Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

The recent revelations that American and British intelligence and law enforcement agencies are active in the world of online games, most notably World of Warcraft and Second Life, have raised more than a few eyebrows. Predictably, many individuals find the image of the government intelligence agents spending their days playing video games very amusing, but this activity has serious privacy implications.

While players on massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) have no innate right to privacy for their online actions, there are claims that the US and the UK may have unlawfully accessed player logs and other data for games including World of Warcraft, Second Life and Xbox Live.

Furthermore, as the National Security Agency is forbidden to spy on us citizens without approval from the Us Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, it may be that the wholesale observation of US gamers may violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

There is currently no evidence that any terrorist activities are being coordinated or discussed via these online games. In fact, online games post details of many risks for individuals seeking to use them for terrorist activities.

While these networks often appear to be unregulated, they are in fact closely observed by their owners in order to ensure that the game's participants do not engage in illicit or unsportsmanlike activities. In fact, nearly all chat activity and other transactions are retained for a considerable period of time by the MMOG's operators. The tactics used to protect gamers from credit-card fraud or account theft are equally applicable to rooting out attempts by terrorists to communicate via the game.

There are a wide range of other systems that terrorists can use to contact each other, ranging from free services such as Skype, to e-mails sent from disposable accounts. Compared to these other methods, using a MMOG to plan a terrorist action seems to be both overly complex and very likely to fail.

For these reasons, spying on gamers is very unlikely to produce any useful intelligence information.

Intelligence agencies, whether they are American or British, might find their efforts far more productively aimed at the communication channels that terrorists are more likely to use, rather than monitoring the actions of imaginary fantasy characters.

An intelligence agency, no matter its size, must carefully prioritize its actions in order to focus on those areas where the terrorist threat is most likely to be real.

Every agent spending time observing players killing online monsters is an agent who is not spending his or her time evaluating intelligence that may lead to a real terrorist attack.

More seriously, this activity might legitimize the idea of the unlimited surveillance activity, even in the absence of any real evidence of terrorist or criminal activity. The type of operation discussed here would have certainly included an intrusive analysis of many players' communications, chat logs and personal information.

This is an especially serious issue when one considers that the same justifications used for these current operations would be just as legitimate, if not more so, for virtually any type of online activity.

Given how important online social media is becoming, it is clear that a failure to strictly regulate the government's ability to covertly observe these networks could produce a chilling effect on even law-abiding citizens' willingness to use them.

Lastly, there is the question of whether or not individuals could be harassed under the cover of national security. Online games are full of individuals who often make wild statements and threats, largely because they are making them in the context of an online fantasy. It would be easy for hostile observers to take those statements out of context, especially in those games that are set in the modern world and have terrorist-themed story lines.

Terrorist threats do exist, but they are unlikely to be found in online fantasy worlds. The real threat is in diverting intelligence resources to these games, in addition to legitimizing the idea of an unlimited right to conduct surveillance against law-abiding citizens and foreign nationals alike.

The author is a freelance writer based in Corona, California. charlesgray109@gmail.com