Originally by: Miss Anthropy

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I'm not sure if the US has a similar law but here in the UK we have the Data Protection Act. Wouldn't the DPA (for anyone in the know) protect UK players from outside unauthorised scrutiny?

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Originally by: Avery Fatwallet

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ive always wondered if there is any organized crime being... well... organized through mmos.

all kinds of stuff from the common human/arms/drug dealing to whatever sick plan might occur to whoever could be set up using trial characters in mmos.

well, if youre serious about it, probably the best you can do is proper encryption and normal emails anyway, right? i mean.. you CAN encrypt stuff in a way you can trust it to be decrypted YEARS later, when it doesnt matter anymore, right?

but anyways. since the days of UO ive been asking myself how many RL-crimes is actually set up in virtual worlds. as WoW grows bigger and bigger every day the anonymity you can get there gets better, too.

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Originally by: Ademaro Imre

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Just what do you need to hide? You think using the word smart-bomb is going to trigger an FBI raid of your home? That would be funny.

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Originally by: Kur'Dekaija

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I think I read somewhere that pedos use Second life to exchange ideas and infos etc but not 100% sure.. can pretty much be any other MMOs or chat program really.

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Originally by: Miss Anthropy

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Originally by: Kur'Dekaija

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I think I read somewhere that pedos use Second life to exchange ideas and infos etc but not 100% sure.. can pretty much be any other MMOs or chat program really.

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Second Life is a virtual playground for perverts of all kinds. Sky News did an investigation into the pedo problems there a while back. If a journalist noob can find stuff like that pretty easy then anybody else can. The trouble is, unless they actually take Second Life offline, then there's little they can do to stem the time of kiddie smut that exists there.

Going back to the OP, the problem with governments these days is that they don't like anonymity. They use terrorism as an excuse to pass laws that impede the privacy of ordinary citizens. Personally, I'd rather be blown up by a terrorist than have my e-mails, game chat logs, IM's and internet history pored over by a fat CIA agent.

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Originally by: Xen Gin

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Man, that report was so scaremongering. Saying that if they're allowed to pretend in SL, they may going to do it in RL. That's like saying because I'm playing COD4 I'm going to go arm myself and start shooting people. If anything its going to reduce the risk of them doing anything.

Oh and whats worse than a paedophile? A child abuser, that's whom.

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Originally by: Imperator Jora'h

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Originally by: Xen Gin

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Man, that report was so scaremongering. Saying that if they're allowed to pretend in SL, they may going to do it in RL. That's like saying because I'm playing COD4 I'm going to go arm myself and start shooting people. If anything its going to reduce the risk of them doing anything.

Oh and whats worse than a paedophile? A child abuser, that's whom.

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A pedo is a child abuser and then some. It is interesting to note that among prison populations the prisoners themselves view pedos as scum (and that coming from rapists and murderers).

I think someone who seeks out game violence to relax (FPS games and such) is a far cry from anyone who would seek out kiddie ****. You are not a malfunctioning human being if you blow someone up in COD4. You are a deeply malfunctioning person if you want nudie pics of kids.

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Originally by: Miss Anthropy

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Going back to the OP, the problem with governments these days is that they don't like anonymity. They use terrorism as an excuse to pass laws that impede the privacy of ordinary citizens. Personally, I'd rather be blown up by a terrorist than have my e-mails, game chat logs, IM's and internet history pored over by a fat CIA agent.

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Quote:

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Dempsey said the national security fears are overblown

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Wow immy scored - Xorus

Originally by: Ademaro Imre

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Edited by: Ademaro Imre on 08/02/2008 21:35:32

Originally by: Miss Anthropy

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Going back to the OP, the problem with governments these days is that they don't like anonymity. They use terrorism as an excuse to pass laws that impede the privacy of ordinary citizens. Personally, I'd rather be blown up by a terrorist than have my e-mails, game chat logs, IM's and internet history pored over by a fat CIA agent.

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I am sure you would rather die than a data mining software scour the internet for known hazards and knows illicit activities.

Do you even have the slightest clue as to what a analysts would be looking for? You think the CIA has a list of every citizen in the world and goes over your daily internet history? What the CIA and other intel groups look for are tips, or find an actual suspect then observe that they are going into such internet programs. They may find Suspect 1 in Nation A using a service. But they can not get access to the internet that Suspect 1 uses, but the sociual program is location in Nation B where that nation is friendly to catching terrorists, so then the work goes on at looking at Suspect 1 with data mining. Even if Suspect 1 does not do anything explicitly wrong in the social program, the analysts may employ the data mining software because Suspect 1 may have other alias' or cohorts that use the same social program or similar ones. And the data mining software is looking for keywords being used in certain times, frequencies and what not or other purposes to study the relations of Suspect 1. In fact, some people believe that a secret US program named "Able Danger" used data mining and identified 3 members of the 9-11 attacks as al-Qaeda cells leaders as early as September 2000. These agents did not individually review the internet history of not only 300 million people in the US, billions of other people in the world but mining known sources of activity.

You should be more worried about Google webcrawlers than the CIA. You really trust <meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive, nofollow"> ?

I hope you are not using any grocery store discount shopping card. That is a perfect example of data mining. You gocery buying habits are being built into advertising algorithms for your home address. What you buy and when you buy it is being archived. Even Amazon.com keeps a records of your item searches, purchases and lists fpr their advertising purposes.

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