Can you keep a secret? Of course you can, you’re an adult. Could you keep military secrets? If they are threatened with imprisonment (or worse) for revealing them, I bet you could. So why, in the name of God, do people play the War Thunder tank video game (of all things!) And keep leaking classified military documents?
To sum up, this is somehow the third time I’ve written this story. The first was in July 2021:
The July case involved a player who discussed in the game forums about the game’s representation of Britain’s main battle tank Challenger 2. To resolve the disagreement, they published what was essentially the tank manual, which was a hugely stupid thing to do, especially considering it meant that the UK Ministry of Defense was soon involved.
Then, just three months later:
The latter case involves a player discussing in the game forums the representation of the main battle tank Leclerc in France. To resolve the disagreement, they posted part of what was essentially the tank manual, and made the forum moderators wonder what the hell was going on with these people.
And today we are back. As @Osinttechnical first pointed out, in an attempt to get developers to change some of the game’s statistics, a Chinese player posted an image on War Thunder forums earlier this week showing classified military documents. Although I won’t share it here, it was a photo of some weaponry schemes (for a round fired by Chinese tanks), with one of the actual pieces on top of the paper.
The post in question was removed from the War Thunder forums, but since then I’ve seen the image reposted, and then deleted, in several cases in these same forums throughout the day. It is now circulating everywhere, from Twitter to Reddit, to the point that Chinese-speaking players have translated the rounds of the round and been sharing the data along with the image (although it should be noted that most of the information was already known).
Gaijin has since banned the user, telling Kotaku:
Our community managers immediately banned the user and suppressed their posting, as the information of this particular shell is still classified in China. Posting classified information about any vehicle of any nation on War Thunder forums is clearly prohibited, and game developers never use it in their work.
While we understand that our players want the game to be as realistic as possible, we kindly ask that they do nothing illegal and endanger their safety, as well as that of our community team members. The developers of War Thunder do their best to investigate information about vehicles using legally available tools, and obviously scandals like this are not helpful to our efforts.
The fact that video game forums have become one of the biggest dangers of opsec in the modern age, just because some guys want to argue about the statistics of a tank, is deeply amusing.