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US Says Plane Finder App Threatens Security
ProgramErgoSum writes "The Plane Finder AR application, developed by a British firm for the Apple iPhone and Google's Android, allows users to point their phone at the sky and see the position, height and speed of nearby aircraft. It also shows the airline, flight number, departure point, destination and even the likely course-the features which could be used to target an aircraft with a surface-to-air missile, or to direct another plane on to a collision course, the 'Daily Mail' reported. The program, sold for just 1.79 pounds in the online Apple store, has now been labelled an 'aid to terrorists' by security experts and the US Department of Homeland Security is also examining how to protect airliners. The new application works by intercepting the so-called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcasts (ADS-B) transmitted by most passenger aircraft to a new satellite tracking system that supplements or, in some countries, replaces radar."
The intent behind it does, really.
The whole "well-regulated militia" bit likely intends to give citizens the right to be sufficiently well-armed to constitute a significant military force -- that's what a militia is. At the time, that consisted of rifles and pistols, but any modern significant military force would necessarily include RPG's, MANPADS, and the like.
If you really want the Second Amendment to mean what it originally was intended to mean, then yes -- private ownership of these weapons is Constitutionally guaranteed. I don't think this is a good idea, but this position requires changing the meaning of the 2nd.
Its different because the data fed to flightstats is delayed for exactly this sort of reason. The app developers are intercepting identifying signals transmitted directly by the airplanes closing the gap between real-time and that delayed by a government-mandated time period. I'm an airplane geek so I would love an app like this. In the meantime, I'm stuck decoding ACARS transmissions with my laptop. I love watching planes take off over my house and have pictures of the plane get automatically downloaded from airliners.net. Way cool.
The relevant question is not "what would shock the founders" -- hell, a country where you can't keep slaves anymore would be a shock to many of them.
Well, the Constitution did have to be amended to ban slavery. Don't get me wrong - I hate slavery with a passion, but it was the law of the land, and the founders clearly intended for it to be the law of the land.
When you think about it, individuals owning guns has always been fairly well-correlated with freedom.
Feudalism was very oppressive, and its power derived from the expense of equipping soldiers. An effective military force required a horse (a specialized breed not useful for farming/etc), and all kinds of armor and gear. It also required a squad of support personnel for every knight (to maintain all that gear, and carry it around - it isn't like the knight hiked across Europe in plate and they didn't ride war horses around either).
When guns came out, it changed everything. Now a poor man could be issued a relatively inexpensive musket and they were as powerful as anything the enemy could field short of a siege weapon. The siege weapons themselves weren't all that expensive either - you didn't need many of them and they didn't require feeding like war horses/etc, and they didn't have to be built to fit a particular man like armor. Nobody needed armor, since armor was useless anyway. Guns democratized warfare, and the nobility vanished.
In theory modern weapons carry this even further, except that nobody is allowed to own inexpensive but effective weapons like RPGs/etc. So, power is becoming more concentrated among those who are allowed to own weapons. On the other hand, when needed anybody who controls the police could quickly equip at least a 3rd-world grade army inexpensively.
Now, the flip side to all of this is that more powerful weapons also greatly increase the amount of damage a single nutcase can do to the rest of society. In the middle ages a guy with a sword couldn't really do more than slash up a few people at church or something before being overcome. Even a guy with a barrel of black powder could only do so much since there wasn't anything big to blow up that wasn't also made to withstand siege. Today, just about anybody can get their hands on enough armament to wreak quite a bit of havoc - to the point where now nuclear proliferation is becoming a big concern.
I'm not sure what the solution is - to some extent the genie is out of the bottle. However, I'm not convinced that giving every redneck a howitzer and a MANPAD is going to make things better. Certainly that would make me think twice about flying...
Bit less than that my friend!
The UK developed an air-to-ship missile during WWII that was (and I shit you not) pigeon guided.
Pigeons were shown silhouettes of German battleships and rewarded with food whenever they pecked on them. Then pigeons were mounted in the transparent nose of a glide missile. There was a glass panel in front of them connected to actuators, so if the ship was off to the left the pigeon would peck on the glass and the missile would turn left.
Absolute genius. I don't know if it was ever used in anger, but the theory is sound.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
As many here have pointed out, it's absurd to think that this app would be useful for a terrorist who has the resources to obtain a surface to air missile. If you're going to shoot down a civilian plane, do you really need to know the flight number? Or do you just pick the one you see above you?
A more likely concern is that the device can be used to reveal government misconduct. It was hobbyist plane-spotters who, through their observations of civilian air traffic, exposed the CIA's Torture Jet flights or "extraordinary renditions", wherein they kidnapped people abroad and transferred them to third countries like Egypt, Jordan and Uzbekistan for interrogation using tortures that even the CIA wouldn't use (I guess there still are some).
If the choice is between ceasing their crimes against humanity, or trying to cover them up better: they prefer the latter strategy.
What's the point of encrypting these signals? I'm pretty certain you could derive enough of the information in them with a database of airline schedules, background knowledge of the routes airplanes take, and some on the spot information about the plane (which was was it heading? What time is it right now? What flights were delayed recently?) which is freely available stuff if you just crawl the airline websites. The airplanes only broadcast it to make things a bit easier for air traffic controllers; it's nothing a theoretical terrorist group couldn't figure out on their own.
Also, you can count on the fingers of one head the number of times a commercial airplane has been shot down with a missile in the USA, so basically this is a non-problem.