Government After Terrorists in MMORPGs

And you thought gold farmers were irritating. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released a report on data-mining that includes information on a new initiative called the Reynard project. The point of the foxy initiative?

Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.

They do describe it as a ’seedling’ effort that ‘may increase its scope to a full project’ if early results are promising. I have nightmarish visions of TSA meets virtual worlds, which won’t be pretty. You can find the full PDF version of the unclassified data mining report at Wired.

U.S. Spies Want to Find Terrorists in World of Warcraft [Wired]