It is difficult to know whether to be worried about the espionage risks from online gaming or if warnings are as over-hyped as Duke Nukem Forever. We decided to find out.

US Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira found friends online like many Gen Z gamers during Covid-19. He had a girlfriend known as ‘Crow’, a young woman he’d never met in person. Teixeira also traded memes and war videos with virtual friends on the Discord platform, and - if prosecutors are right - leaked hundreds of US secrets to impress an unlikely group of military strategists: chronically online teens living at home with mom.

The Massachusetts airman is not the first gamer accused of spilling secrets online - not for money or ideology, but to settle disputes, score bragging rights, and ‘own’ an opponent. Texieira pleaded guilty on six counts involving wilful retention and transmission of national defense information in March 2024 but he's not the only gamer suspected of leaking classified information. Since 2021, military intel has been posted three times on the War Thunder gamers’ forum - technical specs of British and French tanks and intel about Chinese DTC10-125 tank ammo, all apparently genuine.
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The Discord leaks may be in a class of their own, however. PBS and The Washington Post describe them as one of the biggest government leaks in US history: more than 300 pages of highly classified intel, from Pentagon assessments of the Russia-Ukraine war to Iran’s nuclear program. A Foreign Policy headline claims gamers have even ‘eclipsed spies’ in the realm of espionage.

But with only four reported leaks and billions of gamers, can the situation really be so dire?

“While I do not consider gamers to be ‘eclipsing’ spies, there is some merit to addressing/considering this issue,” said former CIA officer Peter Warmka, a cybersecurity expert and author of Confessions of a CIA Spy. Warmka is not alone in that thought.

Jonathan Askonas, an academic and co-author of the Foreign Policy article on gaming, said his central argument is that the traditional acronym intelligence officers use to recruit spies, MICE (Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego), needs a fifth addition to describe the durable, deep social ties experienced by people heavily involved in an online community. “It's not really about ‘video games’ as such but about the way the Internet is rewiring human sociality in ways that current counterespionage practices do not know how to cope with.”

So how did we arrive here? It is a tale rooted in the Cold War that features NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and an intriguing set of cyber spies who play online games for a living.

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SIGINT Intelligence & Spies

After WWII, the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand struck a ‘Five Eyes’ deal to share signals intelligence (SIGINT). As satellites and computer networks became more common, their listening posts transformed into digital collection centers that hoovered up foreign military intel and diplomatic secrets. By the 2000s, the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ were also spying on tens of millions of online gamers.

Games, as one NSA analyst wrote enthusiastically in 2008, “are an opportunity!”

During the so-called ‘War on Terror’, SIGINT experts zoned in on millions of World of Warcraft players, sucking up country and time zone data, local IP addresses, and realm server addresses, according to classified documents leaked in 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Fantasy world Second Life was another data-rich target; so was Microsoft’s Xbox Live.

The online world wasn’t the den of iniquity spies imagined, however. Terrorists, it seems, were more focused on the real world and the Snowden leaks led to media questions about privacy and the legality of virtual surveillance.

“This skepticism was well founded: establishing direct connections between acts of ‘virtual’ vandalism and actual terrorism was as absurd as it was unsubstantiated,” Dr. Tim Stevens, reader in International Security at King’s College London, wrote in his 2015 paper Who’s Watching the Warlocks? “Why would a jihadist group form a recognizable entity in a quasi-public space to wage an insurgency against the ‘government’ of Second Life, let alone to pursue more nefarious ends?”

What isn’t clear post-Snowden, is whether Five Eyes spies are still targeting gamers, perhaps disguised as undercover Orcs or lurking in the shadows of chat forums. Back in 2008, there were so many intelligence officers conducting ops inside games that a ‘deconfliction’ group was considered to ensure the NSA, DIA, FBI, CIA, and Britain’s GCHQ weren't spying on each other.

“I am sure there is already a technical capability in place for gathering SIGINT from this part of the Internet,” assistant politics professor Jonathan Askonas said. “I have not seen anything about how surveillance of Discord or other systems is being implemented, but of course these would be key sources and methods that the Intelligence Community would not disclose.”
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Gamers: A Security Threat? 

Which brings us back to the issue at hand: Do the four online military intelligence leaks reported since 2021 indicate that gamers and the online gaming chat servers they use to communicate pose a rising security threat? As the CIA is fond of saying: “It depends.”

“I believe that these identified online intelligence leaks were motivated more by ego and bragging rights than by conducting true intelligence on behalf of a state actor,” says former CIA case officer and SPYEX consultant Peter Warmka. “If an intelligence service recruits a gamer as a source, they will generally train them in proper online tradecraft to avoid having any such leak traced back to them.”

That said, online gaming is complex. Platforms don’t just offer players the opportunity to leak secrets in private chat rooms; they are a haven for foreign spies who can disguise themselves with avatars and tease information out of gamers they may want to recruit. It cuts both ways though. Warmka sees the platforms as an opportunity.

“I see online gaming platforms as a means for intelligence services to identify and establish a relationship with a potential target of interest with the ultimate goal of recruiting and handling them as sources,” Warmka told SPYSCAPE. “Online gamers generally are socially inverted and not as accessible as those who might participate in outside public events where they could be bumped.”

It’s common to find some of a gamer's ‘best friends’ are people they’ve never even met in person, which can be useful. “If a gamer is successfully recruited, they never have to meet in person to pass/respond to requirements,” Warmka said. “They can also be paid in the virtual world. With properly deployed tradecraft, It is a much more secure world than traditional espionage.”

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Gen Z Spies in a Virtual World‍

Online gaming is surging worldwide with revenue expected to reach $28bn in 2024. The boom means intelligence agencies won’t just want to recruit gamers and locate intelligence leaks; they’ll also want to focus on preventing those leaks in the first place. But how?

“For me, the biggest takeaway is that the government needs to revisit its clearance process and stop handing out Top Secret access like it is candy at Halloween,” former CIA officer Alex Finley told the Just Security website.

Massachusetts airman Jack Teixeira worked as a ‘cyber transport specialist’ - a low-level IT staffer - granted Top-Secret clearance to perform his job. His case led to considerable debate about how many of the 4.3m US government workers who have security clearance really need it and what questions should be asked during their vetting process.

“An applicant to be, or current, clearance holder, can expect questions about their social media activities,” said Dan Meyer, a partner at D.C.’s Tully Rinckey law firm who specializes in military and security clearance issues. “NSA has loosened up, but it is still risky to have an online presence and work at Fort Meade. Most CIA personnel do not expose themselves online.”

“Other agencies can be more generous,” Meyer added. “The critical question to ask is whether an applicant or holder has committed to the lifestyle changes necessary to do classified work.”

Former CIA officer Peter Warmka wants to see the US security clearance process address the subject's online activities.

“One of the requirements is to identify foreign contacts. How are such contacts identified when dealing in the virtual world? With the power of analytics, perhaps all online contacts should be identified and run through a program identifying linkage. This is very easy to do,” Warmka said. “Online activities also need to be further explored as part of an individual's respective behavioral analysis. Is it at a healthy level or overly excessive, to the point of being a vice? Is it an escape from depression, a sign of loneliness, etc?”

Online platforms like Discord may find it nigh impossible to police millions of users exchanging conversation and documents in chat rooms while still respecting their privacy. So where is this all headed? What’s the future hold?

“Good question,” Warmka said. “I don't have an answer.”