November 27, 2015

With the massive level of surveillance conducted worldwide by security agencies as well as governments, the question that is on everyone’s mind is how could the terrorists behind the Paris massacre communicate and coordinate with each other to pull off such a massive operation without alerting authorities?

The answer could be a PlayStation 4!

Gaming consoles such as the PlayStation use its own network (PSN) for allowing gamers to chat with each other, and experts are opining that the terrorists used these channels to communicate with each other without striking up red flags on surveillance radars.

PSN currently has over 110 million users globally, with more than 60 million active connections, meaning that it is rather difficult for intelligence officers to sniff out potential terrorist communications. Moreover, such networks offer a multitude of way for criminals to talk to each other. They could either voice chat or send PMs, or even modify in-game elements to send messages.

So how would modifying in-game elements work? Assume you are playing a multiplayer game such as Call of Duty. Instead of communicating directly with another player, you could shoot bullets at a blank wall in a specific pattern so that the bullet holes spell out certain keywords which would then be picked out by the intended recipient.

Quite understandably, monitoring such communications would be next to impossible for surveillance agents, and the authorities would also receive significant flack if word got out that they were trying to infiltrate something as benign as video game chatter.

While there are yet to be conclusive evidence that this was indeed the case for the Paris tragedy, it should be mentioned that there is at least one case where a PS4 was used for illicit purposes. Just a few months back in June, reports surface from Australia that a teenager had used his PlayStation console to contact ISIS members. he then went on to download the blueprints of a bomb through PSN, and one can only guess what would have happened next had the teenager not been apprehended by the authorities right on time.

---