Well... Most conspiracy theories become "conspiracy theories" because they fail to pass Ockham's Razor. For example, there's a good 3000 words there about how but exactly fuckall about why. Meanwhile, the "how" skips over how three decidedly nondescript Georgians managed to disable a 777 with 230 passengers on it all while managing to spoof Inmarsat. On the other hand, a demonstrably incompetent organization losing two airliners to tragedy within six months seems unlikely so we assign nefarious agents to the problem. Nefariousness, to our thinking, is more probable than dumb chance for the simple reason that we can protect against nefariousness. I mean, if the Russians wanted to send a message, they'd send a fuckin' message. 007 was the second airliner the Soviets shot down and they really didn't much give a fuck. Are we somehow saying Putin is less belligerent than Yuri Andropov?I'm hopeful someone equally knowledgeable writes a rebuttal, as most of us don't have the technical ability to know what flaws might exist with this theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 First off, holy shit. The Soviet Union once shot a commercial plane down? With hundreds of people and a US Congressman on-board?! And this was during the Cold War? I've never heard this before. And to add to the goat-getter, the last paragraph: wat. Add that to the list of hugely significant (and recent!) geopolitical events that I've never heard of.In addition, the event was one of the most important single events that prompted the Reagan administration to allow worldwide access to the United States military's GNSS system, which was classified at the time. Today this system is widely known as GPS.
Twice. Twice shot a commercial plane down. That's okay. It's not like the US has clean hands on this one. Flight 007 was one of the reasons cited as to why Mathias Rust was allowed to land a Cessna in Red Square; contrary to the narrative at the time ("Soviet air defenses were just that bad"), Soviet Air Defense followed him the entire time, just nobody wanted to be the guy responsible for blowing a Cessna out of the sky.