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Russians fear Pokémon Go a Western plot to destabilize nation from within

mrklaw

MrArseFace
“Imagine that the little beast in question doesn’t appear in some park but at a secret site where a conscript or other soldier takes and photographs it with his camera,” Aleksander Mikhailov, a retired major general of the Federal Security Service, told state news agency RIA Novosti. “It’s recruitment by one’s own personal desire and without any coercion. This is the ideal way for secret services to gather information.”


so this is actually an awesome idea lol.


How is that different from "imagine a person goes to a place and takes a photo with their phone"? Surely if it's a secure location, random members of the public wouldn't be able to get in, and sensitive materials would be hidden from view.


That alternative Pokemon go app is just so insane
 

Cuburt

Member
No it's clearly a CIA/NSA plot to track people in the U.S. Something they have never been able to do before until now.

I have several friends tell me on Facebook and in person that is the real plan all along.
 

Sydle

Member
tumblr_nn1nznruW41s9gsm7o1_r5_500.gif
 

Makonero

Member
Can we please have region specific Pokemon Go knockoffs? When I go to England, I want to throw scones at Shakespeare when I visit the Globe Theatre, and when I go to France I want to throw croissants at Gustave Eiffel when visiting the Eiffel Tower.

Please make this a thing, foreign countries!
 

Maz

Member
Don't be silly it's obviously a plot between the Japanese Government and Google to locate the GPS coordinates of military bases in the People's Republic of China!
(I'm serious, the Chinese Communist party literally said that)

I have actually heard similar things said here. Except they think pokemon is owned by us government(CIA or something). Send a rare pokemon to a classified place, wait for the hordes of mindless godless zombies playing pokemon go to rush there and take a million photos of the place while catching said pokemon. Take all those photos and recreate the place digitally in 3d.

By far this was my favorite theory about Pokémon go
 

Zubz

Banned
Can Russia slow down for a minute? ... Granted, it is amusing to see people call Pokemon a nation-wide crisis, but aren't they too busy starting/exacerbating other problems to pretend a mobile game is one of them?
 
Funny that it's pretty much entirely dictatorships that are afraid of Pokemon GO, isn't it?

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." at its finest.

Kinda says something about a country if they have secret military installations everywhere that can be discovered by people not catching Pokemon there, eh?
 

Fox_Mulder

Rockefellers. Skull and Bones. Microsoft. Al Qaeda. A Cabal of Bankers. The melting point of steel. What do these things have in common? Wake up sheeple, the landfill wasn't even REAL!
May Trump help us
 
How is that different from "imagine a person goes to a place and takes a photo with their phone"? Surely if it's a secure location, random members of the public wouldn't be able to get in, and sensitive materials would be hidden from view.


That alternative Pokemon go app is just so insane

I can kind of see some degree of merit there, actually, although it's more a matter of "people who would otherwise know better might take pictures of their friends with a Pikachu and post them on social media, despite the fact that classified information is clearly visible in the background".

I mean, it's still a faulty mobile device actuator in the end, but I can see why someone might be worried that something like that would be less likely to set off red flags in the user's mind than "take a photo of their friend giving the thumbs-up in front of a detailed uranium enrichment facility schematic".
 

Barakov

Member
This is good stuff. Whenever data of any kind is involved, there's a good chance that people with certain mindsets will go bonkers.
 

joecanada

Member
How is that different from "imagine a person goes to a place and takes a photo with their phone"? Surely if it's a secure location, random members of the public wouldn't be able to get in, and sensitive materials would be hidden from view.


That alternative Pokemon go app is just so insane

well its different a bit because the example they used is soldier takes picture. So I assume they mean indoctrinate people into addicting type games that they "need" to play, then stick like a gold, shiny Pikachu inside the Kremlin right in front of say the defence ministers computer screen....

...step 3 profit lol.
 

Yeezus

Member
Pokemon Go is definitely a disruptive technology. Calling it a plot might be a little overzealous, but its a game that quite literally can change the infrastructure of a city overnight.
 

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
In a bid to counter Pokemon Go mania, Moscow city officials announced Monday that a Russian-developed version of the game would be launched in the capital next month. It will feature famous Russians such as Ivan the Terrible and Pyotr Chaikovsky in place of multicolored Pokemon creatures.

I need to play this.
 

DrBo42

Member
"Comrade, there's a Pikachu next to our secret weapons lab entrance!"
"Nyet!"
"Da! Ilya placed a lure on his smoke break."
 

Hawko

Neo Member
“Imagine that the little beast in question doesn’t appear in some park but at a secret site where a conscript or other soldier takes and photographs it with his camera,” Aleksander Mikhailov, a retired major general of the Federal Security Service, told state news agency RIA Novosti. “It’s recruitment by one’s own personal desire and without any coercion. This is the ideal way for secret services to gather information.”

This is probably the only valid concern in the article. The general notion that the game is made specifically to destabilise Russia is ludicrous of course.

However, I could see a scenario where a young and naive conscript goes Pokemon hunting and decides to share it on a social media platform, thus inadvertently making the information open and easily available to foreign secret services.
 
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