Turn on the news today and there’s bound to be some neatly tailored anchor or anchorette telling you about threats to you, the American way of life, and some fruit/pastry hybrid we took from some other country. These threats seem numerous and all grave but there is another threat that you may not be aware of, one that seems serious enough for the American intelligence community to turn its gaze. The answer is just made of three simple letters: MMO.

It’s true: the new realm of the American spymaster is not South America, Cuba, or even Iraq, but the streets of Second Life. Considered to be an area where terrorists can meet and plan their attacks, using the anonymity and complicated lingo that are to be found in such games, intelligence officials have evidently been interested in Second Life since earlier this year. An article published in the Washington Post on Feb. 6 discusses this shift in the attention of the intelligence community from the physical to the digital.

The agency behind the shift, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (or IARPA), is using a program titled "Reynard" as its powerhouse. According to an declassified report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Raynard is described as a “seedling effort to study the emerging social phenomenon of social(particularly terrorist)dynamics in virtual worlds.” It’s a tool used to make the complex world of MMOs easier for outsiders to understand by seeking out “the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments.” This data, once acquired, will be used to locate and identify social interactions in games such as Second Life that could be considered potentially dangerous or suspect behavior.

Second Life isn’t the only social online game which has the eye of American intelligence: World of Warcraft has also been a object of interest. Dr. Dwight Tovas, who is employed at the Pentagon-sponsored National Defense University, gave a presentation using World of Warcraft as an example; one part of the presentation, tilted "A Cyber Conversation," refers to a fictional conversation between two gamers in the “digital kingdom” which the slide states are “occurring at message boards and online games all across the country.”

This hypothesized conversation features Talon238 and War_Monger who are discussing a raid. Commands are exchanged between them before one confirms the receipt of "a shipment of Elite and Epic weapons last month” to be used in attack on the "White Keep." The two players go on to confer about how run the “raid,” remarking that all “castle guards” and “all other players in the area” needed to be taken care of so that the “Dragon Fire" spell could be used. After this is done, chortle the fictional MMO players, they will “dance on its burning rubble” and comment that “no one will dance there for a hundred years after this spell is cast.”

What does this not-so-subtle bellicose dialog translate to? According to the slides that were part of Tovas’ presentation, they equate to a possible nuclear attack on the White House; the rest more or less speaks for itself. It is obvious from this scenario that terrorists, using the language of the MMO world, have called for an attack on the White House just by using World of Warcraft. Even the geographical plotting is contained in the mention of the Zoram Strand and the Stone Talon Mountains, which correspond to the attack path in this real world attack.

What makes this speculation somewhat weak, as the slides themselves state, is that they are entirely fictional: there is no record of anything like this ever happening. It seems that the dialog between the fictional Talon238 and War_Monger does spell out very plainly a plan for a nuclear attack on the White House, but the location they describe -- the White Keep -- and the method of attack -- the Dragon Fire spell -- are inaccurate because there exists no White Keep in World of Warcraft and no spell such as the Dragon Fire spell. It seems that the presentation relies more on scare tactics than how this could realistically be done in-game, and anyone who has played the game, as apparently neither Arey nor Tovas have, would be able to spot something that conspicuous. It seems that this is just another case of government paranoia about the video game industry, which has been increasingly prevalent since it was reported that the terrorists behind the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 used flight simulators to train themselves, and uses the same method of inaccurate yet plausible sounding information to enact these policies that are based on shaky information.