This is a surveillance photo from Second Life, included in the NSA/GCHQ manual regarding techniques for spying inside virtual worlds.
Just when you thought the Snowden revelations couldn’t get any weirdly self-parodic, you learn that American and British spies have created avatars to conduct surveillance of suspicious activity inside World of Warcraft and Second Life.
Apparently a CTO of Second Life (now developing mobile applications at Facebook) is a former Navy officer and NSA employee who helped them get their start. Not long after his brown bag at NSA in 2007, the UK’s GCHQ has conducted its “first operational deployment into Second Life.”
Can virtual marketplaces for magical D&D weapons really be used for laundering real-world cash from criminal enterprises?
What avatar would J. Edgar Hoover create?
What are the in-game consequences when your elven fellow traveler gets outed as a narc?
For the record, I never knew anyone in my WoW guild to be NSA, but I know Cory Ondrejka well enough to talk to, (the Second Life / FB employee referenced there) and his NSA background has never been a secret.
On the contrary, it’s a fascinating story that really begins with his father, Ron Ondrejka. The elder Ondrejka was the photogrametrist responsible for CORONA, among other things.
I’ll also say for the record that CORONA surveillance (declassified story here) was primarily a force of stabilization during the Cold War, allowing the United States to get a clearer picture (literally) of how many missiles the Soviets had. That gave the US the knowledge and leverage to conduct arms-reduction talks with the Soviets. It was one of a few thin reasons that no one ever ended up nuking the planet.
To track the lineage from the photogrametrist on the very first spy satellites to the use of NSA surveillance in Second Life could be someone’s “Starship and the Canoe.”
The relationship between the Cold War scientists and the curious and fascinating children they raised is underexplored, to my mind, and reveals that underneath the most frightening technologies in the world (e.g., nukes, panoptic surveillance) there are also just people who are trying to answer whatever big questions there are to answer.
Not to say it’s neutral or nothing, just to say: also, fascinating.