The expanding digital net of our nation’s security agencies appears to have stretched to the point of absurdity.

What else are we to make of the news that our spies infiltrated online games like “World of Warcraft” and “Second Life” to hunt for terrorist plots — without any evidence that’s where the terrorists were plotting?

It makes the National Security Agency and the other three-letter outfits look ridiculous and frankly scarier.

I appreciate that these people are charged with the grave duty of protecting us, and that means looking under digital stones for bad actors plotting the next assault.

But spying on the world of avatars, elves and gnomes makes me think that in our post-9-11 world, spies feel entitled to look everywhere and at anyone, and they are doing so with little oversight.

“It shares a pattern with other NSA revelations,” said Linda Lye, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “The agency has a propensity for engaging in surveillance that is not well calculated to the goal of apprehending terrorists. It is both overreaching and ineffective.”

The virtual world initiative appears to have been nutty right from the beginning. The NSA and its British counterpart launched their efforts on what appears to be a hunch that terrorists were using “Second Life” and the other sites, according to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to the New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica.

The agents pretended to be players, tried to recruit informers and collected data and conversations.

But according to the Snowden documents, there were so many agents from American intelligence agencies on “Second Life” that the bosses worried that spy avatars were colliding into each other — and maybe spying on each other. A “deconfliction” group was created to keep avatars and identities straight.

The Snowden documents provide no indication that the probes into “World of Warcraft” and “Second Life” resulted in any valuable information. And experts on terrorism offer a good explanation why: Companies that run the games typically have a person’s credit card and track their movements, creating a difficult environment for clandestine activity.

“If there is evidence that a terrorist is using an online game to communicate with co-conspirators, the NSA should be watching those terrorists,” said Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel with the Center for Democracy & Technology. “But without a tip tying the terrorists to the gaming session, it’s just more mass surveillance — watching everyone, just in case someone might do something wrong.”

So far, the Snowden documents have revealed an agency that is technically adept.

But they also reveal an agency that is politically tone-deaf, with each revelation of the surveillance agency’s powers offering critics ammunition to argue that the NSA’s activities have skirted the law.

Probably like many Americans, I had been worn down by the drip-drip of the Snowden revelations. But the video game spying is both surprising and revelatory.

The foray into gaming is the most solid evidence we have that there are few controls on what our security agencies do. They can go on a digital fishing expedition with no real target in mind. The documents make scant mention of people’s rights to privacy or legal constraints such as getting a warrant. There is no weighing of risks and benefits. It’s all about what interesting games spies can play, not whether they should.

Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees. “This shows that the NSA wants a world in which there is no privacy, no spaces outside the watchful eye of the government, and without oversight,” he told me.

It’s time for President Obama to rein in these agencies and make major surveillance program changes — as much as he can without an act of Congress. He should do it soon, before we are hit with the next Snowden revelation that further damages the public’s confidence.

Contact Michelle Quinn at 510-394-4196 and mquinn@mercurynews.com. Follow her at Twitter.com/michellequinn.