Comment by spdustin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spdustin | Hacker News Reader

It's not just drones. Law Enforcement often flies surveillance flights, circling over locations of interest. These planes often have thermal/visual imaging video cameras and, according to some stories, may also be carrying other tracking or signal interception hardware (think Stingray). HN user jjwiseman [0] scooped most of the press about this.

You can locate such "interesting" flights right now, using your browser. Just open up ADSB Exchange Virtual Radar [1], which doesn't filter out flights with certain squawk codes like other online virtual radar sites do. If you do, select "Menu" from the map (with the gear icon), then "Options". Select the "Filter" tab, select to "Enable filters", select "Interesting" from the dropdown listbox, and select "Add Filter". Now you can zoom out over the country, and see all the "interesting" flights using the table on the left. Note any flights with the "LE" or "FBI" or "DHS" user tag.

Right now, as I write this, an FBI-owned aircraft is circling over the Norwood/Bronx area of NYC [2], tail number N912EX, registered to OBR Leasing (one of the "shells" that the US Gov't uses for registering its law enforcement aircraft), as mentioned in an AP story last summer [3]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jjwiseman

[1]: http://www.adsbexchange.com, select "Currently Tracking [number] Aircraft on upper-right"

[2]: http://i.imgur.com/EUYqx98.png

[3]: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/4b3f220e33b64123a3909c60845da...

Edit: Another one, flying around NW Los Angeles, right now: http://i.imgur.com/PwRpqRe.png

Edit2: Any aircraft squawking transponder beacon codes between 4401-4433 are engaged in law enforcement operations. More on the various squawk codes reserved by US Gov't operations can be found here (pdf link): http://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Order/FINAL_Order_7...

So, presumably, there are uber-secret flights that the military and cia, etc operate which are so clandestine that they appear civilian. However, their flight plans are probably quite similar to the known law enforcement/military stuff. Eg: circling over certain places or circling/tracking a moving car. So in theory you could train a network on known civilian vs known law enforcement and then have it identify the as yet unidentified law enforcement flight plans?

I don't think you'd even need anything fancy. Here's the list of things that are true of most of the surveillance aircraft I've found:

  Flies in circles
  Flies over one region for hours
  Flies at around 5000 feet altitude
  Squawks 4414 or 4415
  Uses a callsign that starts with JENA or JENNA
  Registered owner in Bristow VA, Greenville DE, Wilmington DE, or Manassas VA

I have some simple code that highlights planes that are flying in circles so that I can take a closer look at them.

> Squawks 4415 or 4415

Typo?

Yep, thanks!

Very interesting stuff.

I remember during the San Bernardino shooting online tracking showed 2+ LEO aircraft

Edit: it's showing two Hawker Hunters over CA right now...

> You can locate such "interesting" flights right now, using your browser. Just open up ADSB Exchange Virtual Radar [1]

This is really neat. However, it's only showing 10 flights in the Southwest (USA) area. O_o How come it shows nothing in the El Paso area? I find that hard to believe (also: There are none flying in OR, ID, UT, CO or NM?)

Without the filter, it shows all aircraft broadcasting ADS-B [0]. The filter procedure I outlined restricts the aircraft shown on the map only to those that have been flagged as "interesting", usually because they're related to law enforcement, government agencies, or celebrities.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillan...

> The filter procedure I outlined restricts the aircraft shown on the map only to those that have been flagged as "interesting"

Yep, and that's really neat.

My point is it is obviously b.s. data. there are far too few aircraft being shown for it to be realistic.

adsbexchange.com collects data from volunteers, of which there are currently fewer than 500 around the world. One person can usually only pick up aircraft within a hundred miles or so. Many "interesting" aircraft don't broadcast their position, so you won't see them on a map unless they can be triangulated (actually multilaterated)--but that requires that multiple nearby volunteers receive their signals.

That's why you don't see a lot of aircraft on the map, not a failure of realism.

Cool, I was just wondering why no one was mentioning the pink elephant in the room.

> not a failure of realism.

Actually it's exactly that. What you just said proves it. In reality, there are a lot more aircraft than being shown on that map due to the low number of volunteers and stealth nature of the aircraft.

They came up with algorithm to narrow down "suspects"...

http://blog.enigma.io/track-84-aircrafts-the-fbi-uses-for-su...

How much does a cessna pilot for the FBI make a year?

I'd apply for that job, 172s are all I have hours on

Simply amazing.

I'm sure that there's a good reason for it but the Turkish military has a plane over Columbus, Ohio. I would have never expected to see that.

Forgive the tin-foil on this hat, but how does this not fit all the qualifications for a foreign invasion?

We do joint military operations and training with allied countries all of the time.

It's not an invasion if we invited them and they're not attacking.

I also tracked that one for a bit. It came out of a part of Ohio full of air research institutions. Probably just a routine oil change.

randomly found a plane registered to none other than Donald Trump using the interesting filter.

N725DT CESSNA 750

Fascinating tool! thanks for sharing!

When does this stop?!

You're better off trying to figure out how long we have until it gets a lot worse.

Interesting. There is one over northwest LA as well.

That's N404KR, which over the past year has flown over Los Angeles on average one day in five. It's one of the top 10 planes I receive transponder pings from, in frequency.

What do transponder pings indicate? Are those Stingrays?

Thanks for all the information by the way, very informative.

Those are just the pings from the transponder that almost every aircraft carries to help air traffic controllers keep track of it. You can receive and decode them with a $20 RTL-SDR dongle and free software.

There's more info on how I track aircraft and how I figured out that the FBI was flying over 100 aircraft registered to front companies, some of them doing aerial surveillance, here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zwRyuVJGaQwG6mYMSYWo...

Thank you for this work.

This is one of my slides on N404KR: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zwRyuVJGaQwG6mYMSYWo...

I found that the adsbexchange site had a JSON feed (that adheres to the virtual radar standard, even) but couldn't find any direct guidance about permissible usage. Do you know of any aggregators of ADSB data (without filters) that one could use to set up a site for constant logging/tracking/visualization of this stuff? I'm thinking of mashing this up with geolocated tweets/pics/videos to try and figure out if the public can identify what the hell these planes are doing. Maybe also a way to get alerts when you're in an area that is being surveilled. I have a toy Python script doing some of that now with the adsbexchange feed, but I don't want to let something into the wild that uses someone else's feed without permission.

Hey there - I am the operator of adsbexchange.com. We can talk offline - send me a message with your contact info through the contact form on the site.

--Dan

That is very cool, thanks for sharing.

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