Recent years have brought reports of the US government eavesdropping on phone conversations, emails, even tweets - all in the name of fighting terrorism. But surely your Xbox must be safe from the prying eyes of Big Brother?

Not for long. You might not immediately think that slaying dragons or driving like a maniac through virtual streets is all that interesting to intelligence agents, but the US government believes there might be law-enforcement gold on your Xbox.

Government researchers say that hacking into consoles will allow police to catch paedophiles and terrorists. Meanwhile, privacy advocates worry that gamers may leave sensitive data - and not just credit card information - on their Nintendos without knowing it.

At the cutting edge of this development is Obscure Technologies, a small San Francisco-based company that performs computer forensics and which has just been given a $US177,237 ($172,250) sole-source research contract to develop ''hardware and software tools that can be used for extracting data from video-game systems'', and ''a collection of data (disk images; flash memory dumps; configuration settings) extracted from new video-game systems and used game systems purchased on the secondary market'', according to the contract award from the US Navy. (Law enforcement agencies contacted the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate for help on a tool to examine gaming console data. The department then asked the US Naval Postgraduate School to execute the contract and spearhead the research because of the expertise of Simson Garfinkel, a computer science associate professor at the NPS in California - hence the US Navy contract.)

The project, called the ''Gaming Systems Monitoring and Analysis Project'', originated in 2008, when law enforcement authorities were concerned about paedophiles using video-game consoles to find victims.