Reynard, a data-mining project from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), is an exploratory effort to monitor activity in virtual worlds and online games and then model what extremist activity in those worlds would look like. The Office of the Director of the National Intelligence (ODNI) recently released a Congressionally mandated report on various data-mining projects of which Reynard is just one. It is known that the CIA and other US Agencies have a presence in Second Life and that IARPA has investigated Linden Lab's world as well.

Whoever chose the name "Reynard" has a literary-based sense of humour since its origin lies in the 12th century French trickster, presented in "Le Roman de Renart" by Pierre de Saint Cloud around 1175 and translated into English by William Caxton as "The Historie of Reynart the Foxe" in 1485.

Reynard is a seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly extremist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the intelligence community. The cultural and behavioural norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally under-studied although some conferences have been held on the subject. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioural and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behaviour and actions in the virtual world. The US government understands that "applications of results from these research projects may ultimately have implications for privacy and civil liberties," so "IARPA is also investing in projects that develop privacy protecting technologies."

Asymmetric Threats

Brief details about Reynard came to light in a report sent to the US Congress by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which co-ordinates the work of US intelligence agencies. In that report, which talked about the data mining efforts undertaken by the ODNI. Using publicly available data Reynard researchers will carry out observational studies to establish "baseline normative behaviours." Once these are identified, Reynard will "then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world." For a number of years the world's governments have been behind in chasing extremists' presence on the net and detecting asymmetric threats. Just to feel their way around and work out what new intelligence collection methods might be required to deal with virtual worlds' asymmetric threats is useful because they may not be able to use traditional law enforcement methods in trans-national zero boundary virtual worlds. ODNI mentions several other data-mining initiatives. These include:

. Video Analysis and Content Extraction -- software to identify faces automatically, events and objects in video;
. Tangram -- a system that wants to create surveillance and a threat warning system that evaluates known threats and finds unknown threats to issue warnings ahead of an attack;
. Knowledge Discovery and Dissemination -- this tool is reminiscent of the supposedly inactive Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. It seeks to access disparate databases to find patterns of known bad behaviour. The program plans to work with domestic law enforcement and Homeland Security.

Education & Training Virtual Grounds

All of the major extremist treatises have been distributed through the internet so taking it to a virtual world with multi-player role games is really an easy and logical step. It is inevitable that terror and extremist groups would make greater use of the internet and the possibilities that virtual worlds offer them. The visual richness of virtual worlds made them good places to educate recruits about real world techniques.

How Real?

Macro extremist groups are emerging in cyber space and virtual communities that are wholly virtual. They can organise and radicalise in virtual worlds and attack using cyber methods without becoming a real world presence in any tangible way until the last moment or not at all. Many groups are likely to use the expertise and skills they learn in virtual worlds to target key internet based systems. There is a continuing growth in the amount of horsepower in the digital attacks that are directed at infrastructure servers by both nation state and non-nation state actors.

[ENDS]

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DK Matai

The Philanthropia, mi2g.net

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