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?
The scary part of all this is that 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 it 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, even in the wake of this information. 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.
