Terrorists sought in cyber kingdoms

APPARENTLY OVERWHELMED by terrorists in the real world, the US government and its intelligence services have resorted to thwarting violent extremists who they believe may have infiltrated virtual worlds in cyberspace, such as World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, Call of Duty 4 and Second Life.

A report sent to the US Congress by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which co-ordinates the work of US intelligence agencies, outlines plans to carry out extensive data mining and develop ways to spot extremists using virtual fantasy worlds.

The project has been codenamed Reynard, and is described in the report as "a seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the intelligence community".

Reynard will be programmed to recognise "normal" behaviour in the virtual worlds and will therefore also be able to pick up on "abnormal" or nefarious activity taking place within the same medieval cyber kingdoms.

The publicly available Data Mining Report notes "The cultural and behavioural norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral, and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world."

According to the BBC, Andrew Cochran, founder and co-chairman of the Counterterrorism Foundation, reckoned "It's a positive step, for a number of years we were behind in chasing jihadists' presence on the net and detecting it. "

Roderick Jones, a vice president of Concentric Solutions and a former special branch officer, also agreed with the report's claims that terrorists were bound to try to hijack the advantages and opportunities that cyber space offered them. "There's more a chance of things like Jihad worlds coming online in the next five years I think," he noted.

He didn't mention if he thought they would include dragons, knights or damsels in distress, but he did add: "They would organise and radicalise in virtual worlds and attack using cyber methods without becoming a real world presence in any real way."

He claimed the vividness of the virtual worlds made them ideal for teaching new recruits the basic techniques needed to be a winning terrorist.

Apparently, Reynard is only in its very early stages and it's still too soon to say which online worlds it will target. But, warned Mr Cochran to potential e-terrorists: "All of the major terrorist treatises have been distributed through the internet so taking it to a virtual world with multi-player role games is really an easy step". Calling your character Osama and having it sport a beard might not be a clever move then.

The report also gives details about what various other data-mining initiatives might involve. They include video analysis and content extraction to automatically identify people's faces, and objects in videos; Tangram, a system for evaluating known threats and issuing warnings about potential attacks; and a Knowledge Discovery and Dissemination tool which would access disparate databases to unearth patterns of known bad behavior.

Like spending too much time in virtual worlds rather than doing homework. µ

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