> 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.
> He faces a public-disorder charge, which could result in him being ordered to pay over $120,000 if he's found guilty.
> About $103,000 of that is from the Spanish Defense Ministry for the cost of scrambling the fighter jets.
Definitely alarming than encrypted Snapchats are clearly not private, but the response as a whole still seems fairly reasonable, no? He did kinda threaten to blow up a commercial airliner.
I think the BBC article about his acquittal has a lot more points relevant to the discussion about privacy:
Where are you putting the stress in this sentence?
If your issue is with the encrypted private channel being spied upon, then I completely agree, and so did the court system.
But outside of that, if he had said this via SMS, this would be the standard response. It may be a shitty joke, but jokes don't make you magically immune to consequences. You can't yell "fire" in a clouded theater, and you can't say "on my way to blow up the plane (I'm a member of the Taliban)" while boarding a commercial airliner. Well, you can, you just should expect to be sued.