Remember that NASA conference I blogged about on Jan. 25? The one where folks were going to discuss how, using synthetic worlds and gaming software, one day we might all get to "go along" on NASA space missions? Well, we certainly aren't there yet, but a new animation, enabled by what NASA calls "the highest resolution terrain mapping to date of the moon's rugged south polar region," gives you a glimpse of the virtual future.
Check out the briefing about the extraordinary new Moon views and likely landing spot for the next lunar mission here. "We now know the south pole has peaks as high as Mt.McKinley and crater floors four times deeper than the Grand Canyon," says Doug Cooke, deputy associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters.
Who knows, by the time the mission launches, we all really might get to go along . . . virtually, of course!
The blogs frequented by massively multiplayer online role playing gamers and virtual world denizens are abuzz today with revelations about the "Reynard" project. It's a study of emerging social dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games being conducted by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity within the Office of Science and Technology at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Typical headlines: "US Government to Track Terrorists Via World of Warcraft," "U.S. Spies Want to Find Terrorists in World of Warcraft." The latter comes from a Feb. 22 post on Wired magazine's "Threat Level" blog, which appears to have set off alarms throughout the online gaming world.
Reynard came to light in a Feb. 15 unclassified report from ODNI to Congress required by the 2007 Data Mining Reporting Act. First news of the report came from "Secrecy News," the blog of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. The virtual worlds study is described as a "seedling effort" to "identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments" and then "apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibilty of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world."
Based on my own frustrating and less than illuminating experiences in Second Life, I am tempted to offer IARPA a chuckle, a nod and a "Good luck with that" about this project, but the report that unveils it deserves more serious attention.
High up in the report, DNI archly informs lawmakers that they won't be getting much real information about intelligence community data mining because they asked for the wrong thing. The law defines data mining as "a program involving pattern-based queries, searches or other analyses of 1 or more electronic databases" to "discover or locate a predictive pattern or anomoly indicative of terrorist activities." But that's not the kind of data mining DNI uses most, the report says.
"Analysis performed within the ODNI and its constituent elements for counterterrorism and similar purposes is often performed using various types of link analysis tools [which] start with a known or suspected terrorist or other subject of foreign intelligence interest and use various methods to uncover links between that known subject and potential associates or other persons with whom that subject is or has been in contact," the report says. But "the Data Mining Reporting Act does not include such analyses within its definition of 'data mining' because such analyses are not 'pattern-based." Note to Congress: Catch up. Fix your definitions.
What's more, the report explains, the few IARPA programs that do fall under the law's definition are so experimental and or cutting-edge that they generally can't meet the reporting requirement to judge their efficacy nor do they yet have a basis for determining that a pattern or an anomoly inidcates terrorist activity.
All that said, DNI does report on several projects within IARPA's incisive analysis area--the outfit designed to harness advanced analytics to help intelligence analysts sift mountains of data fast to find relevant information. The knowledge discovery and dissemination program, for example, uses data collected from across intelligence agencies. One effort "attempts to match known patterns of deception as provided by subject matter experts in foreign intelligence data."
The Tanagram project is testing the viability of a semi-autonomous surveillance and warning system to report the "threat likelihood" of known and unexpected "threat entities" by continually assessing information about known threats, among other things. Data mining will be or is being used to overcome incomplete and incorrect data, test threat hypotheses, warn of unexpected threats.
Video Analysis and Content Extraction attempts to automate the tedious and overwhelming process of reviewing the video feeds from surveillance cameras, such as those in subways and other public transit systems. It also is testing search capabilities to apply to video databases to retrieve terrorist events such as bombings and beheadings. Already the program has produced a video event manager that helps find events of security significance, such as a person entering and leaving a bag in a restricted area.
The ProActive Intelligence project (PAINT) studies "the dynamics of complex intelligence targets (inclusive of terrorist organizations) by examining patterns of causal relationships that are indicative of nefarious activity."
And finally, there is Reynard, which will "conduct unclassified research in a public virtual world environment."
The 15-page report devotes almost a quarter of its space to research in privacy protecting technologies intended to limit the use of data and to identify and protect information about innocents. The privacy initiative was born of a series of workshops in thefall of 2006 including government and private sector experts and privacy advocates.
And what of the funny name for the virtual worlds project? Well the logical allusion is to Reynard the Fox, hero of Medieval satires about social manners and classes. Here's how the Encyclopedia Britannica Online describes him: "Though Reynard is sly, amoral, cowardly, and self-seeking, he is still a sympathetic hero, whose cunning is a necessity for survival. He symbolizes the triumph of craft over brute strength." Hmm, or should that be "spy craft" over brute strength?
Most of us remain skeptical about practical uses for virtual worlds. What we've seen of Second Life, for example--scantily clad avatars, simulated sex acts, bizarre creatures flying about--leaves us doubtful that it's a place where serious business or governance could be conducted. That's why we scratch our heads over the presence in world of many companies--Sears, Wired magazine, Reuters, Adidas, Sun Microsystems, Toyota, IBM-- let alone federal agencies such as NASA, NOAA, CDC and others.
But yesterday, IBM announced that it has developed a way to recreate companies' data centers in 3D in secure virtual worlds. Is there anything more deadly serious and businesslike than a data center? Hard to think of what it might be, so this might just begin to allay some skepticism.
Apparently, we all, even data center managers, think better in 3D than 2D, hence the desire for a synthetic, but wholly accurate, representation of servers, racks, networking, power and cooling equipment that data center managers can virtually walk through and monitor.
Here's how IBM's press release puts it:
"Viewing information about your data center in 2D text -- even in real time -- only tells a data center manager part of the story, because our brains are wired for sight and sound," said IBM researcher Michael Osias, who architected the 3D data center service. "By actually seeing the operations of your data center in 3D, even down to flames showing hotspots and visualizations of the utilization of servers allows for a clearer understanding of the enterprise resources, better informed decision-making and a higher level of interaction and collaboration." A key advantage of visualization is that it lets managers "see" which machines aren't being used to full capacity so as to consolidate. Another advantage is being able to view how heat and energy flow within the center. Indeed, IBM made its first foray into virtual data centers in Second Life last year as part of an effort to conserve the huge amount of energy its own servers suck up.
The nation's data centers consumed in aggregate some 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity--1.5 percent of total U.S. consumption, at a cost of about $4.5 billion. My Goverment Executive magazine colleague Katherine McIntire Peters chronicled federal conservation efforts here.
The new virtual data center was built using IBM's virtual world integration middleware, Holographic Enterprise Interface in the OpenSim Application Platform for 3D Virtual Worlds for a Swiss construction company, Implenia. It uses the multiuser center to better manage heating, cooling, ventilation and security at dispersed data centers.
Companies with data centers in many locations already are beginning to manage them as a single computing pool. IBM argues that it can further improve on that model by allowing managers to collaborate across centers to make better and faster decisions. It touts the in-world instant messaging and shared 3-D experience of virtual centers that allow multiple users not only to manage and monitor current conditions, but also to play out "what ifs" for disaster recovery and to better deploy assets.
IBM says virtual data centers illustrate "the future of work and how business will be conducted in the 21st century workplace. " Could be.
O'Harrow's story grew out of a new report from IARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the spy version of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Of Second Life, the report says: "Unfortunately, what started out as a benign environment where people would congregate to share information or explore fantasy worlds is now offering the opportunity for religious/political extremists to recruit, rehearse, transfer money, and ultimately engage in information warfare or worse with impunity."
That may be, though later in the piece, O'Harrow cites an intelligence official, who said he had "no evidence of activity by terrorist cells or widespread organized crime in virtual worlds."
Ironically, the most widely known incidences of "violence" in Second Life have not been the work of jihadis or other terrorists, but of far right vigilante groups and anarchists. Best known is the Front National, a right-wing French group led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the first European political party to open shop in Second Life. On Jan. 20, 2007, British newspaper The Guardian reported that the opening of the Front's headquarters occasioned protests, explosions, gunfire and the hurling of exploding pigs. Le Pen and other Front members have been convicted of inciting racial violence in France.
Of course, where rightists roam, can anarchists be slow to follow? Yes, it's true, Second Life also has a Second Life Liberation Army.
Free speech and virtual worlds commentators jumped all over IARPA's interest in synthetic worlds and massively multiplayer online games, suggesting it would lead to illegal surveillance and abrogation of civil rights.
O'Harrow warns that scrutiny of virtual worlds will intensify because other countries are creating them. He's especially concerned about a Chinese entrant that wants to enable avatars to move among worlds:
National security officials have begun working informally to take stock of virtual worlds. That research likely will take on more urgency this year, as companies in other countries prepare to unveil their own virtual worlds.
One such world, called HiPiHi, is being created in China. HiPiHi founders said they want to create ways for avatars to be able to travel freely between its virtual world, Second Life and other systems -- a development that intelligence officials say make it doubly hard to track down the identity of avatars.
In promotional material, HiPiHi officials said that they believe that virtual worlds "are the next phase of the Internet."
Interestingly, HiPiHi counts among its partners a number of U.S. firms, including IBM and Intel. What's more, IBM shares the goal of linking online worlds and views them as the future of the Internet, too. IBM holds a good deal of space within Second Life and is building showrooms there for the likes of Sears, Circuit City, and other companies.
IBM also makes space available on its virtual islands to work on experimentations that push the limit of what might be possible in virtual worlds, with aims to begin the foundations for building out the next generation, 3-D Internet and to drive open standards. Its goal is to experiment with ways to replicate business processes in these worlds and apply variables to them to see what might happen in the real word, or to build new ways to educate people or treat certain types of maladies through innovative uses of technologies for e-learning and telemedicine.
O'Harrow quotes Jeff Jonas of IBM's Entity Analytics Solutions organization, which focuses on making data more easily and intelligently searchable by resolving identities and stripping inappropriate identifiers so it can be shared across organizations. It's a different arm of IBM from the virtual worlds folks and it's much involved with law enforcement and anti-terror data mining. In 2002, I wrote about Jonas and his early work helping casinos identify employee collusion with fraudsters in a story about the CIA's venture capital investments (Jonas got one).
Those who closely watch serious terrorists' activities don't believe they are likely to find Second Life congenial what with its exploding pigs and anarchists, and now, no doubt, roaming U.S. spy avatars. Instead, they advance other predictions for jihadis online, including that they will create or commission just-in-time virtual worlds spun up for specific training sessions and then just as quickly disassembed. How could worlds appear and disappear so fast? By using botnets--thousands of unrelated computers rendered zombies controlled by hackers with nefarious purposes--as temporary servers.
As the Music Man says: "Make your head spin? Well I should say!"
