US Spies Getting Own Version of Second Life

Call it 007 2.0, if you will. The US military is planning a Second Life-style virtual world just for spies, complete with a “time machine” feature. But some are skeptical. "They can't do plain old forensics right and they're going to develop a mechanism that rolls the clock backwards and forwards based on multiple inputs?" grouses one unnamed critic in Wired.

The spook world would include the opportunity for agents to explore their own past thinking and to project analyses into the future “by applying predictive models that look forward in time and suggest indicators leading to future events." The world will encourage “creativity, reasoning, collaboration with internal and external experts,” says the military. (More spies stories.)