US Military is Targeting Online Gaming Networks

This TIA spinoff gone agency, IARPA's "Reynard" program "will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments."

Reynard is a seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamic in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the intelligence community.
* The cultural and behavioral norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.
www.dni.gov...

IARPA is the "Intelligence Communities" version of "DARPA" (the military agency in charge of creating self-aware cognitive A.I. computers):
www.darpa.mil...
www.abovetopsecret.com...
video.google.com...

HLS has their very own "HSARPA":
www.hsarpabaa.com...

Don't forget ARDA/DTO:
en.wikipedia.org...

Totalitarian Information Awareness (TIA):
epic.org...

interesting post but i dont understand how virtual worlds help them track terror groups. terrorists dont play games.

Sounds like this could be the early stages of something similar to the movie "The Minority Report". I guess they watch peoples reactions and attitudes during game play to determine if they would be a future threat in society perhaps.What people do in the virtual world is probably what they would like to do in the real world.....or will do.

[edit on 4-3-2008 by CaptGizmo]

[edit on 4-3-2008 by CaptGizmo]