when you'll be working (embassy driver) overtime hours..."
Even if this was a legitimate concern to the NSA, if you don't cover every game you wouldn't catch any possible terrorist. If I were a smart terrorist, I'd just simply use a fairly obscure game unlikely to be targeted.
"The inf1del n00bz of the Alliance, will be crushed by
our grand Jihad Horde. We will bomb their cities, and rain
death in Arathi Basin on all major servers. Allah is great!"
General Alexander wasn't able to comment, because he was apparently speed leveling his Paladin. Anonymous sources cite that his palandin is still level 30 and that quote: "Keith is quite a newb. He doesn't know that he can insta level his Paladin.".
It is always great when evil is incompetent. I dislike that the NSA, GCHQ, etc. are spying on everyone and violating everyone's basic dignities, but it's great that they waste time doing so in rather insane ways, e.g. by playing video games.
Basicly, I hate the NSA's spying, but if they want to spy on me in ridiculously convoluted ways... it's better than them being actually competent.
That's a good point. This has to be one of the most Rube Goldberg ways I've ever heard of someone trying to collect intelligence. Did that teenager really have sex with my mother? Or is that some sort of code! Or is he just mad that I fragged his team and broke his streak? Or was the streak itself some sort of code!
This sounds like it is actually closer to traditional spy work than most of the revelations we have heard recently. If you tell an NSA agent (or anyone online) something they will know what you tell them. It is more worrying if they are leaving vulnerabilities un-patched as this could allow anyone to exploit the same methods. Are foreign governments using this to spy on Americans?
When I read this I just though of the Penguin Party scene from Four Lions, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-SrlQ9tlI.
Turns out these morons get there ideas from satirical black comedies.
Or the laundry verse where the external assets experimented with using WOW to communicate.
Persephone has a "WWLJD" bracelet. When she's trying to infiltrate Schiller's compound, everyone naturally assumes it stands for "What would Lord Jesus do?" Actually, it's "What would Leeroy Jenkins do?"
From what little has been confirmed, the system we know about works "better" the more connections you feed into it.
I doubt they intended to find anyone directly using this information. Instead, what is more likely is that collecting data in these games might help identify "friends" of people considered suspicious via some other means.
Although now that I think of it, games like WoW and EVE Online do make for quite a milieu. I know that several of my colleagues play such games and with each other.
It certainly chills the spine a bit when you realize that there are people who've had this kind of data for quite some time, using it for who-knows-what...
If you have to monitor all online communication, then infiltrating private message boards by means of technology or human interaction is essential.
An in-game chat is just an additional communication protocol next to email, Skype, etc.
Leaving such communication channels unmonitored would pose a potential threat. This behavior is in line with the current state of affairs and should be expected.
Or... you find players that are obsessive 1st person shooter players, you cross reference their mental health history and access to guns. That pops up Adam Lanza in Newtown. You engage him and coerce him. hmm..
But you can't get rid of the NSA when there are real threats in the world. It's just not going to happen, because there actually are real threats (the number is debatable), and the existence of more than an anomaly of threats will always be justification for NSA and their ilk.
The only way to get rid of the NSA is to get rid of the threats. The most effective long term way is to work for and achieve a much higher level of peace, tolerance and community than the world currently has.
> But you can't get rid of the NSA when there are real threats in the world.
Sure you can. The existence of real threats does not mean that the NSA is the only means of dealing with them, nor even that it is an effective way of dealing with them even before considering the negative impacts it has, nor, finally -- and this is the key consideration -- that it is a net positive considering the benefits it provides against the threats against the direct threat it produces to freedom.
I'll concede that getting rid of the NSA regardless of threats is within the realm of possibility. But it's very unlikely. Maybe more unlikely than world peace.
Too late. The national conversation is already insane, with a pandoras's box nature that will not be reversed. The West is fucked, and like any spoiled asshole, is going to wreak the game (life on Earth) for everyone else. God/Allah/ca$h have mercy on our stupid fucking lives.
The United States is collapsing, and the show will take a while. I'd say sit back and enjoy, but in this show most of us die, and those who don't will wish they did.
Well, this is a good excuse for gaming MI5 analysts, and probably a reason for their recent Russian vacancies, someone has to play Russian MMORPGs (just kidding).
But seriously speaking - do you remember that American spy killed in Tripoli before the Lybian war (if memory serves)? He was a huge authority in EVE Online as it turned out.
I find the task of finding terrorist communications in MMO's so daunting that I'd never even consider making an attempt at it. However, the NSA is one organization that seems to have nearly infinite resources to throw at impossible problems. This is an organization that is literally trying to "hack the planet"! I seriously doubt they'll ever managed to uncover anything significant, even if they're plugged directly into the servers at Blizzard, etc.. However, at least some spooks get to play WoW for a living on the government's dime!
Seriously... The NSA makes military spending look frugal!