this is straight up retarded
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/n...ns-spies-w.html

what's retarded about it? do you seriously not know that extremists (Muslim and otherwise) use things like this to communicate covertly?

nope - NOIPY thinks we all should hold hands and sing love songs.

LOL, Terrorism in World of Warcraft, LOL, OMG. Hahahahahahahaha

yeah, studying the social patterns of terrorism is a bad idea. oh, wait, no it's not...never mind.

yeah, we can use IRC for free, but lets all join WoW so we can pay to chat about terrorism in a monitored environment!

which is easier to monitor, easier to hide in?

uh, irc is easier to hide in

really? I disagree. it's a publicly available forum in a text format. much easier to monitor (by the government), and in turn harder to hide in IMO.

there's no centralization, though. i could go on undernet, efnet, or hell, since this is gaming, quakenet, and make a temp channel. i'm not familiar with the nodes and whether things are logged, but i do know that for any mmorpg, all data sent to the server will be logged. and they have more info to connect users to handles.

yes, but how willing would the host of that mmorpg be to hand over that data?

lately? fairly to very.

i mean, there are obviously much, much more secure ways than irc, but i cant see people thinking a hosted game server is safe at all. now if it was hosted locally it might be different.

I really, really hope that this is just some cutesy disinformation campaign. Otherwise, someone in the US government needs to be slapped hard.

If terrorists are using Second Life and World of Warcraft to hook up, by all means, let them. Not only would they have to create accounts, using valid e-mail addresses, but in the case of WoW, terrorists have to give a credit card number, too. They'd have to connect to proprietary software to specialized servers, making anonymity and untraceability that much harder. Downloading the bulky software needed to run these "massively multiplayer" games would add even more electronic breadcrumbs. Plus, game administrators regularly monitor what players are doing online.

http://armsandinfluence.typepad.com/armsan...errorist-c.html

exactly

create the email account on Yahoo, GMail, whatever...register on WOW, then delete the email account (which of course already has no connection to you anyway).

and? they haven't shied from using credit cards in the past, have they? *cough*9/11*cough*

people seem to gravely misunderstand how easy anonymity is in situations like this.

so what? they don't say "hey Muhammed, let's blow up the Pentagon today." derrrrr