Airspace Regulations Quotes
Estonia had moved a Russian Soviet era monument to WWII dead Soviet Soldiers from a prime location in the center of their capital to a location outside of town. Russian-speaking Estonians were outraged and fomented violent demonstrations and riots that almost paralyzed the city. At the same time 85,000 Estonian computers were hijacked and used to implement a denial of service attack on some of the major government sites including the main bank, blocking all those webservers from serving normal customers on the Internet. The Prime Minister and other Estonian officials accused the Russians of the cyber-attack and likened it to a blockade which is an act of war under international law. What complicates cyberattacks is that there might have been some Russian nationalists who, with no knowledge of the government could have implemented a denial of service attack where so many accesses to servers are engineered that the servers crash. The perpetrators may have been instigated by the Russian government or not. They could have been any place in the world when they did it.
You simply do not do that to a head of a democratic state wanting to cross [fly] over your airspace.
American (traitor of whistleblower depending on who is judging) Edward Snowden was in the Moscow International Airport seeking political asylum from several nations. The United States, wanting to extradite and try Snowden criminally had “intelligence” that Snowden was going to fly out of Russia in the private plane of Bolivian President Morales. The U.S. persuaded the European countries to refuse his plan “flyover” rights—usually a formality that is always granted for a foreign head of state. This forced Morales to land his plane for refueling in Austria where, under pressure from the United States, Austrian law enforcement officials boarded and searched the plane—something that is almost never done to a plane that is just refueling, much less the airplane of a head of state. The Secretary General was expressing the outrage of the OAS nations (and many others around the world). What made the situation even more embarrassing for the United States, Austria, and the other European nations which did not grant flyover rights, was the fact that the U. S. Intelligence was totally wrong. Snowden was not on the plane forcing the Austrians who had technically committed an act of war against Bolivia by forcing their way onto a Bolivian plane carrying diplomats and the president of Bolivia, to apologize. Snowden was still in Russia, and the Russians then gave him political asylum in large part because they too resented the behavior of Austria, Europe and above all the United States in the Bolivian plane incident as the pane had taken off from Moscow. This was a very difficult call for the American intelligence agencies, in that there may well have been a plan to put Snowden in that plane that was cancelled when it was clear that the Americans would try and intercept the plane somehow. The OAS and other complaining nations argued that even if Snowden had been on the plane, there was no right to intercept and search the plane anyway.
