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Some people want to win arguments no matter the cost:
WTF?! Governments looking for classified documents on other nations' military vehicles might no longer require spies to get the job done; they can just check out the War Thunder forum. Once again, someone used the popular game's message board to post restricted military Intel—twice.
The first incident occurred earlier this week during a discussion about the F-16 Fighting Falcon, a single-engine multirole fighter aircraft originally developed by General Dynamics for the United States Air Force. It was introduced in 1978 but is still used in active duty today.
Aerotime reports that during the lengthy conversation about the aircraft, a user called spacenavy90 wrote that he found something "interesting" during his research about AMRAAM missiles for the F-16. He proved this by attaching a document that contained export-restricted data.
[...] This is a familiar phenomenon for the War Thunder forums. Schematics for the Challenger 2 tank extracted from its Army Equipment Support Publication (AESP) were posted in 2021. This was followed a few months later by another leaked document, this one on the French Leclerc Main Battle Tank and its variants, prompting Gaijin to warn users against the practice as the team didn't want to "end up chained at the bottom of a disguised CIA cargo ship in international waters." The warning was ignored—classified documents relating to Chinese tanks were posted to the forum last year.
These documents are usually posted to win arguments. But even those that have been declassified fall under the jurisdiction of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which limits the disclosure of US weapons data. One has to wonder if proving you're correct is worth a potential ten-year prison sentence.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24 2023, @07:14PM (2 children)
For example, a US citizen merely talking about the nuts and bolts of rocketry, nuclear power, or early on even crypto (among many other things) on SN could violate ITAR because SN doesn't prevent foreign nationals (who ITAR prohibits from communicating) from reading those posts. There have been numerous occasions where academics or industry engineers have given talks at conferences or colleges that have run afoul of this law.
To give a specific example, I used to do volunteer work for JP Aerospace [wikipedia.org]. About 10-15 years back, the founder traveled to China to give a talk on what JP Aerospace was doing (high altitude, unmanned experimental balloons at the time). As I recall the story, he was warned on the trip out by the Department of State (which is responsible for enforcing ITAR) against violating the conditions of ITAR. They may have even briefly interviewed afterwards, though I don't remember the story well enough to say for sure.
Now, imagine an aerospace company trying to do business outside of the US. Your engineers can no longer speak to the other side's engineers because it might violate ITAR at some point (and that can get expensive [militaryaerospace.com]!). This gives some idea of the scale [csis.org] of the problem:
So to summarize the "ideological" objections: we have that it is a straight-forward violation of the First Amendment (and I'm a firm backer of free speech); a US citizen who happens to be a knowledgeable layman or outlier engineer can violate ITAR through innocuous communication on the wrong subjects; no significant risk to the US has been addressed by ITAR; and it has caused substantial harm to US industry and commerce over the past twenty years.
The story above illustrates these problems succinctly. A document that wasn't restricted in the US is posted to an international forum, triggering said violation of ITAR. No harm will result because anyone who would benefit from acquisition of this document likely has already obtained it from other sources who oddly enough didn't respect ITAR either. And it demonstrates the harm of ITAR since it would otherwise allow ignorance of other War Thunder forum readers to continue - which I consider a much more serious problem than imaginary US national security risks.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday January 24 2023, @07:40PM (1 child)
I think part of the problem here, and this goes with a lot of "intellectual property" law in general (like patents) is that they don't really account for freedom of thought. They don't really properly anticipate that some people use their brains to think of things all by themselves. Furthermore, if these people don't know that someone else already thought of it, and it was classified as ITAR, there will be a problem.
It sounds to me like the US is overly zealous about categorising certain not particularly novel, clever or important things as ITAR though.
Isn't the purpose of laws like ITAR to stop the bad guys getting their hands of the useful stuff?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 24 2023, @11:25PM
I think it was more to look like they cared about foreign powers spying on America. That value ran out long ago and it's cruising on inertia now.