The internet is full of conspiracy theories. And reality, with its various news of government spying on us, is fueling those theories nicely. Only that we saw too many movies like Men in Black or The Matrix or whatever and assume that government is some sort of sinister organization full of sinister people. But try to look at it under a different angle: What if YOU got a job at the NSA, were given nearly unlimited resources, and very little supervision. What would you do? After doing a bit of spying on that neighbor you don't like or trying to focus that million-dollar satellite camera on a topless beach in the south of France, you'd probably get bored of spying rather quickly. And, given the lack of supervision and the availability of good computers, you'd start doing something more fun. Like playing World of Warcraft. You could always say that you were watching for terrorists in the game.

And this is how we get to things like today's news, where the National Security Agency was revealed to have had lots of agents "spying" on World of Warcraft. Not by forcing Blizzard to hand over all chat data, or by doing any sophisticated hacking of data streams. No, the NSA agents said they were looking for terrorists by playing World of Warcraft and listening to general chat. :) Way to go, NSA agents! I wish I would work at a place where I could play MMORPGs during office hours and pass that activity off as actual work.

The NSA presumably doesn't hire stupid people. And it is evident to anybody with half a brain that watching Barrens chat for hidden terrorist messages is an enormous waste of time. Even if terrorists ever used a MMORPG as communication network, they would obviously use group or private chat instead of public chat channels. Even if you really believed that WoW was full of terrorists, you wouldn't plan to find them by playing the game. So this isn't a conspiracy to spy illegally on domestic targets or anything. It is a conspiracy to bullshit your boss into letting you play World of Warcraft at work. And not just you, but all your colleagues as well, because this is such a "target-rich communication network". You just write a memo explaining why playing WoW is really what you should be doing at work, and until the day Edward Snowden publishes that memo, everything is fine.

Isn't this exactly what we would have done if we had been in the same position?