International Relations and Security Network

ISN have put together a piece on the potential for virtual worlds to be misused by terrorists.

Link here.

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Good piece from Canada

Terror goes Digital

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Interview- MMObux.com

Just back from holiday in Cuba, and sorting through the 1001 (literally) e-mails I have, I find a nice little e-mail from the site MMObux.com who wanted to interview me for my thoughts on Money Laundering and Virtual Asset Trading in general.

Now back to deleting the spam from my account!

David

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Cut and Paste at the Times

Following last weeks hack job on virtual terrorism in The Australian (owner NewsCorp) the London Sunday Times (owner NewsCorp) has followed suit with a remarkably similar article with some of the same nonsense about ‘virtual atrocities’ in Second Life. The standard of reporting has improved in this version but it still shows a lack of knowledge about the wider virtual worlds platform.

The main new points are this time Rohan Gunaratna states he has monitored 12 jihadists who have assumed identities in Second Life. It is the methodology behind this claim that is hard to understand. Presumably these are jihadists who are being watched on other Internet sites by Gunaratna who then discuss their Second Lives on these sites. I’m not sure that makes sense but again without published evidence its hard to say either way.

The article also pulls in EuroPol and the British Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca) who state they are concerned about transactions involving the Linden dollar and the laundering of money through Second Life casinos (now closed of course).

“A Soca source said the agency was looking at ways to address illicit financial activity in the virtual world.” That is quite a task and it should be noted that there are many more virtual currencies than Linden dollars to track – some such as the Chinese QQ Coin system, which have many times more volume than Linden dollars.

In my original metaterror piece regarding the potential use of virtual worlds by terrorists, I highlighted many of the issues that are now being stated as fact. While I still believe virtual worlds will be attractive to not just terrorists but other brands of extremists – it seems unlikely they would utilize a system such as Second Life. A more likely scenario is that extremists will migrate into their own private virtual worlds in much the same way that jihadists sit behind layers of password protection to enter their chat-rooms. A light presence remains likely in mainstream virtual worlds in order to vet members for private virtual worlds. I think the potential dangers are significant and unfortunately are not helped by this current wave of reporting that insists on referring to ‘virtual atrocities’.

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