Posted on 12/10/2007 5:57:34 PM PST by ranair34
Second Life, or SL as it is known to devotees, is an online reality game. It was launched in 2003 by California-based Linden Labs but it did not come to prominence until last year, when corporations including Sony, IBM, Nissan and the ABC bought islands and began marketing to visitors.
In SL people create their own characters, known as avatars, and live an alternative life, buying goods, real estate and living in a community of more than eight million people from across the world. They go about their lives, attending concerts and seminars, building businesses and socialising.
On the darker side, there are also weapons armouries in SL where people can get access to guns, including automatic weapons and AK47s. Searches of the SL website show there are three jihadi terrorists registered and two elite jihadist terrorist groups.
Once these groups take up residence in SL, it is easy to start spreading propaganda, recruiting and instructing like minds on how to start terrorist cells and carry out jihad.
One radical group, called Second Life Liberation Army, has been responsible for some computer-coded atomic bombings of virtual world stores in the past six months.
On screen these blasts look like an explosion of hazy white balls as buildings explode, landscapes are razed and residents are wounded or killed.
With the game taking such a sinister turn, terrorism experts are warning that SL attacks have ramifications for the real world. Just as September 11 terrorists practised flying planes on simulators in preparation for their deadly assault on US buildings, law enforcement agencies believe some of those behind the Second Life attacks are home-grown Australian jihadists who are rehearsing for strikes against real targets.
Terrorist organisations al-Qa'ida and Jemaah Islamiah traditionally sent potential jihadists to train in military camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Southeast Asia. But due to increased surveillance and intelligence-gathering, they are swapping some military training to online camps to evade detection and avoid prosecution.
Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside al-Qa'ida, says it is a new phenomena that, until now, has not been openly discussed outside the intelligence community.
But he says security agencies are extremely concerned about what home-grown terrorists are up to in cyberspace. He believes the dismantling and disruption of military training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan after September 11 forced terrorists to turn to the virtual world.
"They are rehearsing their operations in Second Life because they don't have the opportunity to rehearse in the real world," Gunaratna says. "And unless governments improve their technical capabilities on a par with the terrorists' access to globalisation tools like the internet and Second Life, they will not be able to monitor what is happening in the terrorist world."
more: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22161037-28737,00.html
Good grief. The terros should come over to EVE Online. But they won’t, they’d get their asses kicked.
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