When Google agreed to provide China censored search capability, it justified its action on the principle that information cannot be contained.  The implication was wherever a connection exists, people will explore and adapt their methods of communication to allow the free and unmonitored flow of information.

This week, the Greater Tampa Bay National Defense Industry Association (NDIA) had an event welcoming the joint Coalition forces, and the subject of social media came up between a general and some highly placed defense industry execs.  Aware that the US has been monitoring their social media activities, terrorist groups have apparently moved some of their key conversations… into the World of Warcraft and other MMOs.

Most analytics are based upon the consistently structured, open-access, and archived nature of conversational interaction on social media platforms.  Conversely, MMOs enable proprietary, unstructured, unrecorded, firewalled, many-to-many communication amongst participants, sharing voice, text, images, and other media, that do not lend themselves even a little bit to external monitoring and analysis.  Proof of the effectiveness of this strategy - and Google’s position - was demonstrated when information regarding democracy and civil liberties was shared to and among Chinese citizens via MMOs as early as 2005, effectively bypassing the government censorships of those topics on the internet, as shown by this extract from “Taking New World Notes” by Wagner James Au:

“As of this date [late 2005], the firewall does not evidently block counterrevolutionary speech transmitted within online worlds. So far, Chinese authorities have not cracked down on political expression in MMOs (though they have imposed limits on play time, arguably an indirect abridgement of free speech.) With over a million paying Chinese subscribers in World of Warcraft alone, however, sheer numbers make it inevitable that some will soon directly test the limits of political expression there, too.”

While it was opined that “NSA can get into Blizzard’s systems when it needs to”, we have an analytical and accessibility rift between social media platforms that foster access to conversations among members, and those that don’t.  The implications are significant for counterterrorism and intelligence purposes, but also for everything that social media analysis is used for - market and brand research, advertizing and monetizing, public relations… and of course civil liberties.  Will government intelligence efforts “crack open” MMOs and lead the way for civil and commercial analytics?

Thanks to Thomas Eskridge of the High Tech Crime Institute and Ken Pohl for their insight and contributions to this discussion.  For more discussion on the US government project to mine MMOs for counterterrorism, read “Government to Seek Terrorists in World of Warcraft: The Full Proposal.”

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