defn is quite right - Murdoch famously threatened a politician with "a headline a day or a bucket of shit a day" - a clear "abuse" of journalistic power in exchange for political influence. Horror.
Whether or not that actual threat occurred, the press, lead by the Murdoch press, have used their considerable power to threaten, bully and cajole politicians, police and others into doing what they the newspapers wanted.
(infamously the phone hacking scandal in the UK, where the CEO of murdochs empire, and the prime ministers press head honcho have both been charged with a range of such crimes, and Murdoch only avoided it because no one found the emaisl or phone conversations where he was told where his newspapers were getting good stories from.) I am a little bit bitter about "freedom of the press" being seen as a right without duties.
I don't think you could crash the ISS into New York. I don't even think that's possible. It doesn't have the engines necessary to get back to the surface.
ISS has some engines, crashing on earth is very simple, you can just thrust in the opposite direction that you are going (thus falling into the planet, although slowly and probably astronauts can find the attacker and put it back into orbit before anything serious happens) or you can trust in a diagonal of sorts, to slow your speed AND toward the planet (if you just accelerate toward the planet is more probably that you will only create a elongated orbit, and if you insist, you will slingshot out of orbit).
Right. I was assuming/implying a lot by saying, "if you had the controls." In the hypothetical where you have complete control of the ISS (despite manual overrides, et al), you'd still have a very hard time hitting a specific target on Earth. You could crash the thing fairly easily though. That's all I meant to say; I understand that this isn't a practical reality.
Yup, I understood. I was just adding a thought about how it was even more impractical than your comment suggested. Wasn't arguing against your point itself.
I'm not sure the ISS has enough delta-v to get back down quickly. Lowering the orbit enough so that it will fall down in a few weeks is probably possible.
It's likely that a decent orbital dynamics model and a relatively small, well-timed delta-v would bring the ISS down within a rater small planned impact area. It wouldn't be necessary to decelerate very much to accomplish that. Remember that the ISS must periodically boost its orbit to compensate for frictional losses, on that basis it can be assumed that the craft's dynamics are well-understood:
