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Comment by TehCorwiz | Hacker News Reader

The flight information that twitter account was using is publically available and required by law to BE public.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zygg/twitter-bans-elon-mus...

"Sweeney has been using sites such as ADS-B Exchange to track the movements of private jets blogging to celebrities, tech billionaires, and Russian oligarchs for years now. By law, the movement of these plans is publicly available information. “This account has every right to post jet whereabouts, ADS-B data is public, every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder, Even AF1 (@AirForceTrack) Twitter policy states data found on other sites is allowed to be shared here as well,” the account’s pinned tweet read before it was banned."

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af

View on HN

This confuses the issue though. ICAO numbers change if your aircraft is enrolled in the PIA program, which Elon is. Sweeny was bypassing this by using people on the ground to circumvent this by watching the jet's movement and if an aircraft was going to takeoff that had an unknown ICAO number he'd have someone at the airport to figure out it was Elon's jet that had changed it's ICAO number.

Your link will only be valid until he again changes his ICAO number.

More info: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy

The ICAO number in the GP's comment is listed in the FAA registry for the N-number: https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul... (Mode S Code (Base 16 / Hex): A835AF). Are you saying that PIA program can make registry.faa.gov report data that's either obfuscated or out of sync? Why is it not reporting such data now? (Edit: Or maybe GP's comment is using a non-privacy ICAO number and the actual number squawked is private?)

The PIA program, from my understanding, removes the ICAO number from that page. It's possibly in a state that he's not registered with PIA at the moment.

Are you sure that plane actually has a PIA ICAO number? Or that on the ground spotters were required to find the new ICAO?

I know nothing about this, but was a rabbit hole to explore.

The tail number for his plane is well known. If you put that N-number into an ICAO conversion script (https://www.avionictools.com/icao.php), you get the same Hex number that you see from adsbexchange.com. From what I can tell, the script is using an algorithm and not doing a DB lookup. So, just based on the tail number, you could figure out the canonical ICAO code for the plane.

The strange thing is that adsbexchange also lists the plane as being part of the LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) program (but I don’t know the source of this annotation). AFAICT, LADD limits public display of information, but only for data distributed from the FAA. Crowd sourced data isn’t limited (nor could it be).

In order to address this privacy shortcoming, the PIA program exists. This would change the ICAO for the plane to be disconnected from the tail number. But from the tracking website, it seems like the ICAO number for his plane hasn’t been changed/anonymized(?!?). So either, they haven’t actually gotten the new ICAO number installed (after 10-ish months), or the plane isn’t eligible to be part of the program. PIA requires the plane to only fly domestically and have the right kind of transmitter. If the plane flys internationally, it can’t have an anonymized ICAO number.

See: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy

Otherwise, I don’t see how anyone could track this particular plane if it did have a PIA ICAO identifier and you only knew the tail number.

Like I said, I don’t know very much about this, but it is a fascinating rabbit hole. Anyone want to correct where I went wrong?

> Are you sure that plane actually has a PIA ICAO number?

I'm not sure that it does at this very moment, but public statements by Sweeny himself said that it did indeed have a PIA ICAO number and that Sweeny de-anonymized it. It's possible Elon stopped using it because of that de-anonymizing.

> The strange thing is that adsbexchange also lists the plane as being part of the LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) program (but I don’t know the source of this annotation). AFAICT, LADD limits public display of information, but only for data distributed from the FAA. Crowd sourced data isn’t limited (nor could it be).

Yes LADD is a different system and you're not required to follow it as a data provider. FlightRadar24 for example follows it and does not list any LADD aircraft as they use FAA's data feed which requires as it's terms of use that you follow the LADD program.

> Sweeny himself said that it did indeed have a PIA ICAO number and that Sweeny de-anonymized it

I read that too, but haven’t been able to find any source that wasn’t Sweeny on that. Without another source, I’m more inclined to believe that the plane is part of LADD, but not PIA (or isn’t anymore). And that the plane from the Sweeney tweet from February 2022 may have been another plane entirely. Maybe Musk’s plane was enrolled at one point, but it honestly doesn’t make much sense to me to have a plane enrolled in PIA.

I mean, if I had a private plane, I’d like to keep the option of flying it internationally, which you couldn’t do with an anonymized ICAO (again, according to my limited reading).

Also, given the limited number of PIA planes, it would be trivial to look for ICAO numbers that disappeared at one airport and then for a new private ICAO number to appear at the same airport. The system only makes sense from a privacy perspective if you don’t have continuous monitoring of the ADS-B transponders. As things currently exist, with a small number of PIA planes, it would be obvious to find new codes.

That would certainly be an interesting twist on the story if it wasn't actually covered by PIA and only LADD. I haven't heard this variant before, but it would make a lot of things make sense, but it would give me more questions than answers.

Even if you have PIA though, I don't thing you're restricted from flying internationally. I don't see any comment on the PIA page that says you can't fly internationally with it. Wouldn't you just revert to your original ICAO when doing international trips?

> Wouldn't you just revert to your original ICAO when doing international trips?

The FAA site made it seem like changing the codes was a non-trivial “process” that wouldn’t want to do regularly. You’d have to reprogram the transponder back to your canonical code, because other countries don’t have access to the private PIA conversion lookup tables. The private ICAO numbers might also conflict with other countries “number space”.

Maybe this is an easy thing, but most changes in aviation don’t seem “quick”.

It might be possible that you’re not allowed to do this on your own as a pilot of a certified plane (and require to pay someone who is certified to do so) but I can change mine very easily from a setup screen in about 30 seconds.

It could be a procedural thing where after switching, the FAA won’t recognise your canonical one? That’s seems a little strange, though.

I don't think that's relevant past the point where Musk is on the record as saying that because he's such a champion of free speech he's not going to ban the account.

A masked stalker, dressed all in black, was following his young child in car thinking it was him. He then blocked the car and jumped on the hood: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944

Imagine it were your child. Can you honestly say you wouldn’t change any opinions or practices when it came to personal security?

Maybe don't shuttle your kids around on a private jet..?

So you think he has good reasons for going back on what he claimed was his free speech position. Fair enough. It doesn't mean he hasn't gone back on what he said though, and it definitely fits with previous observations that he doesn't actually care at all about free speech and just does whatever he feels like that day.

Free speech absolutist not so tough when he and his are scared

Cut a free speech absolutist and a censorious fascist bleeds.

Nobody is a true free speech absolutist; and Musk least of all[0]. There are always limits to speech.

Things like libel, threats, blackmail, etc are also speech, and yet banned or restricted in some way. Social media are doing a lot of work exploring the edge cases of these, and it's possible laws need to be updated to account for the results.

[0] Years ago Musk cancelled a Tesla order from a critic. On Twitter, it didn't take him long to ban a lot of satirical accounts.

I agree with you, but I believe it is the case that Elon has previously described himself as a free speech absolutist, so this whole episode is exhibit 487 in the case for Elon having no idea what he's talking about.

He did, and it's both impossible and blatantly untrue. I just thought I should make that explicit. It wasn't meant as disagreement.

It's interesting because Elon agrees with free speech restrictions only when he or his own children are affected, but not others. Case in point, this one + alex jones' controversy ('My firstborn child died in my arms'). Meanwhile, he fired the entire child abuse monitoring section.

I get it but what is the relation with his private plane ?

"Free speech is peachy, until it hurts me. Then we need to come down on it like a ton of weight."

And remember, my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.

And also at this point it's allegedly inciting violence, so his position might even be consistent given changing circumstances. Whether it actually is incitement is still debatable but a person of principle can still change their position without it being a flip flop. If Musk is taking legal action at least there is corresponding litigation for the account suspension for some sort of due process and objectivity.

I fail to see the connection between this video, which was posted well after the account was blocked, given that the account had not tweeted out Musk's location after Dec 12th.

The 'won't somebody think of the children' argument doesn't play nice with 'free speech as long as it is legal'.

If Musk is so concerned about his children's privacy and safety then maybe he should stop tweeting out their whereabouts in real time himself?

It actually is relevant in this instance.

The “speech” you speak of is automated broadcasting the movements of wealthy people in real-time. The primary group of people who have use for that information is kidnappers.

There’s zero connection between this “speech” and political freedoms.

Similarly, there’s a huge difference between you sharing you or your family’s location on social media occasionally on your own terms vs strangers tracking and sharing it regularly.

This always was the case and there are zero recorded instances of such so no need to trot out this argument. Musk himself has Tweeted out the location of his child in real time.

No, it's broadcasting the movements of a set of aircraft, using publicly available data. There is no information about who is on board those aircraft.

Nobody has any right to privacy regarding the flight movements of their aircraft, and indeed any idea in that light is antithetical to the entire principal of air traffic control and safe air travel. The idea that people would not be able to track his aircraft if this account is gone is ludicrous, as there are both other flight tracking websites, the ability in some areas to get full flight plans, and even if you're a stalker the ability to just listen into ATC radio near the routes his aircraft use.

You even have spotters who spend all their days at airports logging all aircraft and posting the results online, as they've done for decades, so there's no way for aircraft movements to remain secret for long.

By buying private jets and choosing to use them exclusively, Musk himself gave up his right to any privacy when flying on them. He has other options, such as flying commercially or chartering aircraft, as others in his position have done, but has chosen not to use them. He's now trying to change the rules for everyone else to carve out an exception for himself and other super wealthy individuals.

It's rank hypocrisy and bullying and I'm amazed so many people on HN are supporting him in this, and choosing to believe him rather than reading up on how open this data already is.

And publicly available satellite imagery can track the movements of your car. Depending on the country you live in, the fact that you own the car is also publicly available information.

That doesn’t mean somebody putting those pieces of information together and regularly tweeting your movements isn’t creating a security risk for you. The choice that you make to buy a car or drive it in public also doesn’t mean that you have to welcome automated stalking.

Show me how publicly available satellite imagery could offer anywhere close to the same level of tracking that is federally mandated and available for aircraft, and I might take that argument more seriously.

This account wasn't even 'putting those pieces of information together', he was tweeting it directly from ADSB Exchange, one of a number of collators of ADS-B Out data.

Aircraft movements are not private and haven't been for decades. If you want privacy in your air travel, don't fly everywhere on 1-3 well known private jets.

So these "kidnappers" you are talking about are smart enough to create a security risk for a multi-billionaire who can afford any level of security, but at the same time they are too stupid to combine a few pieces of publicly information themselves and would only be dangerous if some teenager on Twitter does it for them?

Publicly available satellite imagery can’t track my car in any meaningful way. At best you’d be able to figure out the color and (rough) size of it if you knew my address.

They might be creating a security risk, but it's a legal security risk and might even be moral too.

That said it's just as legal for Musk to kick anybody he wants out of his new club house and even be a hypocrite about it.

I just wish he'd get back to saving the world and setting up Mars for my kids. As a social media icon he's basically worthless to the world.

> I just wish he'd get back to saving the world and setting up Mars for my kids.

That was never going to happen. It's just a way to get people to work their asses off to further his real goal, to amass as much wealth as possible. Ironically, buying Twitter may well end up undoing that.

Free speech applies to all speech, not just political speech. If you want "free speech as long as it's legal", this should be allowed. If you don't that's also fine, but then you can't cite "free speech" as a reason to reinstate Trump (Which Musk did). Although regardless neither of these is a "free speech" issue (In the constitutional sense) since it's about a corporation banning certain things on its platform, which it's perfectly entitled to do. It's just very clearly shown the hypocrisy with which Musk now runs Twitter.

I heard some people walked in to a big building in DC after Trump tweeted which later got him banned. Imagine if it was your building! Or does free speech only apply to things Elon likes?

it me, the incontrovertible proof that is an 11s clip of somebody dressed like an 80s action film ninja inside a fuckin random-ass hyundai

What does this have to do with tracking his plane using public data? This is not about tracking his, or Grimes' or any other ex's car; not even about stalking them.

If you're the richest person in the world, you're going to have to expect that weirdos are going to follow you around. Many employ private security details. That's just how things are.

That’s not relevant to whether he’s a hypocrite. All that’s relevant is “would he have done the same thing if it was someone else’s location being tweeted out?”

Given he had no problem calling a random person a “pedo” knowing it would cause harassment, I’m going to go with “no.”

He'd say "one two gerbil gerbil fourteen spiders singin' to me" if it would affect the stock price of anything he's planning on buying or selling, or harming something that cuts into his earnings.

Previous strategy to appeal to tech was to pick last week's top post on /r/iamverysmart and state it as his philosophy.

Current strategy now that tech has soured on him the past few years, is transitioning to parroting fascist dogwhistles.

In two years he buys Whole Foods and will be ranting about holistic lifestyle chakra healing.

Not even sure I fully trust Musk on this, after he lied about holding his child that died; when it turned out the mother did and it was SIDS related, he's got form on using his children to manipulate the outside world.

https://twitter.com/justinemusk/status/1595506087570333696

I'm not a Musk fan but "died in my arms" doesn't have to be read literally and i wouldn't consider this as a lie.

> My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat.

That is pretty literal

The guy is an absolute toad.

Not under the "always assume best intentions" principle, I have read similar descriptions from people that were near someone dying without actually physically holding them.

> Not under the "always assume best intentions" principle, I have read similar descriptions from people that were near someone dying without actually physically holding them.

In such a case: "Died in front of me" would be accurate. "Died in my arms" is a lie.

That only applies to people who haven't repeatedly proven themselves to be acting/speaking in bad faith.

If Lucy pulls away the football 27 times, you aren't required to go running at it the 28th.

it depends if lucy is idempotent

She may have hidden internal state. Or she may be pure. How many tries before we are going to make an assumption?

I'm very fortunate in that none of my children has died.

But I expect there's something particularly poignant about the moment of death.

So to me, Musk's inaccuracy about that detail is very significant.

Since I onow people whos children actually did die in their very arms, using such a dramatic experience and be untruthful about it is simply dispicable. Especially since having your child die in front of you doesn't need any further dramatization at all.

Hunter was Joe’s child. If Twitter not publishing Hunter’s pics is a conspiracy, I don’t understand why this isn’t

Hunters penis however is something that is apparently of great public interest.

Hunter was using clout of then vice-president Biden to do some shady deals.

It was relevant to an election Biden was about to become the President. The hookers and meth was there to entertain the more base urges of audience.

Could be, but there is no proof of deals in Elon’s Twitter files. Just Hunter’s naked pics

Did you actually read the files? They don't have any naked Hunter Biden pics (thank God).

It's mostly about Twitter fabrication of Hunter Biden was hacked (discovered during laptop dissembly) and the connections between federal government and Twitter's staff.

I did. Did you? There were links to pictures of Hunter in Elons posts.

Elon? I read Matt Taibi's report.

I'm grateful I was spared from H. Biden wang.

I meant Elon commissioned posts that Matt Taibi posted. Links to Hunter’s pics were among them. If you are curious it was Tweet 8. Biden wasn’t part of federal government then FYI. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394

>Links to Hunter’s pics

Links? You mean a picture of an https addresses that leads to a deleted tweet.

> Biden wasn’t part of federal government then FYI.

Sure but he had connections, and way to pull those images. See twit #8.

> Links? You mean a picture of an https addresses that leads to a deleted tweet.

Yeah, obviously those pictures and associated tweets are deleted. That is why we are here. However, those are archived in WaybackMachine(archive.org). Copy/paste those links there.

I did try a few, and they were deleted from archive.org :/

So a picture of a link, of a deleted tweet, you have to access via Internet Archive, that's also deleted.

You know links are usually click and go, not transcribe, click, go back, go to Internet Archive and try there. Then do some internet sleuthing.

I just checked. I can find it on archive. I don't want to post that in a public board. Please do your due diligence

On recheck the 2020 page did contain the pics in question, for some reason they didn't load.

Still this isn't a case of they posted links to materials. Anyone that wants to find them needs to invest some effort to actually find them.

>A masked stalker, dressed all in black, was following his young child in car thinking it was him.

I mean, maybe?

I don't see a masked stalker doing much of anything in that video. In fact, the masked stalked in the car seems afraid of the person doing the filming (a security guard?). Certainly not showing much aggression. The claim is that this person then got out of the car and jumped on the hood of Elon's car preventing it from moving, but that wasn't caught on video?

Of course an event like this would cause me to rethink my position. But I don't think I would wait until it actually happened to my child.

People have been raising these kinds of concerns to free speech absolutists like Musk for a while, but until it impacts him they are theoretical concerns that aren't as important as his principles.

If he uses this personal experience as an opportunity to empathize with others and reconsider how Twitter handles speech which is legal but poses a safety risk to an individual or group then that is commendable.

Or, if he maintained his commitment to free speech in the face of personal danger to his family I would respect such a principled stance.

However, if he only bans those who might cause him (or people he likes) harm while allowing and even encouraging those who use free speech to incite harm against others then that seems hypocritical.

citizens deserve equal protection under the law. there's nothing special about his kid (or him). if anything, information about public figures, when in public, deserves less shielding.

Guess free speech is dead then. Elon killed it. Rewrite the US Constitution

No, I think it’s relevant because the banned account was not just “sharing public information”, but actively tracking Musk using a combination of online data and real word surveillance.

The fact that Musk previously said he wouldn’t ban the account, then changed his mind (apparently after a personal incident) just shows Musk changed his mind, is all.

It certainly demonstrates he didn’t think through his previous decision, suggesting it was a spontaneous comment and not a rigorous policy. Which is worrying, because publishers such as Twitter need to have a consistent and coherent moderation policy.

But it’s still relevant if we’re to decide which position we agree with, and whether Musk was “right” previously or now.

There is nothing 'real world surveilance' about following this link:

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af

That Musk 'changed his mind' on the one thing that he said would set Twitter apart from 'the rest' is where I have a problem: this is a matter of principle so dear that it should override his personal affairs because that is what he is on the record about. If Musk's principles only hold water as long as he isn't personally affected then I'm fine with that but then he should get off his high horse and stop pretending.

Twitter before Musk was not perfect, but it was perfectly usable (even if they got stuff wrong every now and then, and in those cases they usually - but not always - eventually corrected themselves). What is on display right now is capriciousness of an entirely different degree.

> There is nothing 'real world surveilance' about following this link:

There is about how you know which link to follow.

He is not using PIA right now, A835AF code is what is entered in the publicly available FAA register.

> Twitter before Musk was not perfect, but it was perfectly usable (even if they got stuff wrong every now and then, and in those cases they usually - but not always - eventually corrected themselves). What is on display right now is capriciousness of an entirely different degree.

So Twitter is now unusable because elonjet has been banned? Social media companies change their policies all the time. You don't have to agree with the decision but holding it up as something so consequential is just silly.

Assuming what he said about his son being accosted is true, how could he not change his mind? Should he really not stop something that threatened his kids life because of a promise he made to internet strangers?

If Elon uses this personal experience as an opportunity to reconsider how Twitter handles speech which is legal but poses a safety risk to an individual or group then I will commend him for finally maturing past the "free speech absolutist" position.

If he simply bans those who would cause him (or people he likes) harm but continue to allow and encourage "free speech" for those who would cause harm to others then that seems a bit hypocritical.

Twitter now is unusable because Elon bans anyone who does something he doesn't like.

This includes criticizing him in various ways.

Say what you will about pre-Elon Twitter; I never heard about anyone getting their account banned for saying bad things about Dorsey.

This is an extreme exaggeration. If you've used Twitter since the Musk takeover and come away with the impression that you can't criticize him there, you've had a completely alien experience to mine- it seems to be the main use of the site these days.

He has banned parody accounts that don't specify 'parody' in the username, he's threatened to de-amplify negative tweets, and he's banned the ElonJet account. I vehemently disagree with all of those moves, but the idea that the site is now unusable to say anything that he doesn't like is absolutely hyperbole.

As he originally announced his non-banning as being due to his fundamental principles, it's more than just changing his mind. He should at least clarify how his attitude towards freedom of speech on Twitter has developed. Personally I think he's being disingenuous as he doesn't seem to care about other people's safety following even his own tweets, so although I can understand him putting his own family first, he should now appreciate that his previous stance on absolute free speech is untenable.

I wonder if he’d change his mind if this was someone else’s incident.

He perhaps wouldn't have. Then again, so? Incidents happening to us and our family, hit us harder, and can move us to take specific action more often, news at 11.

So free speech only counts when it doesn't affect you personally, got it.

I don't think anyone would really care about this had he not made purchasing Twitter all about trying to save us from the evil Twitter censorship demons.

>So free speech only counts when it doesn't affect you personally, got it

Yes, people are less accepting of things that personally are meant to spite/hurt them, even if they match their general principles. News at 11.

Besides, free speech is about sharing opinions and such, however controversial. Petty "I'll share your itinerary to the world" is not real speech, opinion, let alone an argument. It is doxxing/stalking - that the information is publicly available in aviation registers is irrelevant (lots of stalking information is: the doxxing/stalking/threatening part is extracting it from its normal location, highlighting, it and making it more public).

It's not doxing if it's public information. News at 11.

This incident clearly shows why there should be a firewall between owners and moderation. This is in no way a way to run any social media site.

Indeed. Which is why the golden rule used to be 'do not moderate the forum that you participate in'. That solves most of those problems.

Yes you've nailed it. Totally human to react to a personal incident. Needs to be guarded against.

How is this different than what Twitter does through its advertising partners though?

It is very relevant in the context of claim that ElonJet only reshared information that was already public.

We need to be careful about not (unintentionally) spreading misinformation.

(Your objection to Elon is correct of course.)

This is the root of it all for me. I’m not against banning the account for doxxing Musk, as it would be fair to ban in other similar cases.

That won’t stop me saying he’s a hypocrite for doing so. Does he feel so strongly about accounts doxxing “the libs?”

There's a number of valid arguments for why the plane tracker may not be doxxing, and a couple tenuous, but valid arguments for why to ban the plane tracker account.

But no matter how you slice it, this account (and it's owner's personal account) were targeted purely because they irked Musk, and he has given zero indication that he plans to enforce this rule for basically any other account.

I agree with your assessment.

But Musk owns Twitter and he can pick and choose what accounts he wants to allow.

I guess it is akin to me removing unwanted comments on my blog. His site, his rules, policies and ToS.

He absolutely can but he’s going to get called out as a hypocrite when he acts like one.

I suspect we're quickly approaching the point where impotent cries of hypocrisy will no longer be considered even worth issuing. Maybe we're already there. The charge is inert, it does not sting, it changes no minds, and is slightly entertaining to haters, who chuckle for less than a second, and then get on with their lives.

So? Everyone keeps saying this over and over, but leaving out the most important part. In the same tweet he admitted it’s a direct threat to his personal safety! Can you comment on that part? Because it seems like people want, with Elon and other celebrities, to be put in harms way, in the name of keeping these doxxing accounts online. Which by the way are made by some college kid who probably doesn’t realize the ramifications of what he’s doing.

I wonder if the founding fathers had an opinion on temporary safety vs liberty. Shame there’s not a quote about that.

Here's one https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-06-02-01...

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

I wonder why what some guys wrote centuries ago is taken as holy scripture...

Especially when it's not even accurate, not to mention being misunderstood:

https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-be...

Right now it seems like he's willing to defend he and his friend's personal safety (his friend's safety as an after thought mind you), but he doesn't much care about the safety of people he's upset with.

Meh. Musk has no problem handing information to journalists like Matt Taibbi that included personal email addresses, all the better for Taibbi to accidentally publish.

Musk had no problem insinuating that Yoel Roth was a pedophile (as is Musk's style), reportedly forcing Roth into hiding.

Does Musk recognize the ramifications of what he was doing in either case? No. At any rate, it's pretty clear that the "threats to personal safety" is a mask, he clearly is fine with doxxing and threatening other people's public safety... as long as he is the aggressor, not the victim.

> ICAO numbers change if your aircraft is enrolled in the PIA program, which Elon is. Sweeny was bypassing this by using people on the ground to circumvent this by watching the jet's movement

Maybe he should just buy another jet or two, make sure the other jet(s) are in regular use (maybe shuttling SpaceX/Tesla/Twitter/etc employees around), and make sure he regularly swaps which one he is personally using. Extremely expensive solution, but not beyond his budget.

Or maybe he should just buy himself a private jet chartering firm. An even more expensive solution, but he can probably afford that too.

> "ICAO numbers change if your aircraft is enrolled in the PIA program"

Only through a manual process that sounds like it can take a month or so to complete.

Perhaps, in future, this could be solved with technology that automates generation/randomisation of Aircraft IDs, much like MAC addresses on phones and laptops are randomised to prevent tracking?

Next-generation ADS-B transponders could communicate with the FAA (or appropriate local authority) via satellite or mobile network to generate/request a new, random ID before every flight.

Every measure like that introduces safety risk into the critical air traffic control system by increasing the odds of data inconsistencies and other things going wrong. I don't believe it's worth it just to preserve the privacy of billionaires and corporations.

Of course not, but what is the risk here to actual traffic? the plane still transmit its location so others can see it, they simply can't know the exact instance. Seriously asking out of curiosity.

The aircraft's type is not part of ADS-B Out data, it has to be looked up in a database using the hex code. This has implications for aircraft separation, as heavier aircraft produce more turbulence that can be harmful to smaller aircraft. A bad or missing weight category caused by something like PIA having a code collision or a failed update could lead to a fatal accident if the separation for a small aircraft is used for a large one.

A small risk, and something that could be mitigated, but still there nonetheless.

The proposals to encrypt ADS-B data, being driven by corporations and wealthy individuals, are more risky in that they add key management to the mix and make it much more likely that something will go wrong and cause widespread ATC failures or aircraft going dark on ATC displays and in collision avoidance systems at critical moments. Especially as there'll be a mix of encrypted/non-encrypted transponders for decades to come.

Presumably, just aircraft IDs would be encrypted, and not data that is safety-critical for collision avoidance? Things like callsigns (which can be changed each flight and don't necessarily have to be the aircraft's registration) and weight category could also be added, unencrypted, so that ATC screens wouldn't go dark if there was some sort of key management failure.

There is also an argument for some sort of cryptographic signing of ADS-B messages in order to prevent spoofing.

Aircraft IDs are used for type lookups and uniqueness. Callsigns are already in the signal and must be the registration for anything other than commercial or military flights, as they're registered and there's a process for allocation. Weight category and other data being added would require a whole new revision of the standard and will not reach most systems for decades.

Is all of this really necessary when billionaires have other means at their disposal to avoid scrutiny? Why add risk and complexity to a critical system just to make their lives easier?

Spoofing is not really a useful attack vector, for various reasons. In any case it's also not something that can easily be retrofitted for the same reasons, in that it takes decades to update these systems.

https://twitter.com/scottwww/status/1490553502640140288

> Elon uses the FAA PIA privacy program for a private plane ID. When using a PIA address, the owner is anon and private, not public. Sweeney’s workaround is (likely) to spot a (rare) ICAO plane resembling Musk’s & noting the private code.

You can no longer claim it's public. It was de-anonymized in some way.

It's no longer a case of reposting public information but someone going considerable lengths to post this information.

The @ElonJet guy even bragged about it:

> Elon got PIA but I've already identified it!

If you already know the plane's ID it doesn't matter if they redact the name and address after the fact.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-appears-use-faa-to...

> "These privacy mitigation programs are effective for real-time operations but do not guarantee absolute privacy," an FAA spokesperson said. "A flight can still be tracked in other ways such as a Freedom of Information Act request, www.LiveATC.com, ADSB Exchange, or a frequently departed airport."

That plane: https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...

Registered owner: FALCON LANDING LLC at 1 Rocket Rd, Hawthorne, CA.

Google Maps known businesses at 1 Rocket Rd: SpaceX and Onsite Dental (huh?)

That’s not how you do anonymous.

On-site Dental is pretty common for a lot of tech companies - dentist comes to you. It’s nice enough.

Stop spamming this thread repeatedly with the same information again and again.

His plane registration is not anonymized and is well-known[1].

1. https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...

Why are you reposting this multiple times? It's not the end run you think it is: long after that point Musk declared grandly that he would not ban the account because of his stance on free speech.

Elon Musk was already on the record as seeing the safety of children as a limit to free speech.

Jack Sweeney's efforts to deanonymize the plane could be seen as inciting the following of Musk's two year-old child and the ambush of their vehicle.

If the deanonymisation that Jack Sweeney is said to be doing can be argued to be a protected form of free speech, it must also be open to inquiries over whether it is incitement towards violence now that it has resulted in a plausible threat to a life.

Frequently people use combinations of difficult-to-find publicly available information and educated guesswork to locate people and then repackage this information as a "dox" for their followers. Not all of their followers have good intentions and even if they don't literally tell people to intimidate/scare/attack their target, they must eventually be seen as somewhat liable for the actions of their followers once they're aware of them. (Isn't this similar to the argument made about Trump's tweets before he was banned?)

Hopefully, as a private company, Twitter can establish sensible public policy about what speech is allowed or banned and where these lines are.

"Elon Musk was already on the record as seeing the safety of children as a limit to free speech."

Can I find this in the Twitter TOS?

Not yet, but his opinions on children and free speech were widely reported (e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/21/elon-musk...).

Also, this application of the rules is completely in line with original policy about inciting harm, and as a private company, Twitter is well within their right to deplatform users that don't follow their rules.

What seems capricious to many right now might actually be even-handed enforcement of pre-existing rules towards people that had gotten used to special treatment. And if it's not even-handed I don't see how anything has changed from before, where some people were given a free pass from the rules while others weren't -- the only difference is who is blessed and who is cursed.

So no written rules someone could look into, thanks for the clarification.

"where some people were given a free pass from the rules while others weren't -- the only difference is who is blessed and who is cursed."

Whataboutism.

The written rules are here: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules

There are written rules about inciting harassment and posting private information/locations without express approval. Ignorance of the rules shouldn't excuse people from following the rules.

It's not whataboutism to point out that these policies existed previously, and that if there are any differences at all it's that the rules weren't always applied for this violation previously. The fact is, certain Twitter accounts used to get a free pass -- I feel like the modern adage "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression" applies.

(Do I believe what I'm saying? Basically, it's one way of looking at things and I think that while this interpretation of the rules and their application is unproven and counter-narrative it is a viable argument that I expect Twitter to make as the new moderation team grows.)

Essentially Elon wants to use false debate to bolster his actions without any moderation org that he claimed he would form.

Another impulsive act despite other forces forming negative business opinions of all his impulsive actions.

He will be laughed out of court by any judge.

So to be clear, this info is already public but a lack of web scraping ability prevents the low end stalkers from stalking without the twitter account.

Maybe they know how to use Google?

https://www.google.com/search?q=a835af

And if you don't have the registration that one more search. All of this information is public and that goes for pretty much all aircraft.

If the bar is 'low end stalkers that don't have internet' then yes, it will make a difference.

They can just check the website.

Thank you. I’m sick of seeing so many people defend this nonsense by portraying it as a safety issue. This issue is public. It’s required to be public. Someone pointing out public info is not a safety issue

This is such a ridiculous take. It’s widely considered doxxing if you republish public information that makes it easy to find a person’s actual location.

Without getting into the weeds on this specific issue, the idea that any public information being republished on social media can’t have safety consequences is absurd. If, for example, the information about where someone lives is buried on a buggy government website, packaging it up and broadcasting it onto Twitter to millions of people is a very meaningful event that has safety consequences to the person involved.

It's doxxing if the info was not meant to be public, but was leaked via some source unintentionally. It's not really doxxing if you take info that's broadcast to the public by law and use that. I put out my resume that has my name, address, and phone number on my public website and I wouldn't consider it doxxing if someone uses that info.

If Musk doesn't want to get tracked, he can take a regular airplane like other people, or maybe borrow a plane from someone he knows, and not use one that's registered to his business.

> It’s doxxing if the info was not meant to be public, but was leaked via some source unintentionally.

I’m not sure you’ll find many who agree with you in this definition. The natural followup to “not meant to be public” is “meant by who?” Oftentimes people are doxxed through collation of various public records, kept and published by the government. I’m thinking things like phone books, arrest records, property transfer records, business registration, WHOIS registration, and many more. Then there’s times when the victim themselves didn’t realize they were leaking information. Even seemingly innocuous photos can be used by determined individuals to get a precise location [1]. I realize this falls under “unintentional” by your definition but would it be fair to say the person doxxed themselves in this case? I don’t think so.

To me the essence of doxxing is putting together otherwise disparate info into an easily sharable package. Something which raises the profile of the individual datapoints and their relation to each other until finding the victims information is trivial for anyone with a basic search.

1: See GeoWizards fantastic series doing exactly this: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_japiE6QKWqMVC3JbyONau_0...

It's incredible the mental gymnastics some people go through to justify behaviors they would find unacceptable if directed to their own person.

Bottom line is: there is no justifiable reason to publish real-time location info of somebody against his wishes other than to harm him.

Those mental gymnastics happen primarily because anyone looking at the situation for longer than a minute can see people in power use mental gymnastics to keep themselves ahead just as much.

The real issue here is people believing 'do unto others' is even remotely a concern for people in a position of power.

Ah yes, like the Hacker manifesto says public data should not be public.

If they are powerful, there certainly and obviously is.

Everyone on the planet has a legitimate interest in knowing what Elon will do next with his obscene wealth. Thus, talking about where he is must be protected as free speech.

Whether you agree with that or not, until very recently, Elon suggested that he did.

> If they are powerful, there certainly and obviously is.

Where is the real-time data on Putin & Biden's whereabouts then?

> what Elon will do next with his obscene wealth

What does that has anything to do with his location?

> free speech

Talking about and inviting others to do harm could very well be free speech, but that doesn't make the ones doing it less of a--holes.

That the public has an interest in data, sadly does not guarantee that the data is available.

His location is a hint to who he's talking to and what he's doing.

There has been no invitations to do harm. It's not about who's an asshole or not - it's about who's a hypocrite on free speech.

The people who are pretending to care about free speech now by supporting doxxing efforts are way more hypocritical than anyone who supports free speech making an exception for doxxing efforts.

There were actually Twitter accounts that monitored the jets of both of those too.

Yet Elon has no problem tracking every Tesla owner

Is he putting that info out there for every psycho to see?

Google Maps is tracking me every day and I have no problem with it. But it would certainly piss me off if that info was fed into a dedicated social media account.

No, but the moment it serves Tesla's interest he does.

Until he does, the two aren't equivalent though.

We're past that already.

sounds like you need to go talk to the FAA since they are the ones originally publishing this info rather then a twitter account that is just consuming the info.

Companies that use the data published by the FAA are required to not display information about planes that are part of the LADD program (which Elon's Jet is).

This data is not from the FAA, but from ADSBExchange, which crowdsources the data.

It’s funny how even despite the fact I didn’t address this situation here to try to speak generally people inevitably found there way back to Musk - but the entire point of doxxing is you take public information and repackage it and focus it in a way to help target an individual. Just because the FAA publishes flight information doesn’t imply they are doxxing someone, if someone built a custom app to track everything a specific famous person was doing including this FAA data, that would be closer to what doxxing actually is.

There seems to be at least somewhat of a reasonable difference between saying "X person is at [x,y,z]" and "A vehicle owned by Y Corp is at [x,y,z]." These seem to me to be in completely different categories.

Sure, I get that Musk and his plane are probably inseparable, but it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.

I have absolutely no problem with a website like Twitter banning free speech like "where's musk's plane," since it is his website and he can do what he wants. As long as it isn't the government forcing a private party to say or not say something, then meh I don't really mind. In fact, I think Musk's comment about "as long as it isn't real-time location" is a pretty decent compromise.

I do wish he wouldn't be such a hypocrite about it, and I definitely wish people would stop acting like he is some free-speech absolutist hero, which he is definitely not.

Bottom line is: You can't claim to be a free speech absolutist and only apply that absolutism to platform far right politicians and Nazis.

Correct I believe that’s literally where the term came from - it’s aggregating the full set of accessible information about a person into a document for sharing it and helping people locate them in meatspace.

Ohhh

> document for sharing

Google "Docs"-ing.

Now I get it.

Most doxxing is just taking public info found by a 2 second Google search given the right starting point.

There are countless videos of people screaming in fast food restaurants. If someone recognizes that area, looks up public addresses in the vicinity, and finds a name match, from there you can easily get a phone number, work place, etc.

Doxxing is less about information acquisition and more about intentions and location in which it’s shared. Angry mob posting online about some evil person in a video and you find the target’s address just by looking up their license plate? Most communities will ban you for doxxing if you post that info.

Aren't there public sex offender registries in the US?

> It’s widely considered doxxing if you republish public information that makes it easy to find a person’s actual location.

I know where 14 Premiership managers (and could probably have a good guess at ~150 Premiership players) are going to be on Boxing Day, with exact locations for a specific time range. Is that doxxing them?

Technically, maybe, but it also sounds a lot like a form of doxing. Where people live is not some highly classified secret, but collecting that data about people on a large scale, or posting it online, is not okay. In the same way, posting the whereabouts of someone's personal private plane[0] is not so different from posting their whereabouts when they're using a different form of transportation, and could be considered stalking.

[0] It sucks that personal private planes are even a thing, but that's a different issue.

> not so different from posting their whereabouts when they're using a different form of transportation

As someone pointed out over in Fedi-land, this would be broad enough to cover sports fixtures because you know where players are going to be (live location) and you know how they're likely going to get there (coach from local hotels if you're a UK footballer).

Presence at a specific public event with an audience specifically to see them, is not the same thing as constantly tracking and publishing someone's whereabouts.

> Presence at a specific public event with an audience specifically to see them

But that's not what was said - there was no exception carved out for that.

The location of a private plane is also not the same as publishing an individual's whereabouts.

The solution to people knowing the location of your private plane is really simple: Don't own a private plane. Most of us are already doing it.

> Don't own a private plane.

That is of course the better solution. There's something perverse about the entire concept of a private plane.

Still, as much as I dislike his descent into madness, I do understand Musk's safety concerns here.

Well, due to the Streisand effect if there was a safety concern before it is now magnified.

Yes and the location of a private plane does not publish someone's whereabouts. It's a freaking plane! That's about as accurate with respect to his whereabouts as Elon Musks home address (likely significantly less accurate).

But nobody is "constantly tracking and publishing his whereabouts".

The information published is not constant: it is published only when a plane takes off or lands.

The information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle

It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.

> The information published is not constant: it is published only when a plane takes off or lands.

> the information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle

So would you be comfortable with someone publishing the location of your car every time you get in your car?

Of course the location of your car isn't public, only its ownership. But the location of your house is. So what if someone publishes every time someone enters or leaves your home? I think that would be a pretty dramatic violation of privacy.

> It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.

No, because nobody is flying jets for an audience outside that jet. Except maybe at air shows and the like. It's the audience that makes it a public event, not the fact that it happens outside and is not secret.

That would be a pretty stupid argument to make. Is it one you are seriously putting forward?

Cars are required to carry license plates, that doesn't mean that using a crowdsourced license plate reader to track and publish the live location of the car isn't a massive invasion of privacy.

Please stop arguing for legitimizing surveillance because you hate some rich white guy.

None of us here are going to have private jet money, so stop dreaming as if these privacy rules on jets is ever going to apply to you, as if we're laying down how privacy should work from first principles. Billionaires live by another set of rules from the rest of us. It's about time any of those rules actually went against them.

People are arguing to normalize the destruction of privacy by saying that data being "public" means that anyone should be allowed to aggregate and publish that data.

I think there are reasons why we should allow aggregating and publishing plane location data, (though a time delay does seem reasonable.) Those reasons have nothing to do the data being "already public" and are based on the value transparency and accountability outweighing the loss of privacy.

However, when people argue that the loss of privacy doesn't exist or doesn't matter, they help undermine expectations of privacy in other areas.

The available flight information does not identify anyone.

I can go on one of those websites, see all those flights, but I have no idea who they belong to or who's on board.

That changes once someone specifically links a private jet to someone.

Within the EU I'd be interested in the ramifications with regards to the GDPR.

none whatsoever.

the linking is done simply by looking up who the plane is registered to, and that is also public information.

you can of course always go the other way, look who owns a plane, and the go to flight information from there.

there is nothing private about any of the information used in the process.

> none whatsoever

I would ponder the GDPR's definition of personal data before making such definitive claim.

This all plays out in the USA.

Understood but irrelevant to my point/question.

The GDPR only applies to businesses, not individuals. So, clearly in this case it does not apply at all since the person behind @ElonJet is acting in an individual capacity.

https://dataprivacymanager.net/who-does-the-eu-gdpr-apply-to...

> The GDPR only applies to businesses, not individuals.

That's not true.

"The GDPR only applies to businesses"

No.

The GDPR applies to everyone, except "by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity", member states and some authorities.

Later in same article:

> Musk has also apparently requested, via the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), that his plane not be tracked on third-party sites like FlightAware ... “This aircraft is on the the FAA blocklist meaning it is not allowed to be displayed to the general public,” a FlightAware spokesperson said in an email to Motherboard. “This is something that all 3rd party trackers do usually follow as a list is sent out every month."

Well, ADS-B Exchange still has his plane listed as you can see from the second link. So while that sounds like it could have been the case at one point, it does not seem to be the case right now.

I assume they are referring to the blocklist described here: https://www.faa.gov/pilots/ladd

> ADS-B Out transmits flight data directly from the aircraft to internet vendors not participating in the LADD program. Non-participating internet vendors collect and post all ADS-B Out flight data on the internet. To address ADS-B Out privacy concerns, the FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program to improve the privacy of eligible aircraft.

ADSBExchange does not participate in the program that the blocklist is part of. They even cover this on their homepage

https://www.adsbexchange.com/

> First and foremost ADS-B Exchange does not participate in the filtering performed by most other flight tracking websites which do not share data on military or certain private aircraft. Because ADS-B Exchange does not use any FAA data there are no FAA BARR/LADD, military, or other “filters” preventing you from seeing the the data you collected. ADS-B Exchange simply does not accept payment or requests to remove aircraft from public tracking!

LADD is only one system, that adsbexchange doesn't use, but PIA still applies to them. Once the ICAO number changes the link the person posted above will no longer point to Elon's jet. You'd have to again have someone in person at the airport to deanonymize the jet.

ADSB Exchange can't get around ICAO anonymizing just by looking at the transponder data.

I'd imagine you could deanonymize easily enough just by seeing "ID A enters airport, ID B exits the airport" in logs.

His aircraft is not in the PIA programme. Which renders his complaints somewhat hollow.

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