A much more obscure way to communicate would be to start out with something like guerrilla mail, select a blog or series of blogs that allows commenting in archives, develop a language of code words and hop from post to post, blog to blog. For extra kicks, use guerrilla mail to distribute a one-time pad, and use numbers at the end of a username to create number blocks to transmit messages via the usernames as well. Heck, you could even toss numbers in the post itself that correspond to the one time pad. It’d be nearly indistinguishable from normal surfing, and the various messages would be spread across so many different servers that it’d be pretty hard for any government to lock in on specific users/ip addresses, especially since the query and response could be on totally different sites. Throw TOR in the mix and it’d take Jason Bourne or James Bond to crack the thing. Is it overly complicated? Yes. Would it work? Probably.

The only solution I can see would be to plant operatives in the game to monitor known terrists. I, for one, would work for the CIA tracking terrirsts in WoW by ganking newbs for phat lewt, so long as I’m paid >$100K a year for my 1337 skillz.

No one would EVER have a conversation like this – it’s just another one of their ‘Movie Theatre Plots’ that they’ll use as an excuse to monitor WoW’s servers. How in the HECK they expect to find anything useful out of 50 servers worth of Trade chat is beyond me.

WTB Government that’s not freaking nuts

What other ridiculous ideas are they going to come up with, and why am I paying for this?! ):

I personally think this is totally likely (having stumbled upon some odd conversations while running about in the wilds of Asheron’s Call), the communication is hard to track, and if the game is located on say, a Korean server, it would be hard to create any backdoor to monitor.

You would have to be a bloody idiot to do this rather than simply sending email encrypted with gpg like everybody else who values their privacy does.

Thank goodness we are protected from incredibly stupid terrorists. They might blow down some parking meters or something.

How do these scary boogeymen agree to meet in WoW in the first place? They have a conversation offline and agree to chat in a particular time and place on a particular server. They agree on a mapping of various stupid obvious code phrases* to various sooper-sekrit phrases, like “Keep” means “White House.”

How do they secure this offline conversation? If they don’t have a secure channel for it, then the feds are going to know where and when to monitor WoW. If they DO have a secure channel, why do they need WoW?

*The “sample” terrorist plotting reminded me of a Monty Python bit in which a pimp is talking on a phone, trying not to sound like a pimp talking on a phone. “Yes sir, your watch is ready….your WATCH….your CHINESE WATCH.”

(to quote “Halting State” by Charles Stross…)

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Though I suppose the reason they have so few real leads on terrorist plots is.. maybe the terrorists aren’t plotting anything? Yes we’ve all heard that absesnce of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, but it sure as hell was the last time.

Srsly: why not just go on IRC with Tor?

“No Abdulla No! I have a raid tonight on Molten Core and cannot come to the bombing.”

“I’m in ur base, killin’ ur d00dz!”

or perhaps:

I’m in ur base, killin’ ur drOOdz!

Ladies and Gentleman, The President of The United States.

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Maybe the person who presented this has kids who play WoW. “I’ll get those damn kids for yelling at me about ‘wiping’ them.. whatever the f-k that means.. I bet they are talking behind my back right now on their ‘chat rooms’”

So we know our tax dollars don’t go to WOW accounts.