War Thunder players have leaked restricted military documents... again

techradar.com:

Every type of journalism has its repeats. Real estate journalists will write ‘House prices rise again’ a hundred times in their career, political journalists will be forced to declare ‘Government announces policy U-turn’ most weeks, and sports journalists will wear out the rubber on ‘Lewis Hamilton wins grand prix’. In games journalism, our repeat is: ‘War Thunder players leak military documents’.

Since 2019, players of the multiplayer military sim have shared restricted and classified military documents numerous times. Sometimes it’s just to show off something they’ve discovered about a vehicle they love to pilot in the game, other times, it’s been to win an argument. This week may be a new record, however, with two separate leaks of armament manuals.

The first leak was in a discussion of the F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jet. Players were discussing what weapons could be fitted to the plane, when user Spacenavy90 shared a document(opens in new tab), saying, “Interesting thing I found during my research. During early AMRAAM testing you can see how F-16A would equip the AIM-120 and use TWS on the non-MFD stores control panel ‘SCP’.” Though this may seem like an innocuous, if jargon-laden claim about the specifications of a fighter jet, it turned out there was more going on than you might expect.

A reply to Spacenavy90’s post(opens in new tab) pointed out that the document was only supposed to be distributed within the US Department of Defence and authorized US Government agencies because it contained “export-controlled technical data”.The punishment for sharing export-controlled data can be as much as $1m per violation(opens in new tab) and a 10-year prison sentence.

Moderators quickly deleted the document.

You’d think that