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Comment by SOMA_BOFH | Hacker News Reader

he shipped the manuals to russia through a third party to obscure his identity because he knew it was illegal.

the reaction to the crime may have lacked proportionality but there are more details to the story.

There are legitimate services commonly used to buy stuff from US sellers who don't want to deal with the complicated shipping to Russia and other countries. I doubt he had any intention to obscure his identity – the seller would just not sell to him directly.

It's only legitimate so long as it isn't used to circumvent ITAR. The seller would probably not sell to him directly because exporting flight manuals for military aircraft was paper work the seller didn't want to deal with. By obscuring his identity through a third party the buyer violated ITAR, the seller probably also did as well by not doing proper due diligence.

Would that not make the middle man service guilty, not the buyer who probably has no idea about US law?

He also promised (on the DCS forum) that he would not sell the material and then did so repeatedly to nationals from a variety of countries.

Is there any suggestion that there was anything to learn from manuals being sold in eBay that wouldn't already be well known? Did the person selling the manuals get prosecuted? Was someone court martialed for releasing them?

They were probably illegal to export under ITAR, but otherwise not classified, there are lots of items that fall in to that category.

The legality to own, sell, export, and import things can be different.

Man what a bummer. The F16 is my favorite jet to fly in DCS. :(

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