Category: Aside

To players of WoW (such as my sons), WOW is a fun game. They often wear headsets to talk with teammates while playing, and keep a chat window scrolling as well. To law enforcement, WoW (or any other similar game) can seem instead to be a global terrorist communications network. Players can talk and send chat messages, internationally, outside of the traditional telephone network and outside of the scope of CALEA. The architecture is based on what works for the game, and not what facilitates lawful access.

Peter Swire, “From real-time intercepts to stored records: why encryption drives the government to seek access to the cloud”

Of course, this statement is largely bunk given that the large companies (like Blizzard, the producers of World of Warcraft) tend to have lawful access guides. And Blizzard’s, in particular, is incredibly detailed (and humorous) and been around since at least 2009. It’s statements like the one quoted, above, that make Swire’s entire paper dubious: given the empirical deficiency of his paper (especially in light of Snowden) he should be required to either write an update to the paper and identity everything that was false in it, or just recant the old paper in its majority.