Following Friday night’s terrorist attacks in Paris which killed at least 127 people and left more than 300 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. Belgian federal home affairs minister Jan Jambon has said outright that the PS4 is used by ISIS agents to communicate, and was selected due to the fact that it’s 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 toolight on privacy, with peripherals like Microsoft’s Kinect and PlayStation’s Camera possibly having the ability to spy on users if say, the government wanted a window into your living room.
While the idea is certainly Orwellian, it’s the non-peripheral based communication on consoles which may provide terrorists a channel to effectively converse with one another. The comparatively low-tech system may offer a more secure means of communication than even encrypted phone calls, texts and email.
While it remains unclear whether the Paris ISIS terrorists employed PS4 to communicate, there are a few options, from sending messages through the PlayStation Network (PSN) online gaming service and voice-chatting to even communicating through a specific game. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed that the NSA and CIA actually embedded themselves in games likeWorld of Warcraft to infiltrate virtual terrorist meet-ups
