Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Collecting Private Flight Data On the World Economic Forum Attendees With RTL-SDR (qz.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the keeping-an-eye-on-the-shady-folk dept.

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.

4 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. I'm not surprised at all by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:I'm not surprised at all by SuricouRaven · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What's the point of being filthy rich if you still have to mix with the commoners?

  2. Re:Explain the fucking acronyms in the summary! by ArchieBunker · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  3. Watching what flies in & out of your capital. by shocking · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.