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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.
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