After a lengthy discussion on the War Thunder forum about the history and performance of the F-16 Fighting Falcon, classified military information has once again been leaked to the public.

This latest incident is a bit different from previous classified information leaks on the War Thunder forum: it happens so often that we can mention "all the other times these guys committed treason" and be 100% serious about it.

For those of you who forgot or missed it entirely the first time around, here are some other cases where someone decided to make a point by exposing military secrets in a video game forum:

The previous leak was about armor, but this leak was about F- The F-16 is an older aircraft, but still in service with the US Air Force and many other countries' air forces.

The long conversation about the F-16, which has been going on since mid-2022, is what you would expect, full of technical jargon and strongly-held opinions. However, earlier this week spacenavy90 wrote (open in new tab) "Interesting thing I found during my research. In early AMRAAM tests you can see how the F-16A was equipped with AIM-120 and used TWS in the non-MFD store control panel "SCP"."

"Interesting" is certainly one word for it, and on the surface it seemed harmless enough. However, as Aerotime (open in new tab) pointed out, spacenavy90 attached documentation to prove his point.

The document immediately raised eyebrows: the first response asked about its "restricted status," and spacenavy90 claimed that it was allowed because the information was outdated, but others argued that even if the document had been declassified, the "distribution statement" that restricted how and with whom the document could be shared remained, and, surprisingly, noted that the War Thunder forum was not on the list of approved recipients.

Hilarious, I'm sorry to say, but at the same time I have to admit that yes, this sort of thing is really no laughing matter. Even if this crime is clearly unintentional, the potential consequences are serious and something that communities like War Thunder must keep in mind.

"Convictions for unauthorized disclosure can include up to 10 years in prison, large fines, or both," wrote forum user Ziggy1989.

"Unauthorized transmission of restricted data is no joke. Submitting data without proper vetting puts not only the submitter, but the game publisher itself at risk. Lawsuits and fines are possible. Hopefully moderators will be more vigilant in the future. It is quite a responsibility."

After some correspondence, spacenavy90 said the material in question had been removed." Regarding this issue of restricted information posted last night, I have already spoken with [forum administrator] Smin1080p via PM and the restricted content in question has already been removed. I will be more careful with any technical information I post in the future." Hopefully, we can put this issue behind us."

In a statement sent to PC Gamer, Gaijin Entertainment confirmed that it had removed the post and reminded everyone again that sharing confidential or restricted military information is not permitted.

"A user posted information regarding AMRAAM missiles for the F-16. To the best of our knowledge, these documents are considered export restricted and are not intended to be shared or used by unauthorized persons." We always remove posts containing confidential or restricted information from our forums as soon as possible. We prohibit the sharing of such documents on our platform. We remind our users over and over again that this is illegal and pointless and should never be done. In our line of work we never use such documents.

"So, we removed the post. The document itself was posted through a link to a third party Discord server, not actually uploaded to our server. In any case, we made those links unavailable to our forum visitors and our employees."

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