Spies' Battleground Turns Virtual

A businessman avatar in Second Life, an online role-playing game. Intelligence officials caution that such games offer novel opportunities for terrorist and criminal activity. (Photo: Linden Research)

"The residents are the Gods of this virtual world; it is a world of limitless possibilities for creativity and self-expression, within a complex social structure and a full functioning economy," the promotional material says.

"Virtual worlds are ready-made havens," said a senior intelligence official who declined to be identified because of the nature of his work. "There's no way to monitor it."

The popularity of virtual worlds has grown despite the technology being in an early stage of development. The systems don't work well on older computers or those with relatively slow connections to the Internet. Though Second Life has more than 12 million registered users, only about 10 percent of those accounts are active. About 50,000 people around the world are on the system at a given moment, according to Linden Lab, which operates Second Life.

Officials from Linden Lab have initiated meetings with people in the intelligence community about virtual worlds. They try to stress that systems to monitor avatar activity and identify risky behavior are built into the technology, according to Ken Dreifach, Linden's deputy general counsel.

Dreifach said that all financial transactions are reviewed electronically, and some are reviewed by people. For investigators, there also are also plenty of trails that avatars and users leave behind.

"There are a real range and depth of electronic footprints," Dreifach said. "We don't disclose those fraud tools."

Jeff Jonas, chief scientist of IBM Entity Analytic Solutions, who has been examining developments in virtual worlds, which have attracted some investment from the company, said there's no way to predict how this technology will develop and what kind of capabilities it will provide -- good or bad. But he believes that virtual worlds are about to become far more popular.

"As the virtual worlds create more and more immersive experiences and as global accessibility to computers increases, I can envision a scenario in which hundreds of millions of people become engaged almost overnight," Jonas said.

Jonas said it's almost a certainty that clandestine activity associated with real criminals and terrorists will flourish in these environments because of the ease, reach and obscurity they offer.

"With these actors there will be organized criminal planning and behavior," he said. "The likelihood that somebody is recruiting, strategizing or planning is almost a certainty."