I don't believe that terrorists would get very far per se using an open, very transparent platform like Second Life for planning or execution of attacks as such, but I think taking the issue very literally is preventing people from understanding what terrorists *can* use SL for, just like anybody can use SL, just like anybody can use the Internet (and obviously Al Qaeda uses the Internet and anonymous cut-away mailboxes for terrorism as well). The extremist movements in SL that perpetrate griefing and indulge in rabid racist and anti-semitic attacks are creating a climate where people begin to think such behavior isn't consequential and is harmless merely because it's online. It's not, because building up indifference and acceptance to such destructive ideologies begins to make it easier to accept them in RL.

Micheru also gets a number of facts wrong here about SL. It's not true that you cannot damage people or property except in "unsafe" zones where the "push" box is not checked "off". Of course you can and it is done all the time. On private islands, you have more tools to block miscreants. But on the mainland, with contiguous geography and a lot of Linden land that serves as a "no man's land" and no-show neighbours, griefers can easily use nearby parcels to launch annoying particle blasts with ugly or pornographic textures, and also put large blocks on physics and have them roll on to your land. This can only be shut off my Linden Lab itself, although you can mitigate it as a parcel owner by turning off the view and putting on autoreturn and other settings.

There is an arms race between Lindens and griefers, and more and more, using the open-sourced client viewer, griefers *are* able to override parcel bans and also orbit you even in a "safe" zone. Twice this week I have been blasted off my properties with "safe" turned on, and not merely "teleported home" but crashed off SL. Griefers can also overload a sim with prim litter and force it to crash, or use other means with physics-enables objects. Griefers *can* destroy property by crashing sims while building is in progress so that the work is undone, or sometimes exploiting a bug that overloads sims and forces return of objects so that they de-link, and causing harried landowners to accidently delete their own work as they try in vain to return malicious scripted objects. Griefers also use the exploit in group tools to get at deeded objects and dismantle them, or drop malicious scripts into objects shared with groups that they have joined if they are opened, or wangled invitations to through social engineering.

Griefers share with terrorists nothing of the scale or human tragedy of real life, of course, but they have similar dynamics: randomly attacking the public in large, visible assaults to spread fear and confusion; attacking innocent people who are not part of their original beef, so as to intimidate their original target further; lying about their misdeeds or distracting from them and trying to pin them on others to discredit them; manipulating the media with rumours, etc.

What could real-life terrorists do in SL? The same thing any group does with any ideological sectarian agenda -- and there are scores of them. Make groups, hold meetings, recruit people, disseminate ideas or memes. Extremism flourishes quickly in this medium just like these businesses Micheru references and unlike a bank scam that may be detected and avoided overnight, ideological extremism takes root faster with gullible or inexperiened people.

I found it appalling how easily some sectarians were able to come into SL and wrap liberals who should know better around their little fingers and get them to proclaim that ideologies promoting the restoration of the Islamic caliphate as a form of government were perfectly legitimate, mainly by saying that it was only a "model" or "study" or "you could always log off".

Cults get started and hold sway very easily in SL -- the Gorean slave cults are ominously popular, as thousands of people fall sway to 'masters' online who tell them even when they can go to the bathroom in real life or not. The idea that "it's only a game" or you can "log off" is irrelevant when people spend 14 hours a day online within these worlds and then start to give up real-life jobs, spouses and even children over it. These are real concerns and shouldn't be trivialized.
With anonymous avatars, there is little accountability; people use SL like Myspace to organize RL encounters.

By and large, the overwhelming amount of activity in SL is positive, creative, constructive, and filled with exciting possibilites. Precisely because it is open-ended, it can be used for good or evil, however. You don't quash the concerns of the non-informed mass media by scornfully ignoring the great propensity for evil contained in new media. A small group of geek coders controlling the technology of virtuality don't get to dictate morality and governance for us all based on their own anarcho-capitalist or extropian schemes. Real-life societies must be involved in the democratic governance of these worlds. Indeed, when the issues of governance have been allowed to fend for themselves, real-life authorities begin to muscle in, as they have in Europe to enforce codes against depiction of child pornography, and in the U.S. as credit card companies under pressure from the government have weighed in to enforce the US ban against online gambling.