A new report says the National Security Agency targeted World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game. Fabrice Dimier/Bloomberg/Getty

The Guardian report suggests that the analysts who prepared the report were trying to play the online games on company time — and thus went to great lengths to prove their case. "Al-Qaida terrorist target selectors ... have been found associated with XboxLive, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and other GVEs (games and virtual environments)," the report says, according to The Guardian. "Other targets include Chinese hackers, an Iranian nuclear scientist, Hezbollah, and Hamas members." The online games intrigued the intelligence services because players may provide numerous nuggets of personal information such as geo-location tags or photographs in their biographies. And because World of Warcraft players, thousands of whom may be playing worldwide at the same time, generally trust the system, breaking into the trove of personal data was easy. Blizzard Entertainment, which operates World of Warcraft — or WoW as it's referred to online — said it was unaware of the infiltration. "If it was, it would have been done without our knowledge or permission," Blizzard told The Guardian. Second Life and the NSA declined comment to the paper.

Virtual 'resistance'