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Comment by mturmon | Hacker News Reader

I also enjoyed this tidbit in the article, which I had not known before:

"The presidential plane of Bolivian leader Evo Morales was forced to ground in Vienna, after four EU nations refused airspace access on the mistaken belief that Snowden was hidden on board."

Can you imagine the feeling of impotence, as a national president, when your plane is forced to land because of such suspicions?

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And imagine the shitstorm that would follow the grounding of Air Force One under the exact same circumstances but by any country other than the US

OK, I bit. Turns out this was a major brouhaha. France participated, but later apologized, and Assange was involved as well. Quite fascinating in its own right:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident

and picture from Reuters story:

http://www.webcitation.org/6O7egNjku

Can you imagine the feeling of impotence, as NSA/CIA/$100b+ industrial extralegal agency, of telling people to stop that plane without having any remote certainty on the information?

It's this somewhat unnoticed fact of the saga: these agencies are really, really terrible at whatever they imagine their job to be. I wonder if there is still some intern at NSA combing manually through log files to figure out what Snowden possibly took.

That feeling is warranted. Relative to the US, Bolivia is impotent.

Indeed. Having it demonstrated so viscerally would make an impact. Apparently the Austrian police briefly boarded his plane, although a spokesman in his government denied it.

It also speaks to the panic of the American government in those days about Snowden.

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