IIRC the term the FBI used to describe these activities was "confidential", which is why they registered the planes to front companies they made up. Congress wanted to know more, so the FBI gave them a confidential briefing (https://apnews.com/article/1240a8a42edf4a86aff72a0246525a95):
The FBI assured Congress in an unusual, confidential briefing that
its plane surveillance program is a by-the-books operation short
on high-definition cameras — with some planes equipped with
binoculars — and said only five times in five years has it tracked
cellphones from the sky.
The FBI would not openly answer some questions about its planes,
which routinely orbit major U.S. cities and rural areas. Although
the FBI has described the program as unclassified and not secret,
it declined to disclose during an unclassified portion of a
Capitol Hill briefing any details about how many planes it flies
or how much the program costs. In a 2009 budget document, the FBI
said it had 115 planes in its fleet.
Since then, I've done some other stuff in a similar vein.
I created the Advisory Circular network of twitter bots that post, in real-time, whenever they see aircraft circling (https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1294002338215034880). The code is all open source. The bots have helped me (and hopefully other people) discover all sorts of interesting things that aircraft are doing, often right over our heads: power line inspections, dropping sterile fruit flies, tests of new military technologies over the Mojave desert, retired attack helicopters fighting fires, and more.
ADS-B data includes information about navigation accuracy, and it turns out it's pretty easy to see when an aircraft is experiencing GPS/GNSS interference, and even map it. I created GPSJam (https://gpsjam.org) to make that data accessible to the public (instead of, say, paying tens of thousands of dollars to geospatial intelligence companies). On that map you can see things like conflict zones, U.S. military tests and training in the Southwest, and Russia's concern over increased risk of drone strikes deep into their territory.
The coolest thing about all this stuff is that it's not really very hard to do. It turns out as soon as you start paying attention to aircraft over the course of days, and weeks, you immediately find mysteries to solve.
One other less well-defined project I'll mention: Using whisper on aircraft radio traffic. I think of ATC radio as a completely unindexed, unsearchable, "dark web" of information, and Whisper can open it up and make it searchable. Whisper is the first speech recognition system I've seen that can handle not just the typically low quality audio, but also can take into account contextual information. E.g. some of the most useful information in a transmission on an ATC radio frequency is the call sign of the aircraft. But it's very hard for most speech recognizers to accurately transcribe: "7XY" is essentially just as likely as "1AC". Short, basically random utterances are hell on speech recognizers. But Whisper's killer feature IMO (but weirdly one that people rarely seem to use or even know about) is the powerful language model and its ability to be prompted.
Level 1 prompt engineering for Whisper is simply using a prompt like "Let's pretend we're air traffic controllers" or something to prime it to expect the specialized ATC lingo vs. any other thing people might be talking about. This prompt is specific to ATC, but is otherwise very general.
Level 2 becomes specific to the frequency you're transcribing: "Cessna, El Monte Tower, cleared for the option runway 01." Now Whisper knows that it's ATC, and that the name of the tower (which it will hear a lot) is El Monte, and that there's a runway numbered 01.
Level 3 is where you add additional time- and situation-dependent prompting to increase accuracy. If you look at ADS-B data, you can figure out which aircraft are/were in the area when the audio was recorded, that might be communicating on the radio. You can create prompts using those call signs, greatly increasing accuracy of transcription. (Some researchers have done work along these lines, pre-Whisper.)
An example of what Whisper makes possible: Here's a "supercut" of all the times either a pilot or ATC mentioned "laser", across multiple frequencies, across multiple days: https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1578516727549153280 Here's an example of what I'd like to be able to do (I created it manually, but I don't think it's too far out of reach), a video showing the aircraft map synchronized with ATC audio across frequencies, from a few days ago when a Cessna busted the presidential TFR near Philadelphia: https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1605293275333607424
I’ve got a raspberry pi with two SDR radios on my roof: one receiving ASD-B and the other receiving VHF airband. I’ve always wanted to try to figure out “connecting” these sources somehow, so for example, when I detect a transmission from N12345, I can highlight that aircraft in PiAware. What is the state of the art in this area? Sounds like this Whisper holds potential.
One other piece of additional context that I think is important: I assume the reason this old presentation is linked here today is because it was linked from this LA Times article about tracking Musk's jet: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-21/la-fi-priv....
Plane trackers have discovered secret government surveillance programs, sparking congressional inquiries. They have tracked dictators and criminals. They did help uncover the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. They did track a Saudi kill squad's movements, after the fact.
There is no evidence that anyone has ever been killed, injured, or threatened using plane tracking data.
EDIT: The Ars Technica article is about GPS Interference of Dallas, to the north. It has in image showing a LARGE swath of "Medium" interference between San Antonio and Dallas, in October 2022.
Your tool now shows ZERO Interference for October 2022.
EDIT: I guess that Randolph Airforce Base has two Military Operating Zones, is the explanation for why these two areas
have been under GPS Interference for all of 2022. The October thing in Dallas is still bizarre, and maybe the US military had one these GPS jammers on the Mexico border as in the article?
Randolph Air Force Base. You’ll see that the interference is associated with Randolph MOAs (military operating areas) and stops on weekends :) Testing and/or training.
Not Plausible. Randolph Air Force base appears to be Northeast of San Antonio.
The -two bubbles- of Medium interference are on Highways to the -West- and -Southeast- of the city.
EDIT: Yea, that Weather Map does show big "MOA"s nearby. I guess it was silly to assume MOAS would be nearer Dallas, Texas, as the MOAS are really further from the capitol city.
Yea, I just saw the Air Base off in a direction I did not recognize as "approaching Dallas", and assumed any used space would be in the same direction. I went back and edited/ deleted some comments.
Do you have an opinion on or evidence for/against this comment that the purpose is a continuous timelapse video of major portions of the city to backtrack vehicles after a crime has occurred?[1]
Not OP, but Radiolab did an episode years ago on this topic called: Eye in the Sky. They have some strong evidence and interview some companies that do exactly what the commenter is discussing in other countries.
I also have Meade LX200 EMC. Can you shortly tell how you managed to use Optic Track with it? Also how do you solve the focus issue of moving objects? I'd be happy to track and provide information from the the valley area.
The gravity of this isn't captured at all by the article/presentation.
Many of these planes simply capture high resolution panorama timelapses of a large portion of the city.
The police can then wait for a crime to happen (e.g. a burglary), and then if they have coverage of the time, they can just play their timelapse in reverse to figure out where the vehicles involved came from or went.
Then, they use "parallel construction" to erase the fact that they used persistent mass surveillance to catch the criminals. They already know whodunit, so it's just a matter of coming up with a "lucky break" or an "anonymous tip" or whatever to explain how they caught someone, without ever exposing the surveillance to the scrutiny of the court.
That's a pretty complicated explanation, given that (1) every major city PD already makes ample use of street-level CCTV footage, and (2) it involves local-federal cooperation (the FBI is seemingly the ones flying these planes).
If we're speculating baselessly, my guess would be that, like all cops, the FBI has a bloated surveillance budget and loves trinkets. Why waste shoe leather or sit in a car for hours when you can justify a joy ride in a plane while you watch the bad guys?
I don't know why this is being talked about like it's just speculation. This technology is publicly known. RadioLab even did an episode on it a few years ago:
Is this from actual investigative reporting with sources or just assumed from theoretical capability of tech? Not trying to say this isn’t happening. Just saying that what’s possible and what’s happening don’t always match up.
There was an investigative article from years ago that I recall said exactly what you're describing, complete with images from the planes demoing the ability to track suspects. Wish I could remember a way to dig that up now.
First, what is the ideal amount of crime? It's not zero. Zero-crime is a police state. The people must have some power to inflict damage on the government and elements of society.
I think it would be rather difficult to conduct the civil rights movement today. Monitoring protests and targeting not just the leaders but even the participants is just too easy now.
Second, parallel construction is the most corrosive concept to ever enter US law enforcement. It completely runs around the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine. When the DEA gets a tip-off from the NSA, that obviously illegal abuse of power never gets a debate in a court-room, because a "routine police stop" lucked upon the evidence.
It's a pretty scary technology tbh. In a nearby city to me during the George Floyd protests, protestors got caught outside with police cars blocking streets. The police then decided to call a curfew of <definitely not enough time to gtfo of there> and arrested a lot of them. With technology like this they could actually trace back almost every single person who attended a protest like this and arrest them weeks or even months later
Thought this was just going to be another "check this out, I just discovered ADSB" article. I am glad I kept reading, as the correlation aspect was cool to see.
If you really want to see some wild stuff then lookup the Baltimore aerial DVR program.
Kinda related, I saw this fascinating presentation by Trevor Paglen recently. It's about the footprint of secrecy. It's almost a decade old, but still very much worth your time.
I recorded a similar flight pattern[1] above London not too long ago by the RAF's Shadow R1 Beechcraft plane[2]. I figured it was some sort of training flight as they were circling above Northholt air force base (just north of Heathrow airport).
On the contrary, I can fault em' for trusting google more. Both Google and the US federal government use the "collect everything you reasonably can, since we might need it later" approach. In both cases you have to trust them to handle our data right in perpetuity.
Speaking of tracking, you should see who visits the gpsjam.org website (CCCC IIII AAAA) and what they look at (UUU SSS AAA). Maybe checking to see if my data is consistent with theirs. :)
It might also be legitimate surveillance orders, issued by a judge (hence DoJ), that allows for lawful communications interception, external surveillance, etc on a particular subject. The planes tracks look like they mostly circle some single spot or a driving car, or search for something.
I don't argue it's legitimate. I argue there's no evidence the other way.
Yep, but what do you propose in the case they're legitimate? To post publicly what investigation orders agents received? That defeats the whole purpose.
We could post publicly the orders in general terms, in ways that will not identify the targets. And as soon as possible, post the remainder of the order.
Transparency is essential to rule of, by, and for the people.
Now, I am not interested in the government surveillance aspect of all of this...
I mean, you have a city like L.A. where statistically, you'll have a higher incidence of crimes than say, a corn field in Nebraska, and you have the ability to be an "eye in the sky" (looking down at a city from the sky is technically a public view -- that is, not opposed by the 4th Amendment) -- so why wouldn't [city/state/federal] governments -- use that as a means for preventing/understanding/solving crimes?
I don't endorse it -- but I don't oppose it... (could I, even if I wanted to?)
I'll let the civil liberties lawyers and politicians and social philosophers and podcasting pundits -- have that debate -- but to me it's a waste of time.
All of that being said, here's my key takeaway from the article:
>"But then this amazing thing happened: Someone figured out the RTL dongle for receiving digital TV transmissions could be used as a wideband SDR and pick up all sorts of stuff, including the aircraft transponder packets on 1090 MHz that sometimes include aircraft position."
Now, that is interesting and useful information!
In other words, if someone wanted to -- they could potentially track (you might ask, "who's surveilling who?" in this scenario! <g>) all aircraft moving around a certain vicinity of space, anywhere in the world -- via transponder radio packets, and transponder radio packets alone!
Oh sure, they might miss one or two stealth aircraft(!) <g> -- but for the most part it should work!
Also, another related idea here might be to use SDR to implement a home-brewed version of radar...
Like, I didn't think of either of these two things before reading this article(!) -- but now that I read this article, I think to myself: "yeah, either of those things might be possible!"
So, a thank you to the author for expanding (and pardon the pun here! <g>) -- my horizon! <g>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare pretty much high resolution cameras on a drone that enable surveillance recording of an entire city over a long enough period of time so you can back-track cars that met up with a person or vehicle of interest, so you can figure out who's talking to who.
This looks like local government surveillance. The military ("US Government") flights are almost all in places you would expect (airbases, loosely populated areas, and Palmdale). Perhaps the actual talk has some clarity on this but all I saw was slides.
Can any pilots comment on why the buzzfeed report concluded from their data that counter-clockwise flight paths were the most highty indicative of being a surveillance flight? (slide 85, steer2)
I’m not a pilot, but my guess is that it is because pilots usually sit on the left, giving them a better view out the left side of the aircraft. I think this is why the standard traffic pattern for airports is to make left turns. Surveillance flights, more than others, will require orbiting a specific point on the ground—maybe even one that’s moving. I think it’s just easier for pilots to do that specific maneuver if they can look out the window next to them.
Done. Thanks! What year was this made? (The second last slide has a 2019 timestamp, so I've gone with that for now.)
I know there were other HN threads related to this work/topic, but I don't know how to find them exactly, so if anyone wants to bring up some links, that would be great.
While it's an optimistic thought that violating people's privacy and giving our tax dollars to private corporations will necessarily lead to the crumbling of the empire, I don't actually think this is a given.
So, two years after the Snowden revelations, someone’s surprised the US govt uses planes for mass surveillance. And the «secret» program turned out not to be even classified. This is not really a story.
If anyone's seen UAV development programs for 'serious' things run by the US feds in some extremely rural areas, this isn't secret. Anything flying around emitting ADS-B isn't secret. It's maybe slightly obfuscated with corporate ownership/lease of small aircraft.
Go look at something like the data that has come out (ten years ago, now!) about the RQ170 program if you want "secret".
Many interesting and important things hide in plain sight.
I'm glad the author investigated, documented, and pointed this out. And as a former Imagineer I'm not at all surprised that they followed their curiosity.
I cannot read this in Tor without enabling Javascript OP. Please be mindful of that, it's useless to cite something that cannot be read privately.
(And what do you want, a cookie? I've been told that finding a secret US surveillance program is like an etymologist finding a new bug -- the amount of work that goes into formalizing it is such that often folks leave it for someone newer to the field to make their mark rather than focus on something that won't deliver them income when they're fairly certain if they went through the rigamarole they could name some new... thing.)
I’ve met those idiots. They keep forcing people to add citations to 1 pagers from the 90s because they’ll only read… one page. (Carried by a 22 year old intern.)
IIRC the term the FBI used to describe these activities was "confidential", which is why they registered the planes to front companies they made up. Congress wanted to know more, so the FBI gave them a confidential briefing (https://apnews.com/article/1240a8a42edf4a86aff72a0246525a95):
In case you missed it, pretty much the first place I posted about what I'd found was here at HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9508812).Since then, I've done some other stuff in a similar vein.
I created the Advisory Circular network of twitter bots that post, in real-time, whenever they see aircraft circling (https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1294002338215034880). The code is all open source. The bots have helped me (and hopefully other people) discover all sorts of interesting things that aircraft are doing, often right over our heads: power line inspections, dropping sterile fruit flies, tests of new military technologies over the Mojave desert, retired attack helicopters fighting fires, and more.
ADS-B data includes information about navigation accuracy, and it turns out it's pretty easy to see when an aircraft is experiencing GPS/GNSS interference, and even map it. I created GPSJam (https://gpsjam.org) to make that data accessible to the public (instead of, say, paying tens of thousands of dollars to geospatial intelligence companies). On that map you can see things like conflict zones, U.S. military tests and training in the Southwest, and Russia's concern over increased risk of drone strikes deep into their territory.
The coolest thing about all this stuff is that it's not really very hard to do. It turns out as soon as you start paying attention to aircraft over the course of days, and weeks, you immediately find mysteries to solve.