Spies Look to Second Life and Think Time Machine!

After studying MMOs, spooks decided they needed to have two things: the first being the egregious ability to state whatever they have on their minds and, second, they would commission Doc Brown to build a virtual time machine that did not require a DeLorean going 88 mph, accruing 1.21 Gigawatts. This was only mentioned after the allegation that terrorists (whose hate is for your freedom) may be lurking in virtual worlds akin to Second Life. The contention had also been made that young people playing all kinds of MMOs (including WoW) were unfit to join the intelligence community for a number of reasons: they spread misinformation about their identities, many share files, check their e-mail compulsively and have a predisposition for gaming addiction.

But enough with flagrant stereotypes and fat little 13 year-old boys harboring terrorists so Mom won’t find out. Let’s talk about a new project. The tentative title for the project is A-SpaceX, a virtual tool that builds “artificial worlds” used as a hub not only for intelligence analysts to share data and ideas, but as a training exercise to examine their states of thought about a problem in a dynamic light. This means that A-SpaceX will provide analysts a tool to examine how they arrived at past resolutions and how those thought processes and data may change in the future. This program is made possible through the collaborations of the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Intelligence Advance Research Projects Activity (the new guys).

So what’s the real need for A-SpaceX? Well, in lieu of quick-decision-making and pressured environments, the program offers collaborative participation and a creative atmosphere that would be available to experts. So, while intelligence analysts are blowing their minds on the sweet graphics A-SpaceX offers, they also can use this virtual time machine to produce predictive models that calculate how the data changes, considering future events.

The program is an extension of A-Space, a tool under development that will allow Facebook/Myspace social networking to the intelligence community through blogging, instant messaging, sharing documents and photos, and trading competing hypotheses (in a virtual world). This could be a secure environment free from the vices of other real/virtual communities. Perhaps in time we’ll see if A-Space is able to realize its promise.

The new A-SpaceX program has been met with a lot of skepticism. The old-school brass see this as an untrustworthy source of information generated from simulation (rather than training or experience, the source of true intelligence—or at least that is what they might think). The newbies, probably vying for a spot higher in the intelligence hierarchy, see an innovative way to transcend time in order to meaningfully shift the present (rather than a potentially HUGE debacle if they make even the slightest mistake which could be realized in the loss of human life).

Is nearly anything justifiable if it appears counter-terrorist? This whole endeavor, if you ask me, seems fishy. After all, this group is trying to tell the future based on algorithms designed into a virtual world. It is precisely at those moments of intense pressure and complexity that these systems would be the most likely to fail because of the interaction of effects, nearly impossible to foresee given the intricacy of the system and its penchant toward chaos (i.e., a host of uncontrollable and unforeseeable interactions amongst its many parts). Need anyone be reminded of the Challenger launch decision or the Columbia reentry—please!?