Snowden says NSA spies on Xbox Live and WOW players!!

Edward Snowden is at it again. The latest leaked documents provided to the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica show that many NSA agents have the dreams job of many 20-year-old college men.
According to the documents, NSA agents have created actual characters in World of Warcraft and Second Life and are using them to spy on players.


The documents detail that the NSA has mass data collection capabilities through the Xbox Live console online network. The network boasts more than 48 million individuals from all over the world. The documents even show that the NSA has been attempting to recruit tech savvy users as informants through the gaming network.

http://benswann.com/guess-which-hot-christmas-game-console-the-nsa-is-hacking-into/

 

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I've never understood the problem with government spying. I'm not doing anything illegal and if I'm doing anything embarrassing, why would I care if a complete stranger working for the government finds out and keeps it to himself. On the other hand, I have no problem at all if the spying leads to jailing child pornographers, pedophiles, human traffickers, etc. People are always screaming "THE GOV'MENT IS SPYING ON YOU!!! THEY'S IS SEEING WHAT YOU IS DOING ON YOUR INTERCOMPUTERS!!!" and I'm all like "So? Look all you want, I don't give a shit."

 

Yep, you're an idiot. It's called right to privacy. It doesn't matter what they do with the information; you have a right to privacy regardless. Also, there's a huge potential for abuse of the massive power at their disposal - and they've shown that there's been quite a bit of abuse already.

 

Because as you can see, the government does an oh-so-great job keeping top secret information secret, let alone your facts. You would be surprised what small pieces of information could ruin your life, despite it not being illegal. Over a period of time, anyone could be found guilty for something that was seemingly innocent at the time.

On another note, do you have curtains on your house? Do you close the door to the bathroom when you use it? Sure, you have nothing to hide, but do you really want people to see everything you're doing?

Oh, and of course this little thing...
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

By the way, can I have your email password? Just for safe keeping. Just in case you say something bad about me, Id like to have access.

 

Back to the OP, what exactly does the NSA want with WOW and Xbox Live? Are there a lot of people plotting terrorist activities and other crimes using WOW and Live? Seems a bit bizarre, but I guess they just want to get their little fingers into every facet of American life.

 

Beautiful.

Also, I'm gonna be brutally honest: who the fuck didn't see the NSA getting their greasy hands on the XBone Kinects? But WoW and Second Life: that I didn't expect (yet it's not totally surprising of the NSA either).

The NSA are a taxpayer-funded* joke (albeit a dangerous joke). Their misplaced efforts make the McCarthy communist witchhunts of the 1950s look positively sane and negligible in comparison.

(*Wait a minute, "taxpayer-funded")... OH MY GOD I'M PAYING MY GOVERNMENT TO PLAY WORLD OF WARCRAFT AND SECOND LIFE. I'm sure a fair bundle of gov't employees already play on their computers now-and-again (oh Freecell, how could we survive the office without thee?), but we are now literally paying people to play videogames (let's face it: they're not exactly gonna be too vigilant with their "investigative" playing). I'm sure that even many of the more tax-supportive members here will find this to be ridiculous.

The worst part about the NSA gamers is that this manages to be frivolous and scary at the same time: remember that one kid who got reported for, then arrested and put in jail on his 19th birthday just for making an (admittedly off-color) joke about shooting up a school on League of Legends? I guarantee that such arrests will become less sporadic.

I applaud Snowden for the same reason I encourage people who videotape** police officers: the government never looks over the agencies who watch us (short of a blue moon over a frozen Hell full of flying pigs getting struck by lighting while claiming winning lottery tickets during Thanksgivukkah***), so it's time for us to start watching our government and our police. It's bad enough that some states outlaw the recording of police actions.

**videotape? Ah crapbaskets, I make myself sound older than I really am.
***...I may have gone overboard with this one... and with the footnotes.

 

When the whole NSA thing first blew up I was genuinely surprised that people were shocked. This is old news.
Check out ECHELON.
Anyway, I think this kind of thing is unavoidable in our world as it is today. The only thing you as an individual can do (if you need) is take certain measures to protect your sacred privacy.

 

Sounds like the best job in the world, here's a couple of Pizza's and some mountain dew...now play these games until you capture a terrorist

Kinda agree with Mettleramiel a little. There do seem to be a lot of people totally freaking out about privacy concerns. Yes we have a right to it but I've always thought it a little arrogant of some people to assume that out of the billions of people on the planet, their data is worth focusing on. The odds of something happening to you as the result of a breach or leak are very very very small.

I have a few friends who are making their internet lives hell trying to stay completely anonymous and it's all they talk about, my opinion of them is in decline because as I just said, it gives them an arrogance about them, as if they're so special as to be targeted.

 

That was fucking rude.

 

That's my point. Government is watching you play WOW or scanning your Facebook? These are public places designed to be social and people are upset about it? "We have a right to privacy" is a true statement, but rights are arbiturary to where you live. The US has a right to free speech, whatever it may be, so you can hang your "God hates fags" signs all day long, here in Canada, that's illegal. Also, in Canada you have the right to live, but just a little down south you lose that right if you commit x crime. This is why I always hate when people use the argument "I HAVE THE RIGHT TO DO X" it changes so fast with time and what hunk of dirt you happen to be standing on.

 

Practically, people have been arrested for buying too much cough medicine or borrowing the wrong books from the library. These are people with nothing to hide, doing nothing illegal, yet the system works against them. I was in London surrounded by CCTV cameras. It didn't make me feel one iota safer to have someone looking over my shoulder...

That's not even to talk about the legal issues... Where yes, we are innocent until proven guilty, but it becomes negligible to prove guilt when the government has every piece of data about them and the ability to change law at their whim. If they want to target someone, even if it is just to be a fall guy, they'll get their man. This type of data gathering causes problems outside of the courtroom too:

Say you are buying wigs and visiting websites about chemotherapy. One would assume you have cancer. That certainly isn't something you want to hide, but it is information you want control over. What if you were passed over for a promotion because your employer had access to this information and you didn't know? What if you were buying these things for your spouse?

Then there's the philosophical issues about this - "privacy" isn't about "hiding wrong" things. It's more about transparency. It's knowing what others might know about you, and knowing that it is correct (or not). You might be roleplaying as a criminal mastermind in WOW & watching a lot of heist films on netflix - that information taken out of context could come back to bite you. If you don't know someone is collecting this info and don't get the chance to properly explain yourself, you could be painting yourself into a corner, just buy walking into a few banks...

Don't think about Orwell's 1984, think about Kafka's The Trial.

It's easy to get complacent & it is easy to have a defeatist attitude. Think for more than a second about whether giving up freedom for the sake of "security" is worth it.

 

It's not about a made up "right". It's about not wanting tresspassers on your lawn. Just because it's your lawn.

The decree also permitted increased state and police intervention into private life, allowing officials to censor mail, listen in on phone conversations, and search private homes without a warrant or need to show reasonable cause.

Sounds familiar? Like maybe the war on terror in the US? Well this is Nazi Germany February 28, 1933.

Hitler's argument was the same as yours: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".
A dictature is created carefully and gradually. Step by step. Do you want to live in a dictature? I know I don't.

Yes it was. But you set him up for it

 

Well, that's pretty damn well written, couldn't have did better myself.

You also have to realize there's many people who take this stance just because the Government tells them that; the same thing probably happened in Nazi Germany. We as a people need to lose the notion of "If the Government's saying it, they must be right," we're allowing a dictatorship to form, all for the sake of continued convenience; I wish people would take a moment to ask themselves "How much worse will it be for the next generation?" this question applies to many issues we have today.

 

You have some valid points, but I never said that I thought it was ok for everyone to have access to everything, I just don't have a problem with the higher ups having it. I know it's not the cool way to think about it and trust me, I'm not saying that the government is always right, far from it. Just because someone agrees with something the government is doing does not mean that they have become defeatist or complacent. I have thought about it for far more than a second and to me I really do not have a problem with the police having transparency.

I look at it like this: the NSA looks over all of my emails. They find out that I'm going over to Aunt Hilda's house next week to make cupcakes. There is nothing interesting or important to them, so they move on. The next emails they read they find out that somebody is going to bomb a hospital. Now I know, that's an extreme example as hospitals do not get bombed every day, but was there any harm done by reading my emails?

 

All this being said, I am not trying to argue with anyone or change anyone's opinion, I'm just asking yours and giving you mine

 

This.

Consider this startling fact: you are not the only person affected by this. So, even if you're personally okay with having your privacy invaded, others might not be. The entire population should not be subjugated to an invasive policy because it personally doesn't bother you. Some people are perfectly okay with people watching them have sex. Most aren't. Those people shouldn't make decisions for everyone.

Also, I disagree with your argument about rights being regional. You're right that, in practice, they are sometimes regional. But they shouldn't be. It's an issue of morality more than legality. Privacy is one of those "inalienable" human rights, independent of any external factors.

The NSA's spying activities aren't limited to "public" sites like WOW and Facebook (actually Facebook is supposed to be limited to your network of friends, but whatever). They've also been found to have looked at people's private emails, hacked into computers to obtain personal documents, and even activated the cameras on laptops without the user's knowledge.

On a side note, why are the mods allowing this conversation? I thought political discussions were supposed to be limited to the unmoderated thread.

 

What if Assemblergames is being spied on?

Can you even imagine what horrors a terrorist could inflict upon the good people of the country with a prototype of Super Bomberman 3?

 

I never said that I should make that decision for everyone, all I asked was for people's reasons as to why it botherd them, you are the one getting all upset about it. I personally don't care either way, I just wanted to know why it was sch a hottopic to some people. But as a counter to that, why should the people who are for privacy get to make that choice for everyone else? If it really is a national security issue, why should the privacy advocates be able to deny that to everyone else.

How can you say that rights are a morality issue more than legal when morals also change with regions? There are no such things as inaliable rights because what rights you should have differs in everyone's point of view. Privacy is important to many people, most people even, but not everyone. For that matter, how can you say rights should not be regional? I will use the free speech example again, I am glad that you can not hold a KKK rally in my country, some people feel strongly that it is important to be able to say what you want no matter how biggoted it is. Who is right? How do we decide what rights should be universal? There are to many fctors that come into play

 

Because it's in the Constitution, the very thing the nation is founded on. There seems to be a misconception about this privacy thing. There are legal routes to go for wiretapping and spying. If the government wants to do that, they already could. But instead, they ignore that, and spy on everyone illegally. The government isn't made up of super smart people to the very top. They are all human beings, extremely flawed ones at that, so no one should ever have access to that much information.

 

It's my understanding that, because of the Patriot Act, all of that stuff is perfectly legal. The Patriot Act basically says that government agencies can spy on anyone without a warrant if they're suspected of terrorism. Fucked up and unethical? Yes. Unconstitutional? Of course. But perfectly legal in our current system. Of course, we have all sorts of laws that are arguably unconstitutional, but they're still laws.