RUSH: Hey, folks, you know, these little buddies of mine that I follow on the tech blogs? They are livid. They are so mad, they can’t believe it. When they found out that the NSA is targeting their video games and their computer games, that’s it. It may be the last straw. There are a lot of gamers in the high-tech world, and we have found out that the NSA has gone online and is playing these games with people and spying on them, ostensibly to nab terrorists.

But the NSA… It has been discovered that Edward Snowden released the data. Edward Snowden released this information, and the tech bloggers are beside themselves. You know, everybody has their own tipping point. Obama can nationalize health care and all that and they don’t care.
They’re 23 years old. But now their games are being monkeyed with, and they’re not happy. When they found out… It was bad enough that the NSA was spying on everybody. They thought that wouldn’t happen.

“Obama’s a big civil libertarian! The Democrats wouldn’t do that.” That was strike one. Now the NSA is posing as contestants as they play these video games and computer games? They’re beating everybody, got everybody’s high scores, and it’s just an outrage. Folks, they’re just livid. The NSA admits it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: No, no, no, no. I was not making that up. It’s in The Guardian, the UK Guardian. It’s in the New York Times. The National Security Agency has infiltrated computer games like World of Warcraft. They’re posing as players, as fellow tech bloggers and gamers. They’re trying to apprehend terrorists who might be playing. That’s what they say. They’re spying on people as they play as contestants in these games and my tech blogger buddies are livid. I mean, they feel violated like you can’t believe it. Folks, this is not your father’s NSA.

It wasn’t that long ago the NSA was listening in to what Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Gorbachev were saying. And now the NSA is playing computer games with 14-year-old boys trying to ascertain personal data and terrorist strategies. I’m told Edward Snowden, by the way, is the source for this. It’s the latest in the UK Guardian. And supposedly the morale at the NSA is at an all-time low because of all these leaks that Snowden has done and that people inside the NSA feel very, very depressed that their techniques are now known, having been widely disseminated.

“To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something. The agency’s impressive arsenal of cable taps and sophisticated hacking attacks was not enough. What it really needed was a horde of undercover Orcs. That vision of spycraft sparked a concerted drive by the NSA and its UK sister agency GCHQ to infiltrate the massive communities playing online games, according to secret documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

“The files were obtained by the Guardian and are being published on Monday in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica. The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network –” (laughing) Oh, folks, do you believe this? I don’t know. There’s a part of me, all you can do is laugh at this.

No, we’re not through with the sound bites from the Mandela memorial. No, no. You just sit there and hang in there, folks, and be tough, be patient. You talk about hordes, we have got loads yet to come. But I want to get some of this stuff out there to let you know what’s coming.

The NSA has “built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which has more than 48 million players. Real-life agents have been deployed into virtual realms, from those Orc hordes in World of Warcraft to the human avatars of Second Life. There were attempts, too, to recruit potential informants from the games’ tech-friendly users.”

So the NSA has infiltrated the gamers, spying on them, attempting to recruit them to become spies. And these little tech bloggers are beside themselves. I kid you not. Now, that’s the UK Guardian version of the story.

Here’s the New York Times version. “NSA Spying on Virtual World’s Online Games — World of Spycraft: One of the most extraordinary things revealed in the documents disclosed by Edward J. Snowden is the surveillance of video games like World of Warcraft by Western spy agencies.

“Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents. Fearing that terrorist or criminal networks could use the games to communicate secretly, move money or plot attacks, the documents show, intelligence operatives have entered terrain populated by digital avatars that include elves, gnomes and supermodels.”

But the takeaway is, the gamer community, if I can call it that, this is a serious bunch of people. They take what they do here very seriously. They are into this, and the idea that Obama would be spying on them, that’s a tipping point, folks. They’re already upset the NSA is spying on ’em anyway via Apple, via Google, via Facebook, if all that’s true. They can’t believe Obama would do that. He was Mr. Hope and Change. Obama was gonna stop that kind of thing. It was Bush that did that stuff. And now here’s Obama doing it, making Bush look like a piker.

The Obama NSA has infiltrated the gamer network now, spying on them, posing as contestants and probably beating them, too, all under the guise of trying to catch terrorists and track the movement of illegal money and so forth. Oh, folks, it’s just delectable.