French authorities after the Paris attacks are busy trying to find the source using which the whole massacre was planned. Last Friday, Paris went under seven attacks at different places where there was a rush of people leading to 129 dead and more than 415 injured.
French authorities are showing some interest in the world’s most popular gaming console Sony’s PlayStation 4 and think that it has been used as a communication medium between the ISIS members to plan this annihilation.
Authorities carried out many raids in areas close to Brussels to hunt down the people responsible for the barbarian act and succeeded in killing eight terrorists whereas a large number of their accomplices are still missing.
Jan Jambon, the Belgian Federal Minister for Home Affairs bluntly said that the PlayStation 4 was used by the ISIS members to communicate with each other for planning these killings due to the fact that it is nearly impossible to monitor the conversation made on it. He also said, “PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than ‘Whatsapp’.”
On the launch of all the new generation consoles, there was a question about its privacy especially about its peripheral devices Microsoft’s Kinect and PlayStation’s own camera which could possibly be used to keep an eye on the user.
The non-peripheral based communication on these consoles like PlayStation4 which is considered low-tech & somehow hypothetical, offer a medium to efficiently communicate with each other than any other satellite/encrypted emails, calls or text messages.
Edward Snowden, in 2013 leaked some documents which exposed that CIA and NSA did try and succeed to spy in online games. These agencies embedded themselves in games like “World of Warcraft” to intrude the player’s conversation.
However, it is still uncertain if the ISIS terrorists really did use PS4 to converse and actually used it to plan the whole massacre. The online gamers and users of PlayStation4 might actually know that ordinary voice chat in any online game could have functioned sufficient enough to plan an attack like this as it is difficult for the agencies to monitor IP-based conversation as compared to a simple cellular network.
In 2010, the FBI wanted access to all internet communication channels including game chats but the Federal Communication Commission did not allow them to access peer to peer communications, however, the agency on its own built system of monitoring gaming chats to chase criminals.
Usually all of the gaming consoles available in the market whether it is PlayStation or Xbox, they all come with a built-in function of Voice and Text chat for gaming purpose and it seems quite hard to eliminate such a “Game useful” communication method.
The online gamers do also know many methods of communicating with each other without even saying a word like in a shooting game, the terrorists could have written their message on a wall using their guns, “Sounds creepy” but that is how it is.
The point is to see how deep have the NSA and CIA gone into spying into the games because if they did not think about this non-verbal communication earlier then they seriously need to consider their security flaws and have to have an eye on every gaming console’s every game being played over the internet which is nearly impossible.
Forbes reports that It has not been confirmed, that a console was found as a result of specific Belgian terror raids. Minister Jambon was speaking about tactics he knows ISIS to be using generally.
Game Pressure
