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Comment by jamessinghal | Hacker News Reader

American embassies do this worldwide, famously spying on Angela Merkel from the Berlin Embassy (probably). [1]

[1] https://www.duncancampbell.org/content/embassy-spy-centre-ne...

And how exactly does it help Russia to know there are planes and helicopters flying in the US around an airport

What's the next conspiracy? They have anti air weapons in embassies and wait for a military helicopter transporting a high value target?

Either way it's not worth 64 lives...

> They have anti air weapons in embassies and wait for a military helicopter transporting a high value target?

I agree with you that it seems relatively unlikely that there would be a large weapons cache inside an embassy. I want you to consider the opposite scenario of what you're dismissing though.

If an American CIA officer in Russia wanted to shoot down a helicoper, do you think it would be that difficult for them to get ahold of a rocket launcher and do so?

So what is the scenario, Russia does <what> to cause the president to be evacuated, and hopes he will fly through this route on a Blackhawk, as opposed to any other option, places an agent with a rocket launcher along the route, hopes it gets through countermeasures and shoots down the helicopter.

After this unlikely series of events, what is achieved? Do American people give up because someone killed an easily replaceable politician with bad approval rating?

It should be pretty obvious to anyone who's spent more than about 45 seconds thinking about it that you can gather good information about a potential enemy by watching how they train. For military and intelligence operations you want layered security, and you don't want to make intelligence-gathering operations against you any easier than you need to. So it makes perfect sense at least up to the moment of this crash that if you're operating military training flights in an area with a lot of foreign assets that you'd disable a feature that literally broadcasts where you are with telemetry once per second.

This mindset isn't conspiracy and framing it as such makes you sound like you have no idea what you're talking about.

> They have anti air weapons in embassies?

It'd honestly be pretty surprising if they didn't, but this is also why when countries officially go to war with each other the embassies are typically evacuated and/or evicted.

> Either way it's not worth 64 lives

Not a single person here or elsewhere is claiming otherwise.

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