This is a surveillance photo from Second Life, included in the NSA/GCHQ manual regarding techniques for spying inside virtual worlds.
Just when you thought the Snowden revelations couldn’t get any weirdly self-parodic, you learn that American and British spies have created avatars to conduct surveillance of suspicious activity inside World of Warcraft and Second Life.
Apparently a CTO of Second Life (now developing mobile applications at Facebook) is a former Navy officer and NSA employee who helped them get their start. Not long after his brown bag at NSA in 2007, the UK’s GCHQ has conducted its “first operational deployment into Second Life.”
Can virtual marketplaces for magical D&D weapons really be used for laundering real-world cash from criminal enterprises?
What avatar would J. Edgar Hoover create?
What are the in-game consequences when your elven fellow traveler gets outed as a narc?
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 