How Paris ISIS Terrorists May Have Used PlayStation 4 To Discuss And Plan Attacks
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Following Friday nights terrorist attacks in Pariswhich killed at least127 people and leftmore than300 injured, authorities are discovering just how the massacre was planned. And it may involve the most popular gaming console in the world, Sony s PlayStation 4.
The hunt for those responsible (eight terrorists were killed Saturday night, but accomplices may still be at large) led to a number of raids in nearby Brussels. Evidence reportedlyturned up included at least one PlayStation4 console.
Belgian federal home affairs minister Jan Jambon said outright that the PS4 isbyused ISIS agents to communicate, and was selected due to the fact that its notoriously hard to monitor. PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than WhatsApp, he said.
When the new generation of consoles launched, there were concerns that they would be too light on privacy, with peripherals like Microsoft MSFT -1.92%s Kinect and PlayStations Camera possibly having the ability to spy on users if say, the government wanted a window into your living room...
While the idea iscertainly Orwellian, its the non-peripheral based communication on consoles which may provide terrorists a channel toeffectively converse with one another. The comparativelylow-tech system may offer a more secure means of communicationthan even encrypted phone calls, texts and email...
While it remains unclear whetherthe Paris ISIS terrorists employed PS4 to communicate, there are a few options, from sending messages through the PlayStation Network (PSN) online gaming serviceandvoice-chatting to even communicating through a specific game.Documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed thatthe NSA and CIA actually embedded themselves in games like World of Warcraftto infiltratevirtual terrorist meet-ups...
With PlayStation 4, it seems likely that simple voice communication could have worked just fine. Its still difficult for investigators to monitor IP-based voice systems compared to say, a simple cellphone. In 2010, the FBI pushed foraccess to all manner of Internet communications, including gaming chat systems. The FCC did not grant the FBI access to peer-to-peer communications, but the government agency did builditsown rigs to record their communications in pursuit of criminals in organized chats, like a pedophile trying to lure kids viaXbox Live. Most consoles today come equipped with such capabilities, as nearly anything you do on your unit can be recorded if you want, in this age of YouTube and livestreaming...
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 Makers 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.
