Following Friday night's terrorist attacks in Paris which killed at least 127 people and left more than 300 injured, authorities are discovering just how the massacre was planned. And it may involve the most popular gaming console in the world,
The hunt for those responsible (eight terrorists were killed Saturday night, but accomplices may still be at large) led to a number of raids in nearby Brussels. Belgian federal home affairs minister Jan Jambon has said outright that the PS4 is used by ISIS agents to communicate, and was selected due to the fact that it’s notoriously hard to monitor. “PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than WhatsApp,” he said.
When the new generation of consoles launched, there were concerns that they would be too light on privacy, with peripherals like
While the idea is certainly Orwellian, it's the non-peripheral based communication on consoles which may provide terrorists a channel to effectively converse with one another. The comparatively low-tech system may offer a more secure means of communication than even encrypted phone calls, texts and email.
While it remains unclear whether the Paris ISIS terrorists employed PS4 to communicate, there are a few options, from sending messages through the PlayStation Network (PSN) online gaming service and voice-chatting to even communicating through a specific game. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed that the NSA and CIA actually embedded themselves in games like World of Warcraft to infiltrate virtual terrorist meet-ups.
With PlayStation 4, it seems likely that simple voice communication could have worked just fine. It’s still difficult for investigators to monitor IP-based voice systems compared to say, a simple cellphone. In 2010, the FBI pushed for access to all manner of Internet communications, including gaming chat systems. The FCC did not grant the FBI access to peer-to-peer communications, but the government agency did build its own rigs to record their communications in pursuit of criminals in organized chats, like a pedophile trying to lure kids via Xbox Live. Most consoles today come equipped with such capabilities, as nearly anything you do on your unit can be recorded if you want, in this age of YouTube and livestreaming.
See also: Attacks In Paris Highlight The Worst And Best Of Social Media
The point is that terrorists could simply be in a PSN party together and chatting away mostly free from the fear that anyone is listening because of the difficulty and infrequency of governments eavesdropping on those forms of communication. It remains unclear just how much access the government has gotten to places like PSN and Xbox Live in the past few years, but whatever it is, it’s likely still short of its ability to track more traditional forms of communication, such as cellphones and computers.
By last count, PSN alone had around 110 million users, 65 million of them active, making this no small pool of people. While government agencies can often build profiles of suspected terrorists based on their Internet or communication history, it’s much harder to profile someone based on console usage, if that data is even accessible. Few users would visit extremist’s sites in the PSN Web browser for instance or brag about future attacks in a public game lobby. There is no collection of games that really should raise “suspicion” about possible terrorist ties in an era where terrorism-filled Call of Duty titles are the best-selling games of the year, every year. How do you “profile” a gamer when information is not easy to access, and probably will tell you nothing even if you could get your hands on it?
Additionally, there are probably still a number of ways that terrorists could send messages to each other without speaking a word, if they really wanted to. An ISIS agent could spell out an attack plan in Super Mario Maker’s coins and share it privately with a friend, or two Call of Duty players could write messages to each other on a wall in a disappearing spray of bullets. It may sound ridiculous, but there are many in-game ways of non-verbal communication that would almost be impossible to track. To do so would require an FBI or NSA agent somehow tapping all the activity on an entire console, not just voice and text chat, and that should not even be technically possible at this point.
While the makers of burner phones were once criticized for making it easier for criminals to communicate, it seems unlikely Microsoft and Sony will face the same scrutiny (not that they should). And yet, they may be inclined to start providing easier ways for governments to monitor specific accounts or consoles than what’s readily available now. Because as it is, the most popular gaming devices also happen to be the most effective at connecting not just the world’s friends, but the world’s enemies as well.
Ready my follow-up to this piece, On Game Consoles, Terrorism And Missing The Point.
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