You may remember that one of the funniest stories of 2022 was the way that players of War Thunderâan arcadey online shooter featuring real military vehiclesâjust kept on posting military documents in the gameâs forums. Not as acts of espionage, but to win arguments about specs
I am incredibly happy to report, then, that this is shaping up to be one of 2023âs funniest stories as well.
The last time we checked in on these guys it was some tank players, who despite ban after ban just kept on sharing detailed, classified information on currently-operational Main Battle Tanks and their armaments.
This week weâve seen a similar thing happen, only now itâs about fighter aircraft. As Massively OP report, earlier this week a player âshared military documents related to the F-16 fighter jet in order to win an argumentâ. The problem is that those documents, while not designated as classified military documentation like the tank guysâ stuff, was still restricted material âunder the jurisdiction of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), a State Department-enforced law that limits disclosure and transmission of US weapons data and information to foreign individuals, including distribution on the internetâ. So, not classified, but still not the kind of thing you should be posting in a video game forum.
Then, just a day later, someone else was at it again! This time a different user posted excerpts from over a dozen weapons system manuals for the F-15E. Again, these werenât classifiedâindeed they were for systems old enough that they had been declassifiedâbut like Iâve already said, just because something isnât classified doesnât mean you can freely post it on internet forums where anyone in the world can see them. So they were deleted as well.
I said this last year but I will say it again now, the fact that a video gameâs forums have become one of the greatest opsec hazards of the modern age, just because some dudes want to argue over a weaponâs statistics, is very funny.
