Carolyn Santo writes: > The recent talk about video games made me wonder about using them as > a communication channel that might not be monitored by repressive > governments.
I've heard this idea is interesting to anti-censorship campaigners as well as to spy agencies. A disadvantage is that historically a lot of video game network protocols haven't been even transport-encrypted, let alone end-to-end encrypted. So someone monitoring the network could likely even search for text strings in the traffic and find them, or in any case could develop software to interpret the game traffic. This could change if more game protocols would run over TLS or DTLS. A further disadvantage is that the game operators themselves could monitor in-game communications and many of them probably have tools to do this, not least because multiplayer online games have been plagued by harassment and griefing and the game operators may want to have an easy way to review users' communications (which in turn can be applied to consensual communications too). Jurisdictions that impose surveillance capability mandates (like the U.S.) may try to apply these to some kinds of in-game communications. An advantage is that some, but not all, surveillance systems may have been programmed to systematically discard most gaming-related traffic as uninteresting. And any given game, especially one that's not super-popular, might be far down the list of platforms for which a particular surveillance system or organization develops analysis tools. -- Seth Schoen <sch...@eff.org> Senior Staff Technologist https://www.eff.org/ Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/join 815 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA 94109 +1 415 436 9333 x107 -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
