While the world pieces together what happened Friday in Paris, one of the unanswered questions is whether gaming consoles and online gaming networks are playing a part in the planning and execution of attacks.
The short answer, for the moment, is maybe. But the specifics are a bit unclear, starting with a misreported story that was rereported by many major news websites yesterday.
A fast-spreading rumor from Monday that Playstation 4 consoles had been used in planning the Paris attacks was picked up by national outlets. By the afternoon, the original source was quietly walking it back. Yes, a Playstation 4 is one of the tools sometimes used for communication in terror attacks, but so far no Playstations have been logged as evidence in these ones. What’s out there right now is intelligence known well before the Paris attacks, spoken generally about strategy and concerns.
But security concerns about whether consoles might be part of a terror cell’s communication network? Those are valid.
Part of the problem is that the most popular games often have communities where fanatics create secondary spaces—sometimes for terror activity, and other times for lower-level criminal activity—within the games. Take World of Warcraft, whose popularity eventually created a second market for gold and other in-game currencies. A 2010 study by an Australian University found that gold farming in World of Warcraft and Second Life (two of the biggest massively multiplayer online games) had become a perfect exploitation opportunity for money laundering: buy some in-game currency, move it to another account, sell it, and you’ve got a clean-ish paper trail.
Some of the illicit activities are less challenging to national security. As Xbox 360 was first testing integration for voice and video chat with its Kinect 360 sensor, many games that probably didn’t need open video chat had it anyway.
The result of mixing adults, preteen and teens in an un-monitored video conference is the sort of legal liability that you’d expect from sites like Chatroulette and Omegle, but maybe not from a digital version of the children’s card game Uno. Those trying out their Xbox video functions were often quickly met with nudity or those seeking out anonymous cybersex.
That problem is a serious one, especially for female gamers, who face the same sorts of abuse from inappropriate behavior there as they can on social media. A female Microsoft employee tasked with playing Uno with her webcam on experienced, according to the Xbox Live enforcement team, one penis every 14 minutes, or a little more than four penises an hour. Not quite Chatroulette numbers, but staggeringly and disconcertingly high for a children’s game.
Opportunities like this pose innumerable opportunities for bad people to get to children, and for children to do bad things. That’s not to say it’s happening at the sort of rates where Chris Hansen would get back into the To Catch a Predator game, but it’s definitely something to consider.
In the current generation of consoles, data is considerably better encrypted and channels for person-to-person interaction number in the hundreds. Think of them as large, protected chat rooms with video, audio and text feeds accessible 24/7. That’s how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sees them, anyway. They’ve been aware of the possible threats for years.
The problem is, of course, in parallel with new game releases, these opportunities change on a month-to-month basis. And while it’s uncertain whether Playstation 4 was involved in the planning of the coordinated attack in France that left 132 dead, the larger web of connected gaming consoles presents a kind of safe space for activities that might be harder than ever to detect in the future.