These leaks are often unintended and unfortunate.
I run a few large social media platforms, with others of course.
I was forwarded a video of Chinese JH-7 flying alongside PAF mirages , by a close friend.
It was a good video, recorded by the Mirage pilot himself.
I watermarked it and posted on one of the Facebook pages I operated.
Video went viral and within a few days it was everywhere.
About a week later I received a message from the Mirage pilot himself asking me to take down the video.
I already knew his name because the friend of mine who forwarded me the video said that it was recorded by squadron leader XYZ.
So I knew the request is genuine.
I deleted the video from my Facebook pages and files a copyright claim against other pages who also posted the video. It got removed from Facebook.
A month later the same squadron leader contacted me again asking me to get the video removed from YouTube as it was then threading on YouTube.
He was the original owner of the video but had no way of proving it. But the video had my watermark so I became the owner of the video.
یعنی ٹوپی میرے سر پہ
I made multiple copyright claims on YouTube and the video disappeared from YouTube.
Then it again appeared on Dailymotion, Twitter and other video hosting sites.
The squadron leader again contacted me and this time I had to politely refuses any further actions from me as I had enough.
I asked him why he is spending so much time and effort in searching the internet for the video and trying to take it down?
He said that the Chinese are not happy as the configuration in which JH-7 were flying alongside him was not to be made public.
I asked him , why he released the video in the first place?
He said he is from a certain cadet college and posted the video in a Watts app group only populated by his cadet college colleagues he trusted.
It made sense because I knew that my friend studied in the same cadet college.
He asked me how I got the video and I refused to tell him , because my friend who gave me the video was also his friend and I didn't want to cause friction between them.
I then contacted my friend who originally gave me the video. Told him the whole story and he was well and truly ashamed.
He said that the Watts app group has many serving servicemen who regularly post quite sensitive material on there, but nobody leaks it out of the group. That particular video didn't look sensitive and he just thought it's some Chinese planes flying with Pakistani planes, which looked cool and he forwarded the video to me without thinking much. And that the squadron leader never asked people to not show the video to outsiders.
My friend is not in military, but in oil and gas industry.
I don't know what consequences the squadron leader faced. But I still see that video on the internet, as whatever goes on the internet, stays there forever.
Morale of the story is that servicemen should not post sensitive material on Watts app groups in the first place.
