Criminality in Virtual Worlds

Second Life as a tool for criminals? 3-D money laundering? Racketeering in the metaverse?

U.S intelligence officials are concerned that criminals and terrorists are using avatars and alternate personalities to conduct criminal activities across the Web, as reported in the Washington Post. To quote from a recent paper published by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (now, there’s an Orwellian organization if there ever was one):

“Unfortunately, what started out as a benign environment where people would congregate to share information or explore fantasy worlds is now offering the opportunity for religious/political extremists to recruit, rehearse, transfer money, and ultimately engage in information warfare or worse with impunity.”

Although the organization is currently seeking a director, the Post article raises some intriguing, though perhaps overblown, claims about the ease to which anonymity can be abused. For example, records are not kept of communication between avatars, which could lead to suspicious activities between nefarious individuals. These types of situations have the government nervous, and interested in gaining access to the servers of 3-D and role-playing games.

These issues are not unique to 3D worlds. They’re not even unique to the Internet. A lot of these espionage/criminal claims are a lot like the early warning bells about the Internet, and probably at one point in time about telephones. Basically, it’s government saying “these new technologies scare us, stuff that scares us is bad, and so being scared we have a right to monitor servers and private conversations between individuals so we feel, well, less scared.”

The article doesn’t point to any actual evidence of wrong-doing. And in fairness to the Post, they do point out:

Questions about the impact of innovations in communications technology are nothing new. Criminals, terrorists and others have used Web sites for more than a decade to recruit, operate scams and trade pornography. Law enforcement and intelligence authorities responded to new technologies by repeatedly seeking out new surveillance authorities.