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Comment by Calvin02 | Hacker News Reader

It is asinine to compare the two situations. Greenwald is wrongly equating the two together for his puppeteers.

1) Snowden had already been charged at that point and was running from the law. Morales's plane was diverted because it was believed to be providing passage to a criminal. While I don't know what Snowden did was right or wrong, it is clear that Snowden broke laws. His intentions might have been good but he broke some very serious laws.

2) Roman Protasevich, on the other hand, is a blogger. He hasn't released any state secrets that he swore an oath to protect.

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Even if you believe that there's little difference between Snowden and Protasevich, the scenarios are clearly different. Rescinding permission to transit is a far cry from falsely reporting a bomb threat, backing it up with military force, and then searching the plane and taking multiple passengers into custody as a condition of the plane's release.

> Rescinding permission to transit

Thought experiment: what could have been the immediate consequences of disregarding that rescindment and continuing with the flightplan as filed?

They might have been intercepted by military. It is doubtful that they would have been shot down, but it would have been legal to do so.

The big difference is: No one forced them to land at a specific location -- they could have turned around and fly all the way back to Russia had they desired to do so. They landed in Austria because they decided to go to a neutral country and that they wanted to avoid NATO. It is fairly obvious that not letting someone enter is very different from letting enter and then coerce.

> they could have turned around and fly all the way back to Russia had they desired to do so.

Not sure if it's that simple, the plane has limited fuel and if they are banned from most of Europe's airspace on the way back it might become inevitable to choose between unauthorized entry or crashing down. And that's assuming Russia would also not ban them, which is also a risk when you're already in the air.

Same as Snowden, Roman Protasevich is fugitive wanted by a country’s law enforcement. There’s a warrant and all.

Morales was the President of Bolivia. Thought experiment -- if a country like China or Brazil forced Air Force One down to search, how do you think the Americans would react?

It was really rather close to an act of war. There's a reason the Austrians rushed their president out of bed to go have tea with Morales while he waited.

Asinine Puppeteers

Great way to start a debate.

Snowden case is worse than Protasevich. They diverted a plane of a president of another country. Snowden dennounced a government that was breaking the law. He wasn't convicted of anything, so he as innocent.

The two cases are a menace to democratic societies. I'm appalled that someone can find one terrible and the other one something normal. Great example of double standards.

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