Passenger could face $120k bill after F-18s scrambled for Snapchat bomb joke | Hacker News Reader

Passenger could face $120k bill after F-18s scrambled for Snapchat bomb joke

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4 pointspr337h4m11 comments

"An airline passenger who prompted the Spanish air force to scramble fighter jets after he said he was going to blow up the plane he was on appeared Monday in court, the BBC reported.

Aditya Verma was 18 when he and his friends traveled with easyJet from London Gatwick Airport to the Spanish island of Menorca in July 2022.

The BBC reported that before departing, he told a friend on Snapchat: "On my way to blow up the plane (I'm a member of the Taliban)."

Security services saw the message and flagged it to Spanish authorities, who sent two F-18 jets to follow the airliner until it landed, per the BBC."

If the reporting is accurate (a big if, to be fair), this doesn't seem possible unless either the friend reported his message or Snapchat was scanning private messages.

He didn't tell a friend, he sent it to a group of friends. Any of which could have forwarded it to the authorities or told.

They can all help him pay the fine.

What did they do legally wrong again? My fine legal expert?

Between Snowden being over a decade ago now, and how many ideological nut jobs have pre-advertised their violent attacks on social media in recent years - I would assume that the spooks are doing direct & real-time monitoring of all substantial social media platforms these days.

It's odd how murky this is, considering that it was adjudicated in court. The BBC says[0]:

>A court in Madrid heard it was assumed the message triggered alarm bells after being picked up via Gatwick's Wi-Fi network.

But that seems implausible, given that Snapchat messages are encrypted (if not end-to-end, then at least client-to-server, which should be sufficient to prevent interception via a Wi-Fi network). And why would the court hear what is "assumed"? Shouldn't the investigator(s) who testified know how the messages came into their possession?

Then The Daily Mail says[1]:

>As [sic] spokesman for Gatwick Airport denied any suggestion their network could be compromised.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68056421

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13000923/snooped-ai...

Once upon a time, before social media, when people made stupid jokes they were ignored and nothing happened. Now, governments have to waste lots of time and insane amounts of money doing a "due diligence" investigation on the off chance it's not the idiotic joke everyone knows it to be and something really does go boom... you can't be the government official who did nothing about it.

Ironically, this is actually a well known terrorist tactic: prompting countless false alarms to wear down first responders to the point of apathy or at least not being sufficiently alert which allows the real attack to succeed... which is why I'm completely in favor of this person being slapped with the $120k bill for scrambling jet fighters and putting the counter-terrorist teams on alert.

been acquitted...judge said he sent the message on a private basis, not a threat

Easy to see how his idiotic statement could excite emotions (and ass-coverage instincts) in the security services.

Not so easy to see what justified scrambling F-18's. Were their pilots supposed to board & storm the passenger jet, and wrestle the bomb away from the kidiot before it went [BOOM/]?

Though with Spanish defense ministry demanding €95,000 in expenses - they might have figured "drill & flight time on somebody else's dime".

If the idiot use the threat of the bomb to crash the plane somewhere (like Flight 93), the F/A-18s would have been ordered to shot down the plane.

After all the media coverage that 9/11 and Flight 93 got...I suspect that "give me the controls or else!" would not be a workable plan.

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