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Italian Justice Minister Andrea Orlando has said that €150 million would be invested in order to reform information and security services, including monitoring the PlayStation Network for terrorist communications:
Italian counter-terror agents are to monitor Sony's PlayStation Network for jihadi chatter, according to the nation's justice minister, following alarmingly silly reports that a PS4 was used to coordinate the terrorist attacks in Paris.
Andrea Orlando told Italian broadsheet Il Messaggero that the government would be investing €150m (£105m) in a reformation of the nation's security services, with the aim of allowing them to monitor "any form of communication", with the PlayStation gaming console receiving specific attention.
The Italian plans follow an article in Forbes, cited by the Telegraph and the New York Times, which claimed, "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."
That report, in turn, appears to have been prompted by statements made by the Belgian deputy prime minister, Jan Jambon. Jambon complained that Belgian security services and their international partners were unable to decrypt communications made through the PlayStation Network. Jambon reportedly claimed that "PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than WhatsApp" in this regard. His claims were made days before the attacks in Paris, however, and had to do with ISIS' general tactics.
Also at The Independent.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tftp on Wednesday December 02 2015, @07:18AM
I haven't played a multiuser game in ages. However even back then, in days of Quake, players could meet in a map and exchange information without even using the chat. They could talk with gestures, for example... But chat is also available, both text and voice - and, combined with gestures and noise, there is no chance of reassembling it into a conversation. This attempt is absolutely impossible, unless each and every player has a cop hovering over his shoulder - and even then how will the cop recognize code words? This is yet another example of how the cure could be worse than the disease. The amount of information that floats around the planet is so unbelievably large that there is no chance of even capturing the ciphertext, let alone figuring out what it is. There are so many ways to transmit information, and plain bytes are just one of those ways. Anyone who ran thought experiments with steganography can easily come up with a hundred examples.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @08:12AM
Indeed, everything could be a message. For example, a person with a specific nick name playing World of Warcraft at a specific day could mean "start terror attack", with specific information about the terror act encoded in the player's actions. Actually, the meaning could be different depending on whether a video was posted in a specific YouTube channel earlier that day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @02:09PM
or a post saying that everything could be a message could be a message.
saying that everything could be a message.
If I put that in a shiny powerpoint and show it to the government, do you think I'll get 150 millions too?
(Score: 2) by tempest on Wednesday December 02 2015, @02:24PM
Making terrorist threats on most MMOs would be like finding a needle in the haystack for any agency considering how foul mouthed kids are on those games these days.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Wednesday December 02 2015, @07:46PM
> They could talk with gestures, for example...
Stop giving those monsters* ideas!
(* The paranoid authoritarian government, not the terrorists.)