Cryptosmith

Here is a classic example of human nature: people on a gaming site argue that the site’s tanks don’t accurately reflect their capabilities. Participants post classified information to prove their point. Reporters have been following this story for almost a year on the game War Thunder. The first case appeared a couple summers ago regarding Britain’s Challenger 2 tank. Another case involved the French Leclerc tank. A more recent case involves a Chinese tank shell.

The count is probably behind reality: we probably don’t know how many cleared personnel fools are doing this. Discussion threads summarize the problem as people doing dumb things for dumb reasons, or for dishonest reasons.

I briefly worked for a metal-bending defense contractor in the 1980s while Tom Clancy was writing his military-oriented techno-thrillers. The VP of engineering had a personal copy of Clancy’s Red Storm Rising marked up wherever he mentioned one of the devices we were building (mostly Mark 26 missile launchers and Mark 45 gun mounts). Clancy’s book reviewers gleefully pointed out how the Secretary of the Navy accused him of publishing classified information, though he seemed smarter than that.

Some time in the ’90s, I met a struggling writer at one of my wife’s high school reunions; she took calculus from his dad. He was signing books in the bookstore and I’d just written Internet Cryptography. It turned out that his previous book was about crypto and the NSA, a techno-thriller called Digital Fortress. I found it readable, interesting, and technically unlikely. He was more successful with his later books, notably The DaVinci Code. Don’t we all wish we were so successful!

Getting back to sensitive information in the entertainment world, Tom Clancy and Dan Brown both started writing from some documented facts and extrapolated them to build an interesting story. And both diverged from documented facts on occasion.