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Defcon Researchers Build Tool To Track the Planes of the Rich and Famous
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Defcon security conference later this week, two security researchers will release a tool that aims to expose a little-seen list of hidden private aircraft flight plans–the so-called Block Aircraft Registration Request or BARR list, a collection of aircraft whose owners have tried to keep their whereabouts secret. Any private jet owner can request to be taken out of the FAA's public database of flight plans. But Dustin Hoffman and Semon Rezchikov found that private flyers' whereabouts are still broadcast in air-traffic control communications. So they developed a speech-to-text system that pulls out planes' tail numbers from those communications almost in real time, often fast enough to post a plane's destination before it lands. In its proof-of-concept version, the site is focusing on Las Vegas airports, but plans to expand to other cities soon."
What does "rich and famous" have to do with anything?
Death to the 1%!
and she sues...
What would the application for this be outside of stalking someone?
There aren't too many Academy Award winning hackers out there!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
people should be smart enough to understand that "being in the 1%" is not only a money calculation and has an attitudinal component. There are plenty of people who fit the financial definition that don't fit the attitudinal definition, like Stephen King for example.
Tell that to Homeland Security and Facebook.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Why don't they just decode the location messages from the avionics? There are several web sites already doing that.
So this Dustin Hoffman guy wants to track all the planes. Track all the planes! What is he, some kind of Rain Man?
Program Intellivision!
Can this be used to track the location of Air Force One?
If you fly VFR, which can be a pain going cross country, you don't *have* to file a flight plan. It is a good idea, but not a requirement by law. Also, uncontrolled airport -- those without towers -- don't require radio communication to use. If you have a radio it is best to make an announcement on the CTAF/Unicom frequency for safety, but it isn't required.
So, if you're that paranoid and secretive, register a plane in an LLC and not your own name then fly VFR from Class E to Class E.
Wrong. The airplanes that carry the rest of us around are tracked in the public domain. These guys are tracking airplanes, not people.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Now that would be interesting, if they started tracking those . . .
That ought to get the spooks annoyed.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
They should also be smart enough to realize that if you are posting from an internet connection anywhere in the western world, you are very likely the top 5-10% compared with the rest of the world. It seems a bit hypocritical for people to complain about the 1%'s wealth, and then complain when they outsource-- effectively, the 10% are complaining that the 90% are getting their jobs, and being lifted out of abject poverty.
If Im wrong here, please let me know, but it seems to me that follks in India, China, Africa could just as easily complain about the greedy 10% (us) who refuse to let any jobs come overseas without raising a huge fuss.
Theyre tracking a private vehicle. How happy would you be about this if it were somehow tailored to track you as you drove your car (or bike)?
Here: http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/04/news/economy/world_richest/index.htm
You only need to make $34,000 to be in the 1%.
Janet flights, torture taxis and the secret corporate jets that are run in a similar manner (they keep them secret to keep up public appearances).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I really wish, but it's just someone else who's interested in the whereabouts.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What is the point in doing this? For the challenge - OK. But why then post it all over the internet? Oh, so you can jump up and down and say "Look what I did" on the internet. Just remember a bunch of people are going to be upset about it and try to take away your rights/ability to do this - and that affects the rest of us too.
And the airplanes the rest of us ride are not "private vehicles"?
Nope, they'll get well paid jobs doing this for $BIG_CORP or $GOVT.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
Almost there, but not quite. The real distinction that should bother everyone is not 99% vs 1%, and it's not even really "non-attitudinal vs "attitudinal" (though you're hinting in the right direction) - rather, it's moral vs immoral. The reason it doesn't bother people as much that Stephen King is rich, vs say some crooked banking exec, is that Stephen King probably made most or all of his money honestly and through hard work (and not through financial fraud and/or kleptocratic "bailouts"). But morality is not really directly about class or wealth - there are moral and immoral people at all wealth levels - it's not "class warfare" we should be fighting (e.g. "the rich" or even "the powerful"), but rather "morality warfare" by society's moral class and against its immoral class.
In fact, if you really think about it, it's society's immoral, powerful members that stand to benefit from confusing people into thinking it's the "99%" vs the "1%" .. because as long as you're fighting the wrong thing, they can "divide and rule/steal".
Well no, actually, I think what bothers people is that the 1% (or really the 0.1%, or maybe the 0.01%) are outsourcing the jobs to poorer people and keeping all the profit generated by such a move for themselves. Personally, I would love to see wages rise in the poorest countries (and worker benefits, employee safety, etc rise with wages), and I would even condone a certain drop in my lifestyle and that of the average Westerner to make that happen, but the people who actually make the outsourcing decisions (and the very rich people who pay them) are not at all interested in making the average Chinese or Indian wealthier. They're only interested in enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else.
It's open to all of us to complain about this (and yes, that includes those people in the very highest income categories, like Stephen King or Warren Buffett), because to varying degrees we all suffer negative consequences because of it. Just because the poorest people have more to complain about, doesn't mean that the rest of us should stop complaining when a tiny minority takes our earned wealth away from us. In fact, if as the top 5% we have more power and can leverage more effective methods than the lower 95% of people, then don't we have an obligation to stand up and complain, and if that doesn't work, march, if we can? For ourselves, but also for those making far less than us?
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Corporations are people, my friend. Delta's airplanes are private vehicles, too.
The 1% need to know that the Total Information Awareness they wish to impose on the 99% can be turned around on them. They think they maintain a monopoly on violence and technological know-how, but they really don't anymore, and it's getting worse. When someone with a 3D printer can print out a gun, the monopoly on violence is over. When an average citizen can track the exact whereabouts of a 1%-er, then the 1%'s ability to exercise their heretofore unlimited power is curtailed. It won't be long before a bright light in the 99% figures out that if they can track every single member of the 1% (which is entirely possible with modern information technology), then they can simultaneously bring down every member of the 1%. Please, 1%, continue to rip-off everyone else in the country. Please, continue to think you can get away with murder forever. Your chickens will soon come home to roost.
I hope I live to see that day, but I know at least my children will. DIAF, 1%
If not us, who? If not now, when?
is not that defcon researchers are building a system to track these planes, but that a completely parallel system for the well-to-do has been engineered expressly to ensure the secrecy of their travel.
im not talking about guys like Jimmy Buffet who own a jet though, i mean guys like Pat Robertson who once abused his personal fleet of jets to operate a diamong mine in the congo, and Tom Cruise who invests in and contributes much to the cause of Scientology. When was this list constructed? Arguably recently as had it been a longstanding feature of the FAA we would never have known the executives from american automotive industries traveled by private jet to panhandle congress for a bailout.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This is more like "Make" magazine savvy. Decoding the Mode-S transponder data sent on 1090 MHz would be a hell of a lot cooler, and would get all aircraft within range, not just the ones talking on a particular freq.
Amateurs.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Wrong. The airplanes that carry the rest of us around are tracked in the public domain. These guys are tracking airplanes, not people.
It's very easy to find out that a particular Learjet with tail letters XYZ belongs to Jay Z. Almost* the entire article is about tracking an airplane which has a one-to-one relationship with a specific famous person.
How easy is it to find that MatalliQaZ is a passenger on UA flight 789 leaving out of PHL at 2:40?
Saying they're tracking airplanes and not people might be technically correct, but it's awfully disingenuous.
* Not quite the whole thing. It does also talk about industrial espionage capabilities (see the WalMart reference).
Not from your and my perspective, they arent-- that is, we dont set our own rules on them.
Raj in India might remark that the average American DOES hoard an obscene amount of money, and spends absurd amounts on the most trivial things.
but comparing ourselves to the worst is not the best way to self improvement.
Way to utterly miss the point. Poor folks in India, china, etc are TRYING to improve by getting jobs in the US, but people here complain to no end that "our" jobs are being "stolen" by undeserving foreigners. Seems hypocritical to turn around and then complain about OUR lack and needs and wants.
They're only interested in enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else.
I mean, they are businesses, and any business in any capitalistic society is going to be about one main thing: making more money. And when it comes to selling goods, the way you do that is by either having a better product, or a better pricepoint, or both.
How do you get better pricepoints? You increase efficiency and cut costs-- one of which is wage.
One thought I had about preventing that wage from getting slashed too hard involves removing some of the barriers for folks here on a visa. Currently when you're over here on a visa, you have basically no leverage, because if you lose your job you have all of about a week to find a new one. This means that there is effectively no competition between employers, and the employer can offer a pittance to that visa worker. If we can fix that so the visa worker can actually do a little job shopping, it might help fix this issue.
What DOESNT help is trying to prevent actual competition on the job market; youre never going to be able to prevent job outsourcing, and a closed job market simply hurts the workers.
You might try dropping that first sentence into Google and see what turns up :-).
The rich and famous should be able to preserve their anonymity when travelling. After all, whose business is it that a certain presidential candidate makes frequent trips to the Cayman Islands?
The problem is that the 3rd world people getting the jobs aren't being lifted out of poverty. As soon as they show a sign of that, their jobs move to a poorer country where wage demands aren't rising. They won't actually be lifted out of poverty until they are employed by home grown businesses that don't offshore.
It is perfectly reasonable for people to use conditions in the country of their Citizenship as a baseline, they have no natural right to order a foreign country around, only their own.
I am supposed to be as well represented in My country's government as a 1%er is. Where that doesn'ty appear to be the case, I am justified in protesting. If, in fact, it appears that my government has been perverted to help the 1% hoover my money into their pockets, I am justified in protesting.
By your logic, as long as someone is currently being gang-raped by 11 AIDS carriers, a person being gang raped by only 10 AIDS carriers should be all smiles and whistling a happy tune.
You appear to talking about income. The whole OWS campaign was against the top 1% of the country by wealth, which is a group that's an awful lot harder to get into than the top 1% by income. Many of the wealthiest individuals don't officially have that much income thanks to clever tax dodges, though since they don't really have to work for that income...