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Collecting Private Flight Data On the World Economic Forum Attendees With RTL-SDR (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Every year politicians and business men meet at the World Economic Forum in the small mountain town of Davos, Switzerland to discuss various topics and create business deals. This year Quartz, an online newspaper/magazine sent a journalist to the forum tasked with writing a unconventional story about the forum: he was asked to monitor the private helicopter traffic coming in and out of Davos from transponder broadcast of ADS-B data. Using an $20 RTL-SDR dongle, Raspberry Pi and ADS-B collinear antenna they monitored the flights over Davos. From the data they were able to determine the flight paths that many helicopters took, the types of helicopters used and the most popular flight times.
This is what Flightradar24 uses. A little more expensive box, but no big deal.
And any executive person should be aware of this and not attend major events like the World Economic Forum in their private aircraft but instead travel incognito. Use Business Class and make sure that the clothing is not standing out. If you have a security team - make them look like a mix of tourists, business men and airport service personnel. (Who actually cares about the person pushing the airport wheelchair around?)
As soon as you have a helicopter you are standing out as a VIP like a polar bear in a kindergarten.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Monitoring these transmissions will soon be illegal just like they did for the 900Mhz cell frequencies.The wealthy and power people who attend Davos people value their privacy very highly and will go to great lengths to protect it.
helicopters flying over the Onion Knight?
I'm guessing that once the story is widely known there'll be calls to arrest him, even though he's using publicly available data and equipment and not doing anything wrong.
Why should I give a flying fuck about helicopters over the World Economic Forum? The quality of stories on this site fucking sucks nowadays. Bring back Taco!
Who else read the title as "We brought an antenna to Davros"?
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
If you don't understand the acronyms, you're not qualified to read the article.
Normally I'm the first to complain about this but everything was explained in the links.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
What's good for the goose is verboten to the gander...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I predict these VIPs will be outraged at the invasion of their privacy and the follow up article will be to expose their hypocrisy over supporting the invasion of privacy of us plebs, but nothing will change in the long term.
I feel the same way about all the fucking cellphone acronyms. And when you add the pseudo-technobable of marketing drones on top of it, it's nearly impossible to know what's what.
A few years ago, RenderMan did a great presentation about how scary ADS-B is and how easy it could be manipulated to do things like cause air traffic confusion or obfuscation of flights that certain people want to be secret. http://youtu.be/mY2uiLfXmaI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Maybe, now these guys will update the rules for these communications to be encrypted...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You don't even have to click the links to be enlightened:
ADS-B links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance_-_broadcast
RTL-SDR to http://bit.do/RTL-SDR-and-GNU-Radio-with-Realtek-RTL2832U
For once, I applaud the summary writer for clarity, conciseness & informativeness.
NB, different AC than GP.
Why is there an affiliate link in the summary for a $20 dongle ?
desperate for cash much ?
get a job you lazy kike
To be more specific, it's not illegal to listen to the 800mhz cellular freqs. All the FCC could do was stop the commercial sale of new equipment that was able to hit those freqs. Got pre-ban equipment, listen away. Make your own, congrats!
What is non-ordinary about this?
The only one who's never ever getting fucked is you.
I can seen the airport of my nation's capital from my balcony. I have a similar setup logging the position reports to a PostGIS DB, which allows some interesting queries ("Give me all the position reports found beneath a certain altitude within a certain polygon that describes a runway, sorted by airframe and timestamp") which allows you to determine what planes landed and took off.
Looking up who owns the aircraft can be done online, and it's funny when something owned by a holding company in the Caymans flies in. Now if only there was an online API that allowed one to query the visitors list for the legislative bodies, one could tie the data together, along with the record of votes cast, and jump to some intriguing conclusions.
That ban needs repealing. Analog AMPS hasn't been used in forever, so that spectrum is no longer used for what they originally enacted the ban for. The digital replacement is/should be encrypted, so no ban is needed.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
This is slashdot, nobody clicks the links.
Top Tips:
Become invisible to police officers by sticking your hands in your pockets and looking up at the sky while whistling.
GZ0275 HMP Broadmoor.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
All ADS-B ever seems to do is tell me the blindingly obvious, like the airplane holding short right in front of me waiting to take off.
I find VFR flight following to be much more useful.
...laura
I was able to gleen from the text, without understanding the acronyms, Flights tracked via seemingly surreptitious data gathering methods.
But - I'll give you this -- without clicking the link --- why should I care? So what that they grabbed license plate numbers?
Actually - after reading the article it seems more of a cool DYI traffic monitoring system. Still don't understand why it is important. Collected Data, analyzed data, created US-Today info graphs from data. The story?! You can do cool things with a Rasp Pi.
tl, dr.
I'm sorry, but who gives a shit? ADS-B is totally public info broadcast over an open standard and available to anyone with an antenna. The software is bog-standard and all this has been doable for at least 10 years. It's so bog-standard there's a large community doing this on a routine basis for more than 2 years (and that's only one example).
Of course, before that you could tune to the local ATC frequency (it's just an AM radio) and listen to position reports.
Next this guy will be listening to the local cab dispatch frequency and telling us he can find people who have called for a ride.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Quick--everyone at Davos realize this tech to so disruptive to invest billions, create 2 to 3 unicorn companies that deliver subpar products that are always in beta and buggy or a kickstarter that never delivers.
The stock markets are crashing, tech bubble has burst--quick start this industry now.... All this new tech will solve poverty, sickness, foreign relations, balance the rich vs poor and any economic issue to date.
---
RTL-SDR ADS-B has been around for what, 2 years?
Incorrect. Monitoring cellular (and any other sort of mobile phone and/or commercial pager) is illegal in the USA, per the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, 18 USC 2510-2520.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
Specifically note: (g) It shall not be unlawful under this chapter or chapter 121 of this title for any person—
(i) to intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public;
Analog cellular broadcasts fall under that rule. Now, there are limitations on what you can DO with information gathered from listening to those calls, in short you can't act on it. But that does not mean it's illegal to receive it.
Yes, it's nice that if you click the links, you might get some clue what the article's about - what's important is that the summary tell whether you'd be interested in reading it or not. In this case, the summary did a fine job, at least if you know what a Raspberry Pi is - it said this was about tracking helicopter movements at the Davos shindig using a $20 $FOO, a Raspberry Pi, and a $BAR-flavored antenna, so you know it's generally hardware things that might have to do with radio. It didn't say how much of the article would be about the technical nits of how they did it, and how much would be about what they found out about all the rich folks showing up at the shindig, and how much it would be about the social aspects of using cheap hardware to track things about people that used to be harder to track, but if any of them motivates you it ended up being at least slightly relevant.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Everybody's extra-polite to you? (Or at least doesn't hassle you for being an American)?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks