SJ Games vs. the Secret Service (1990)
There’s another part to the story which I have told to the folks at SJG, but to which they never responded.<p>In late 1990, I was working in the basement of the Pentagon, supporting the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the J4 Logistics Readiness Center, inside the National Military Command Center. I was a gamer, but I also had a TS&#x2F;SCI security clearance. I had heard about the SS raid on SJG, and I was pissed off. So, I decided to spend a lot of money and go out and buy one copy of every GURPS book that I could find at my friendly local gaming store (FLGS).<p>I had a copy of GURPS CyberPunk, and didn’t think very much of it. I was already in a CyberPunk game, and the GURPS version was a pale imitation. But there was another book that drew my attention. It was oriented towards espionage, and among other things it gave a very accurate description of how satellite surveillance worked. It also happened to use an actual classified military code word in the context of explaining what a classified military code word was and how they were used.<p>The latter was a clear violation of the law, and as soon as I saw it, I reported it to my security officer. He confirmed that this was a legitimate leak of a classified military code word, and he said he would report it further up the chain of command.<p>I never heard anything more about it from inside the government, but I have to believe that the SS and the FBI would use a coverup like pointing at a different book, if this was the actual reason that they were doing a raid on SJG.<p>So, there you go — almost 30 years later, yet another clue as to what might have been the real reason for the raid.<p>NB: When a classified military code word is leaked, they have to go through a huge process to reclassify all the documents that were covered under the old code word. This is a massive undertaking, and would cost millions or possibly even billions of dollars. And then there is the cost of the damage to National Security by all the documents which might already be in enemy hands but where they didn’t know what the code word covered or what compartment those documents were in. So, a leak of this type would be ... a really big deal.