6 ms·

This happens more than you'd imagine. DCS World gets in hot water for this periodically. It doesn't help that these developers are all from Russia

• duxup 5y ago
  I would think that classified or not ... you kinda assume almost all manuals eventually leak just based on the number of people with regular access.
  • content_sesh 5y ago
    I've held clearances before and that was very much not the attitude of the security folks I met. But they were big fans of reminding you what happens if they catch you doing an unauthorized disclosure. I was very low on the totem pole, so I can't know for certain what leadership actually expects. But it doesn't jibe with my experience that there would be some kind of "leak budget" similar to Google SRE "error budget".
    • duxup 5y ago
      I'm sure everyone involved certainly had the attitude that you don't dork up / release it. I think just from a super high level intelligence standpoint ... you know it is going to happen.
      • rblatz 5y ago
        I agree, and if they don’t that feels like negligence on their part.
    • krisoft 5y ago
      This feels like you guys are talking by each other. You are right. Security folks don't treat leaks lightly. Ever. This is part of how they maintain compliance with the rules. But I don't think this is what the GP commenter talked about. You definitely design weapons, and doctrine and systems by assuming that it can leak to the enemy eventually. If your whole battle plan folds like wet tissue-paper just because the enemy got their hands on a single CAD file or manual then it wasn't a really good plan to begin with. Exhaust ports of doom are nice plot devices for movies, but in reality you try to avoid designed-in Achilles heels. And you do this because leaks happen. Some information get leaked by carelessness, some by disgruntled employees, some are stolen by spies, some are picked up from a wreckage, some are stolen in transit, some are deduced from signal intelligence. You can design mitigations against all of these. The scary security folks you mentioned are mitigation against the first two really. Their existence and behaviour doesn't have any bearing on what the leadership will expect.
      • greedo 5y ago
        Exactly. The USAF has been flying Soviet era fighters and helicopters for ages. And I bet the Russians have samples of M1s, M2s, etc. We know the Chinese got stealth technology from the crash of the Stealth Blackhawk that crashed during the Bin Laden mission in Pakistan. While it's interesting from a opsec standpoint, there was no material loss of valuable information with the posting of this Challenger 2 data. The design and performance specs of a tank that has less than 300 units in use is a gnat on an elephant.
        • mandevil 5y ago
          In my experience, the US Army cared more about securing their stats on what a T-72 or T-90 could do than what a M1 could do. Which is frankly amusing given that the Russians know exactly- even better than the US- what those numbers are. Of course, the key is that they don't want the Russians to know how they know this, and are afraid that discussing it openly will reveal some of that. In a similar vein, about 20 years ago the NSA declassified the existence of their program, during the Korean War, to intercept and decrypt Communist Ground Control Intercept messages in real time and then pass the information to American fighter sweeps (the fighter pilots were told it was radar guiding them). While the NSA was happy to talk about the results of this decrypting, they haven't (at least as of the last time I checked a few years ago) released any details on what kind of codes the North Koreans/Chinese/Russians used even though obviously all three countries know exactly what they used and how it works. The reason given to me was that revealing even just how the NSA described these codes from half a century ago would reveal too much of how the NSA thinks about cryptography.
  • na85 5y ago
    I hold a security clearance. That's not what you assume. The clearance exists for the purpose of preventing disclosure and they take breaches very seriously. I know a guy who had the book thrown at him for causing a (fairly minor) breach. Some stuff is "over classified" but the definition of classified data is that which if disclosed is harmful to the national interest, and they actively seek to prevent leaks.
    • duxup 5y ago
      That's not what you assume as an individual because it's your job. Day to day you do the right thing. Tell me how long you think a given tank manual that goes into the hands of all sorts of people stays secret? That's where you assume ... yeah probably not long.
      • na85 5y ago
        >Tell me how long you think a given tank manual that goes into the hands of all sorts of people stays secret? That's where you assume ... yeah probably not long. I understood your point, I just don't agree with your baseless assumption.
    • skissane 5y ago
      > Some stuff is "over classified" but the definition of classified data is that which if disclosed is harmful to the national interest Once a colleague was having some problem calling a product API. He wanted coding help. I asked to see his code. He said "Sorry, I can't show you the code, it is classified". I asked, "Can you boil the code down into a Short, Self Contained, Correct Example (SSCCE)?" "I can, but that will be classified too." "How can an SSCCE be classified?" "The customer is an intelligence agency, every line of code we write while on-site is classified automatically, trying to get anything declassified is a bureaucratic nightmare". Eventually he agreed that he could go home, and try to write an SSCCE from memory at home, and that wouldn't be classified. In the process of doing that he worked out the problem himself, told me he didn't need my help any more.
      • Aeolun 5y ago
  • zentiggr 5y ago
    I served on a submarine 20 years ago. Fire Control Technician... so fairly high clearance given what I had to operate, and against potentially whom. There are a wealth of things I don't know anymore... and no one else will ever hear them from me unless I am absolutely certain that it's been declassified and is in public access. While a system that can be abused to protect people from consequences will never be perfect, in general those of us who have to work with classified information understand that adversaries getting hold of it means more danger for our own people. I do not assume this, and if I had met anyone who expressed that kind of expectation, I would have mentioned it up the chain - they have self identified as a weak link.
    • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      There are orders of magnitude less submarine fire control techs than there are tank crew-members. I assure you, nobody "up the chain" who's deciding what does or doesn't go in a tank manual expects the material in it to remain secret more than temporarily. It's just not the kind of thing you can rely on when you're disseminating the document to thousands of people across hundreds of facilities. Basically they tell you boots to STFU. And then then they base the rest of their decisions on the reasonable assumption that given time some of you will fail at that. Classic "defense in depth".
    • duxup 5y ago
      I wonder how many folks have access to a submarine fire control tech manual compared to a manual for a tank? I'm guessing simply based on the numbers the likelihood of a tank manual leaking in some fashion (even accidentally), for any reason, is much higher than a fire control technician manual. I would expect individual folks to do their job and not say 'well this will leak anyway'. But more generally I think expecting that 'this manual that we gave to thousands of people won't leak' would be absurd. That second part is what I was getting at.
  • lallysingh 5y ago
    The only ones who can answer that with any knowledge are in counterintelligence. And while the major powers may have copies now, the minor powers probably don't.
• doodlebugging 5y ago
  It also doesn't help that this game has been used in the past to spread trojans to user's machines. As a War Thunder player thru Steam, I quit playing when my system monitors flagged an update from War Thunder as a malicious trojan. That was a couple or three years ago. Cool game though.
  • baud147258 5y ago
    Couldn't the identified trojan be some kind of anti-cheat software? Those sometime require elevated access to check what's running on the computer
    • doodlebugging 5y ago
      There may have been some "normal" component added to the update that I downloaded that was designed to verify that the machine could run the software after the update. I don't know how common anti-cheat functionality is in Steam distributions so if that is a thing and if it behaved in a manner that would trigger a trojan downloader warning from Malwarebytes then that could explain it. I enjoy(ed) the game a lot. Great graphics, reasonable sounds, good tools for choosing and maintaining your tanks, planes, etc. I thought it was one of the best tank battle simulators online. I have to keep a low threshold though for potential spyware, etc since I use my machine for work. It is a one strike and you're out thing with me to use a baseball analogy.
  • doodlebugging 5y ago
    Replying to my own comment to chuckle at the fact that I got downvoted for stating a fact. A sad kind of chuckle, but still a chuckle.
• Aeolun 5y ago
  Almost as if it’s deliberate.