Secret files: How Pokemon Go made US spy agencies lose their minds

About eight years ago when Hillary Clinton was telling folks to catch Pokemon while voting US spy-agencies were freaking out about their workers playing Pokemon Go. They thought that cute little Pikachu might be a sneaky spy from China

The game got super-big super-fast: millions of people walked around with phones up trying to catch em all (which made intelligence folks very nervous). Tech companies were getting tons of user-data and spy agencies wanted to get their hands on it; they started buying hacking or stealing any info they could find

The games creator Don McGowan from Pokemon Company said they werent ready for such success: “We were like people sitting on beach when tsunami hits“ he explained. Their San-francisco based company Niantic (which used to be part of Google) had zero people working on safety issues before the launch

I was a very pretty girl to every government around the world

Things got real-weird when Pokemon started showing up near top-secret places. Some dudes were hunting rare Pokemon in NSA parking lots and near nuclear labs which made security folks super-mad. The Energy Department CIA and NSA sent out no-pokemon-allowed memos to their workers

The whole thing was kinda silly - Niantic is just a normal US company with links to Google and some Japanese firms. But spy-agencies got super-worried about how the game tracks location uses cameras and lets players mark spots as Pokestops. They thought bad guys might use it to spy on secret places

The funniest part happened when Energy Department found lots of rare Pokemon near their secure rooms. Turns out it was just because workers left their phones in storage boxes outside these rooms - the game thought it was a popular hangout spot. In the end nobody found any real security problems but the panic showed how digital games can make spy-agencies lose their cool