War Thunder user leaks restricted military documents for AH-64D Apache Longbow | Hacker News Reader

War Thunder user leaks restricted military documents for AH-64D Apache Longbow

nichegamer.com

138 pointscapableweb69 comments

It didn't take me a whole lot of effort to find a document with the "Distribution authorized to Department of Defense and DoD contractors only due to critical technology" disclaimer: https://www.scribd.com/doc/102459342/US-Army-Apache-Longbow-...

First result on https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=%22AH-64D+Apache+Longbow%22...

I am available for hire as a spy.

Your argument doesn't hold: who was the person that uploaded the document? That person is hireable as a spy.

s/spy/spy-hunter/ ;)

For War Thunder he can be a spy-war

From one of the opening pages:

WARNING - This document contains technical data whose export is restricted by the Arms Export Control Act (Title 22, U.S.C., Sec 2751, et seq.) or the Export Administration Act of 1979, as amended, Title 50 U.S.C., App. 2401 et seq. Violation of these export laws are subject to severe criminal penalties. Disseminate in accordance with provisions of DoD Directive 5230.25.

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT D - Distribution authorized to the Department of Defense and DoD contractors only due to critical technology. This determination was made on 26 June 2000. Other requests for this document shall be referred to Commander, U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command, ATTN: SFAE-AV-AAH- ATH, Redstone Arsenal, AL 35898 - 5000.

DESTRUCTION NOTICE - Destroy by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document.

You can only hope that the uploader is who they say they are...

Found this funny one by Googling a similar string:

SOLDIER SURVEILLANCE AND RECONNAISSANCE: FUNDAMENTALS OF TACTICAL INFORMATION COLLECTION: https://www.scribd.com/document/99352146/FM-2-91-6-Soldier-S...

Ever wonder how to "interact with the local populace" when you travel somewhere? Well, here's how it's done:

    - Be prepared to discuss your personal interests (hobbies, books, travel).
    - Be sensitive to your body language.
        -> Smile as long as it is appropriate.
        -> Avoid sitting with your arms crossed.
        -> Do not show the bottom of your feet in an Arabic  culture.
        -> Keep your hands away from your mouth.
        -> Lean forward and nod.
        -> Make frequent eye contact (if culturally  appropriate).
    - Use the person's name, position title, rank, and/or other verbal expressions of respect.
    ...

    - Remember, a person's favorite topic is himself
    ...

Last week I binged enough of “Big Bang theory” so it all seem reasonable as I read it.

You are not committing a crime or doing anything special by finding and sharing this information (/unless/ you are read in to whatever program may or may not require one to protect it).

The crime was performed by the performed leaker.

"No way to prevent this," says only forum where this regularly happens

Would it be possible that these leaks happen on purpose?

Not really much of a conspiracy there, most of the "leaks" are technically public info NATO documents, War Thunder's developer doesn't want to touch ANYTHING that might have been classified at one point.

That is almost certainly what is happening. There are tens of millions of Westerners who are sympathetic towards the adversaries of the West (primarily Russia).

Don't attribute to malice what could be attributed to stupidity.

Most or War Thunder leaks were basically "the in game stats are wrong, here is the proof: [CLASSIFIED DOC]".

And in other cases (like the Ukraine War leaks on Discord) it's just flexing like "I know things you common folks don't know".

It doesn't mean nefarious leaks for money or sympathy don't occur, but there are generally far less visible.

do you have any actionable suggestions aside from moderator-approved messages or turning the forum read-only?

information suppression is pretty tough work, especially when you're trying to suppress the unknown.

Probably the only thing they could do to fix this problem for good is to basically not include any modern equipment at all.

Even then, don't they have the type of userbase that would still keep arguing about equipment that is not in the game?

Train a ML model as a classified document classifier and scan everything through that... now they just need to dig through their archives for the training set from all the past leaks.

Oh sure! Let me just pull up my training set of unredacted classified documents…

Wait. I’ve got a knock on the door.

I mean I was partially joking about the origin of the dataset, but they likely could work with DoD at this point to get a model that is acceptable to put in place, after as many leaks as they have had.

I believe they already have things track how documents are accessed and copied across their network. There’s definitely flaws in it, but it’s not completely open.

Isn't there standard text on these? On a cover page and/or headers/footers?

I get that the content of the documents is not known, but I would think the structure of them is known and could be matched on. Perhaps specific phrases that are only likely to appear in military documents, or a classification level in a header/footer, or even some specific combination of font, font weight, line spacing and indentation.

They could maybe even slurp up the text from PDF's they blocked to prevent someone from posting similar plaintext. Probably not, though, because an endpoint that says whether something is or isn't classified is basically a classified document generator with enough time or clever tricks.

Then just forward the reports to whatever country's military owns those docs (or let the company's government do that). I think War Thunder only needs to make a nominal effort; the various militaries of the world will take care of backing it up with a dire threat.

> Perhaps specific phrases that are only likely to appear in military documents, or a classification level in a header/footer, or even some specific combination of font, font weight, line spacing and indentation.

Do you have any idea how difficult it would be to maintain a database of distinguishing sensitive marks on documents?

Hell, some documents are so protected even the labeling is protected information.

Infeasible.

Edit: I don't mean infeasible or difficult from a technical standpoint. I mean procedurally, this isn't viable. You couldn't accomplish it in a way that wouldn't be so full of holes as to be functionally useless.

People replying to this part of the thread may not be getting the satirical reference to The Onion

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=the+onion...

I don't know why they would want to prevent it. It's free publicity for them with no consequences. They just have to make sure to delete it eventually.

Best example of we've tried nothing and we're out of ideas

They shouldn't have to prevent it.

Does anybody understand why this happens within the War Thunder community? It's not like War Thunder is a hardcode simulator - why on earth do the players need real manuals anyway?

Why does this not happen for DCS or any of the much more serious simulators?

> Why does this not happen for DCS or any of the much more serious simulators?

Size of the player base? I imagine there are an order of magnitude more daily WT players than there are DCS players, for instance.

And while WT isn't a hardcore simulation, it is detailed enough that obscure technical details can make a difference in gameplay balance, combine that with someone salty about getting blown up in a situation they shouldn't ("the game has that panel 12mm too thin and 3 degrees off, the round actually would have bounced!") and obsessing over their favorite piece of Olive Drab steel, well, we find ourselves in this situation. Yet again.

I would get all that, for a hardcore sim. Back in the day there was an F-16 Falcon simulator where people regularly used real (old) manuals to learn how to just start the aircraft.

But I have doubts War Thunder is modeled accurately enough for a real service manual to actually make any difference for any of the players. War Thunder, from appearances, looks very arcadey and designed to be fun for most players. Sims usually involve 20 minute startup sequences, weight balance shifting, etc... I just don't understand this with War Thunder.

War Thunder has multiple game modes, one of which is very arcadey, one of which is relatively realistic, the other which is a simulator. Most of these players play the middle one, which attempts to model everything as accurately as possible from public information but which automates and abstracts common aircraft-specific sequences. That way you can have a relatively realistic multiplayer experience and something that approximates a life outside of it.

The realistic mode can optionally also hold your hands through many aspects of operating the aircraft, at a significant cost in performance, so more serious players will play with "simulator controls" (and will map more advanced things such as changing fuel mixture/prop angle/radiator activation, etc..., like you'd do on a proper simulator).

The developers in theory and sometimes in practice will correct inaccuracies in performance or capabilities if you can point them out from non-classified sources. Unlocking modern vehicles takes 100-600$ or hundreds (sometimes thousands) of hours, and sometimes due to inaccuracies they end up being or becoming non-viable, so some people are irrationally motivated to change that.

I think you've hit the reason with the wrong cause though: because War Thunder is pretty loosey-goosey with it's model, it leaves plenty of room for the "that's BS! The real Abrams would totally have..." argument.

Whereas in a more crunchy simulation model, whether one plane beats another or something is going to be tied up in a lot more nuance.

It sounds like you haven't played War Thunder. The service manual is obviously useless in War Thunder because repairs happen automatically under a cool down. The point of the game isn't to learn how to operate any specific vehicle. The point is to act as the commander with high level controls but with some skill based elements such as aiming.

Meanwhile the technical specs of the tank.... Those are absolutely critical because the damage simulation is entirely dependent upon them, because this isn't world of tanks where tanks have hitpoints. When you shoot a projectile, the projectile interacts with the armor, creates spalling (or explodes inside) that then has to kill all the personnel inside the vehicle for it to count as a vehicle kill. Shots that don't kill can disable parts of the tank, activate the ammo rack, destroy the tracks, etc.

A service manual isn't going to tell you how thick a specific section of the armor is, or what composition the armor has or what angle the armor is. Yes this still retains a sort of arcade simulation feel, because a realistic simulation such as this [0] is computationally too expensive to happen in a multiplayer game.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eASJbjtw180

People aren't posting these for players to use as in-game references. They're posting them to prove that the developers short-changed their favorite piece of hardware, in hopes that the devs will say "sorry, you're right" and fix it.

It’s amazing how much happens because a nerd (positive term) gets angry because of something not technically correct or difficult

And the military needs nerds (positive term)! Who do you think maintains all our communications, networks, avionics, cryptography, collates all our intelligence information, and translates what the bad guys get intercepted saying in their native tongue?

All of these communities have, well, a reputation for a certain type of personality. The old joke is that you can tell an extrovert at the NSA because when he/she is talking, he/she looks at YOUR shoelaces.

The military doesn't need the class of nerd that couldn't spell OPSEC if there were just 5 letters in the alphabet.

Homo sapiens hunting parties be rough, buy one, loose two affairs since the dawn of time?

It has happened for DCS in the past.

The real reason this is always happening for Warthunder is because it's being sensationalized by the media and what's happening is being massively misrepresented.

Every time one of these articles comes out for like the last 6 months at least the "leaked classified documents" have already been available online for _years_. But someone posts these easily findable documents on the Warthunder forums and suddenly the leak originates from the Warthunder forums because it makes a good article title.

One of the more recent "leaks" was just someone posting this easily purchasable flight manual: https://www.flight-manuals-online.com/product/eurofighter-ty...

Has it happened in DCS in the past? I know of the instance where an Eagle Dynamics employee got nabbed due to possessing documents but I don't know of an instance where a community member has posted docs publicly.

ED has clamped down on it. Now if you post something and can't prove it's from an unlimited distribution source BigNewey will delete your post pretty much immediately. I typically see that stuff on community Discords where the volunteer mods have a longer reaction time.

I think it's the fact that War Thunder is less serious than hardcore sims that makes all the difference. The sort of person who is into a "real sim" and values the experience of reproducing the "real" experience is also relatively aware of the culture around military technology. You know it would be potentially bad for you to post classified stuff and you probably understand why "not for export" and "top secret" are different classes of information and why you want two classes of information. You respect the information hierarchy that these systems of secrecy respect - and part of that respect means you enjoy really flipping all of the knobs on an Apache. You probably have access to these documents but you would never be so gauche as to post them on a public forum.

On the other hand, if you mostly enjoy military hardware in a semiotic and arcade-y way, all official documents simply represent potential ammunition to win internet arguments. You aren't aware of the baroque system of different kinds of secrecy and if you heard of itt you would think it was silly. If the information is "out there" already why wouldn't you post it to settle an internet argument? Surely if you can get your hands on it then any potential enemy has as well.

If the US military's aircraft information is so incredibly important and secret, how the hell did it end up in the possession of some civilian gaming forum users? Maybe they should just add it to Wikipedia already and call it a day.

You do realize military personnel are gamers, too, right?

Video gaming has been mainstream for long enough for me to have had a full active duty and reserve career, retire as a senior officer, and then go utterly ga-ga over Baldur's Gate 3, which came out of early release over a month after I retired. The difference is I know how to keep my NDAs.

> Does anybody understand why this happens within the War Thunder community?

At this point its more about the meme than the actual game

> It's not like War Thunder is a hardcode simulator

People work themselves into prison due to stalking and death threats to game developers over balance issues; "what my in-game tank can and can't do" is a balance issue, even if it isn't a sim.

Only played briefly, but my experience was:

1. Jeez the Panther fires slow for a tank with one of the first auto loaders.

2. Wow other people have the same complaint

3. Statement from the developers that they have used the reload times from a technical document written by the french after ww2, where they disassembled and tested a panther for the government

4. Hang on that panther specifcally had its autoloader removed, and was piloted by untrained people.

5. Located a locked thread with pages and pages of technical data, arguments about russian tank favoritism, and ultimately no change.

The devs bring it on themselves by being very much in love with russian hardware, and being very picky about their sources. They also participate in the conversation and that leads to people trying to prove they are wrong.

Panthers never had autoloaders

Gonna need you to prove that by leaking some classified documents. /s

DCS has its own share of drama:

https://www.polygon.com/2019/5/15/18623545/eagle-dynamics-f-...

These have, as have all the prior "leaks" this year, been available for years already.

They are publicly available in many places, like public intelligence and various mega shares.

Many of the recent ones are as you say, "not leaks".

However the Challenger Tank one was real https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/classified-challenger-tank-s...

Yup, the tank turret rotation speed was indeed a classified document, but that was 2 years ago.

Not that I don't wish that there wouldn't be more leaks, the info is juicy even if almost always pretty simple

It has been [ 0 ] days since the last classified document leak on the War Thunder forums.

Third time this month, so yeah almost.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone posted detailed blueprints of a modern thermonuclear weapon just to win an argument. :)

I heard that in the present day that is mostly irrelevant. The hard part is procuring adequate fissile material more than designing the bomb. Maybe an ICBM design would help North Korea?

It seems like aspects of miniaturizing multi-stage fusion devices can still be difficult. Single stage unboosted fission devices should be be near trivial, so long as you have a source of fissile material (as you indicated).

The other secret-ish aspect is details of the safety features and permissive action links. I say -ish because at one point the US offered to give PAL technology to the Soviets.

There is nothing interesting is the design itself, the hard part is how to produce some very intricate parts and materials.

For those keeping score at home, this is the thirteenth time this has happened.

How long before an adversary reaches mod status and is able to see new submissions to the forum?

Thats what happened to Silk Road

except then those government agents went rogue and went to prison too

> Here is the official us government status about declassification of the document.

> If the user was blocked please reinstate his account and his post, as the manual is FULLY UNCLASSIFIED.

Bona fide clown. "FULLY UNCLASSIFIED" doesn't mean shit[1].

[1] https://www.esd.whs.mil/portals/54/documents/dd/issuances/do...

Hahaha I thought this was a repost at first that's awesome!

I wonder if some of this leaks are fromn people paid, threatened or otherwise "moved by external forces" to do the leak

None more foolish than the man in the grip of a desire to win an argument on the Internet.

It has been in service almost forty years, around the world and with multiple militaries.

To a reasonable probability there aren’t any deep secrets left.

Regardless, that it keeps happening is never not funny.

Depends. Flight characteristics? Probably not. Sensors? Perhaps. They just unveiled a new mast this month.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/this-is-what-the-ah-64...

True most major military planes receive regular block upgrades and are pretty much unrecognizable from the initial release after a few decades, save for the airframe.

Not sure if this is also the case with the Apache but I don't doubt it.

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