The government is making it more difficult to track private aircraft travel | Hacker News Reader

The government is making it more difficult to track private aircraft travel

popsci.com

133 pointsspeckx94 comments

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Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40444795

"Folks over at Bluesky dug into the specific language of the reauthorization bill and found it was inserted by Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas."

It's always funny (both haha and sad) to me which sacrificial lamb the parties convince to push something like this forward. It signals so much about their intent. If they wanted lots of coverage, they would pick a much more recognized person within the party as a champion to push something forward. For stuff they want to sneak in, they pick someone much more obscure. This protects the more recognized from catching any blow back. This poor guy is probably barely known in his home state, so he's probably using it as a "happy just to be mentioned" type of coverage.

Rep. Westerman is fairly senior.

He's the Chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources - the Committee that gives authorization for mining, drilling, and land use.

He is also holding Tom Cotton's former House Seat, a former Majority leader of the Arkansas State House (the first Republican one in Arkansas since the 19th century), and will most likely replace Senator Boozman when he retires.

Aka, he's upper level in the hierarchy of the House GOP.

Most likely, Walmart leadership (Bentonville is in Westerman's constituency) lobbied for this as private flight data is often used in competitive intel.

Mike Johnson is the Speaker of the House, but before the chaos that put him in that spot, who here would have known his name and/or been able to pick him out of a line up. I bet there are people in his home state that wouldn't be able to do that too. Even if they are a "senior" member, which I'm only familiar with being used to reference senators, I know that I don't know every single representative from my state. There's too many of them, and the ones I do know that aren't my rep are probably because of some asshattery they were in the news from doing. It's not like senators where there's only two of them.

I'm contesting this point:

> If they wanted lots of coverage, they would pick a much more recognized person within the party as a champion to push something forward. For stuff they want to sneak in, they pick someone much more obscure

Most laws are added this way. It just feels sneaky because most people don't follow the daily goings-on in the House or Senate.

And if there was some "they" that was worried about blowback, they would have given it to a freshman Rep instead of a ranked member.

Finally, public notoriety =/= power within the house.

For example, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar is fairly notorious, but they are unranked members. Meanwhile, similarly junior Raja Krishnamoorthi was able to get a ranked position on a select committee as well as be a member of highly ranked committees like House Intelligence and Oversight.

Not everything is a conspiracy, and following politics for entertainment is dumb if you don't actually know how our institutions work.

Even among representatives from north Louisiana that I had heard of (I live in the southern part) I hadn't heard of him.

> Most likely, Walmart leadership (Bentonville is in Westerman's constituency) lobbied for this as private flight data is often used in competitive intel.

Bentonville is in the 3rd, which is Steve Womack's district.

You're right! Thanks for the correction!

As I understand it House Members just like the UK's MPs win single member elections, so Bruce is literally the guy some people in Arkansas picked, he's not just somebody on a list picked by the Republican Party in DC.

Thus it's a failure of collective democratic responsibility if you're not picking the people you actually want. My friends lived in Vauxhall when Kate Hoey was its MP, which again makes no sense. Kate is pro-gun, anti-gay, anti-Europe even on a good day her interests don't align well with those of Vauxhall voters. So the way Kate was winning those elections is that she's the Labour candidate (was, she left of course because she's a terrible fit) and those voters are voting for the party symbol not the candidate. This is how your representative democracy rots from the inside.

I actually had this dilemma when I last voted.

I was deciding on who to vote for. I liked through all the political parties and picked one.

I liked the overall party platform. I liked the first and second candidate in my district, but the third candidate's description on the party website read like a caricature of an online radical feminist. (She seemed so out of place for the party because she had recently switched parties.)

I debated whether I should even vote for the party, because I did not want her to get elected. After looking at some previous results and electoral math I realized that it's very unlikely that she could get elected.

I think maybe you're misinterpreting what I've stated. I'm only saying that the national party is picking from the list of current congress critters to propose trial balloons. However, the national party will help someone get elected if they feel it is a race that needs the extra attention.

You acted as though nobody knows who this guy is. I doubt that, but if it's true that is itself a problem, regardless of which bills he did or did not propose/ vote for/ etc and that was my point. You should know who your representative is, even if you vehemently disagree with them on most topics - a party in possibly distant DC is too big to get your head around, your representative is just a person, like you, and given how important their role is you should make sure you have some idea who they are.

He's being hyperbolic because Arkansas only has 4 districts and the local residents probably know him [and he's a "local boy" from Hot Springs, Arkansas, so he's likely pretty popular]. But his district isn't the 2nd which is most of Little Rock, or the 3rd which is Fort Smith, Fayetteville, Springdale, and Bentonville. I don't think I know any of the cities in his district.

>It's always funny (both haha and sad) to me which sacrificial lamb the parties convince to push something like this forward.

Driving up to their home with a dump truck full of money tends to get the desired results.

Sounds like a stalking horse?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking_horse

I'm not sure I buy the comparison to Internet privacy. The comparison to cell phone tracking elsewhere in the comments is better.

It's bad enough that the government has relatively trivial access to cellphone tracking data, but if it was publicly available, that would be pretty disastrous on a lot of fronts.

Yes, this is a law that only protects rich people, but it's also a problem that only affects rich people, and I'm pretty comfortable saying that it is a problem.

As long as not too much money or effort is being diverted to this (and therefore away from the hundreds of more important problems), I just really can't get that worked up over it.

> I'm pretty comfortable saying that it is a problem.

On what evidence?

The fact that I think it's wrong for the public to be able to trivially track anyone? I think the capacity is a bad thing. I also think it would be bad as I stated if the public could trivially track poor people. I thought I made that pretty clear in my comment. I don't understand what it is you're asking evidence for. It's clearly a thing that can be done, this the existence is this bill. And I'm making an argument that morally that is wrong.

You're free to disagree with my moral judgment, and I'm sure many people do, but it's not really a thing that requires evidence.

What do you think are the negative consequences of private flight data being publicly available?

"The fact that I think it's wrong for the public to be able to trivially track anyone?"

It's not "anyone", it's people with a lot of social and economic power, that through their means of transportation does a lot more damage to society and our habitat than most people that get sentenced for a crime in the courts.

If it gets public that you smoked some weed or did some oxy without a physician signing off on it then it should obviously be public that you are rich, and that you refuse to mingle with the plebs and instead fart out tons and tons of carbon dioxide.

>The fact that I think it's wrong for the public to be able to trivially track anyone?

Does that extend to preventing private individuals, well heeled individuals being able to sic private investigators on whoever they like, or the government trivially tracking someone?

Because if it doesn't, I find your POV repulsive. There can be no reciprocal equality if you specifically orchestrate the blinding of the public to the comings and goings of those in power.

As a non-rich person, I would find it highly problematic if everyone could track my whereabouts, and I think it’s fair to say that it’s a privacy problem more broadly.

This is more about principles of privacy and reasonable expectations than some form of specific evidence.

Being rich doesn't compel you to use private jets for travel. There are plenty other modes of transportation available. In fact, I'd argue being rich affords you a greater choice.

The necessity of private jets is beside the point.

At issue is whether or not tracking private travel should be accessible to everyone with an internet connection.

Most people would not be ok with tracking private vehicles, and it’s unclear why this should change when the mode of transportation is a plane instead of a car.

Well, rich and poor people are equally subject to tracking when they travel in their private jets. That seems fair. They can use untracked modes of travel like public transit or cars.

We're okay with tracking planes. It's unclear why this should change when it's privately owned by an individual instead of by an airline.

There are actually plenty of reasons we might want to treat air traffic different, regardless of who's on board or who owns the plane. Whether it's because planes are significantly less private by nature of being very noisy and visible (i.e. there's less of an expectation of privacy because you're being very public), or because they're a greater risk to everyone because they're in the air and full of fuel (i.e. you have a legitimate interest to know whether one might fly near you).

planes pose significantly more public safety risk, and therefore higher levels of accountability in their operation are appropriate. I can't accidentally blow up a building with my toyota camry, but a pilot with poor training or decision making can do it with a large enough private jet. if a pilot is piloting inappropriately, we need the tools to quickly figure out which aircraft it is and report it.

How do you imagine somebody like Taylor Swift or Elon Musk could actually travel?

I, for one, would not want to be anywhere near any airport or train station that they were at. The insane security required, crowds of psycho fans and overall disruption to everybody else would cause massive headaches.

Cars and ships work I guess, but they're extremely slow, not that much more efficient on a per-mile basis, and organizing the security for somebody like that would still be a logistical nightmare.

I’d like to learn more about what the problem is exactly

Fly commercial. Problem solved.

Hypothetically, let’s say all private car locations were tracked and visible to everyone.

“Take public transit: problem solved” does not alleviate the privacy concern.

It's fairly common in the US that people of public interest have fewer privacy protections than your average citizen (the public figure doctrine).

I - and many others - believe that these public figures should be held accountable for their actions due to their outsized influence on society. Holding someone accountable for their actions requires transparency, something this law removes.

The courts have actually ruled that billionaires are inherently “public figures”, for exactly this reason, their “outsized impact and influence on public affairs”.

I'm surprised to see agreement, even just in principle, with this amendment.

If you think this is OK, are you just against ADS-B altogether?

I have serious qualms about someone flying a 23,500lb hunk of metal, laden with volatile and explosive fuel, over my community without needing to publicly report telemetry and flight plan details in plaintext.

First it was the cops, and now rich people.

Allowing certain privileged groups to keep this information between them and the state seems likely to lead to outcomes where they can behave poorly and then be able to lie or "get their story straight" before being honest with the public. Which makes incidents more likely altogether.

I think that accountability in aviation is very healthy for a technologically advanced society, and these moves seem like a step backward.

>I have serious qualms about someone flying a 23,500lb hunk of metal, laden with volatile and explosive fuel, over my community without needing to publicly report telemetry and flight plan details in plaintext.

But none of that requires a fixed identifier linked to the publicly-accessible airframe registry, right?

What are your thoughts on the 80,000lb semi trucks, laden with (admittedly less) volatile and explosive fuel, driving through your community without needing to publicly report telemetry and routing details?

Well, semi trucks are required to have license plates, and if they are for commercial purposes, the information on the licensee can be obtained easily.

It wouldn't bother me if they were required to transmit this information via radio, though of course for ground vehicles one can simply visually look at the plate number (something impossible to do for an erratically flying aircraft, at least without a killer zoom lens and tripod).

And then, for DOT hazmat licensing, which is perhaps more comparable to a private jet in terms of risk, the registration requirements are quite stringent, and including prominent display of DOT hazmat labels, as well as licensing information which is of course public.

It seems to me that private jets just became far more opaque than semi trucks, relative to their transport mode.

Private jets are required to paint 12" high registration markings on both sides of their fuselage. Owner data is public record, although often obscured by holding corporations. The data used to contain SSNs if you can imagine it.

I'm unclear what jet aviation risk we are equating to hazmat ground transport. It's not raining aluminum very often, and it's a news frenzy when it does happen.

Every time I read "private jets should X" I can only ever boil it down to envy or "because I have the right to know", which I personally don't agree with. I seldom see things like "transporting that organ to its transplant patient via light jet is so carbon intensive -- why not use passenger aircraft cargo instead?" or other more nuanced takes.

For some, I imagine the opacity is worth the frightful cost of private aviation. I don't know what it is like to have millions of fans trying to figure out where I am at every waking moment, and the very idea is horrifying. I don't think any valid purpose is served by knowing where <star du jour>'s jet takes off from or lands at, and I don't think anyone is honestly looking skyward to FL410 and worrying about an aircraft part landing on them.

From other conversations about this topic, I thought it was interesting that the congresscritter who advanced the legislation is from the Bentonville AR region -- and crafty investors have tracked Walton jets to figure out where the high-level Walmart business meetings are happening, then making inferences about upcoming stock-moving deals. I thought that was fascinating. Humans are crafty, and humans with means who want privacy will find it, despite any number of laws passed. It all feels like wasted whack-a-mole effort to me.

Lol, once upon a time Dick Cheney used to disappear from travel logs by doing the opposite: traveling first class commercial like a "normal" person. He didn't even claim the costs as expenses so as to avoid any publicly-accessible records of his travel. A relative of mine ran into him, and his security detail, on a small aircraft flying out of Hartford.

So we're saying that the reason jets should be able to be tracked by anyone, in real time, is so we can enable targeted moral shaming? Everyone, regardless of wealth or mode of transportation should have the right to not be publicly real-time tracked. Let's find more constructive ways to solve our larger scale societal problems than to fall back on mob rule.

> Everyone, regardless of wealth or mode of transportation should have the right to not be publicly real-time tracked.

I think that's the point. There are data brokers selling information right now on everyone's whereabouts, travel patterns, shopping behavior, and many other data points. This happens essentially any time you interact with electronics that can send and receive data.

Going about data privacy legislation in this way is ridiculous. It's like if you had a clogged toilet in your house, you just continued to let it flood because you can build a ramp over the water to get to your private jet and take a dump in that toilet instead.

I think the outrage stems from wealthy people having their issue fixed by congress in a timely fashion, when regular people feel like they cannot catch a break.

Housing, Inflation, Healthcare, are all a mess but this problem gets fixed right away.

> The U.S. yet yet to pass even a basic internet-era privacy law

Nitpick, but even the first sentence in the article is nonsense. Doesn’t anyone proofread anymore? Let alone read even the first sentence before publishing?

At least that way you know it's not written by an LLM...

If I wanted to give my AI headline-writer software typos, I bet there's a simple algorithm for that. Letter missing, letter doubling, transposition, and nearby-qwerty keys. Of course, you'd need a separate algo for brain farts (their/there/they're and whatnot), but I think I could make something for that too. The sad truth is that it's not worth it to anyone to go to the trouble just to spare us the insult to our intelligence.

Just ask the LLM to slip in one common typo or swap in an incorrect homophone, no need for a "separate algo" for what is just a single instruction.

You could probably just tell the LLM to make random spelling and grammar mistakes in its output, as if it was a news writer in a hurry.

Because they do so well at randomness?

They do, yes.

> Doesn’t anyone proofread anymore?

If the headline got you to click than the article has completed it's job. The other 500 words are just to make you not feel scammed.

its :)

You're saying you've never ever made a typo in anything you've published?

It's almost universally agreed that you can proof read all you want, but has soon as you hit publish you'll spot at least one mistake.

Even HN gives you a two hour grace period to edit the contents of your post.

which federal privacy law were you thinking of?

Can you name one federal law passed in the last 20 years regarding online privacy? I work in this space and genuinely cannot think of one, but would glad to be corrected.

Edit: misunderstood the comment I was replying to, haven't had coffee yet

There's a double word (yet) in the quote.

The fact that you feel like you have to point this out just shows how you're missing the point that nobody cares. Yes, it is a silly mistake to make, but it doesn't negate the intent of the sentence. Harping on it just as a take down comment on a post is just immature.

If this was a post or even just a thread on the lack of editorial process with in today's online media, then we could nitpick the use (or not) of the Oxford comma, the emdash vs endash vs hyphon vs ellipses vs parantheticals. We could even pontificate on the grammar like the selected sentence structure, use of single long sentence as an entire paragraph, the use of capitalization of all the letters or just the first letter in an acronym for a name like Nasa vs NASA. Alas, that's not what this is, so there's a saying that comes to mind about time and place or even picking your battles.

...somehow you managed to write more words than all the threads in this branch combined.

I wanted to definitely end it

Agreed, but then again, you see a stupid sentence like this later in the article:

> Jack Sweeney, the jet tracking student who made Elon Musk cry like a baby

– and realize, wait, I'm not really sure this is any kind of legitimate news source.

I'll wait for a more accurate article without all the editorializing.

The Original Posting here linked to a TechDirt analysis piece; that piece is meaningfully different from the current PopSci link.

The entirety of the PoPSci article begins and ends with the Protect-Jet-Owners'-Privacy law. The TechDirt article uses that law to refresh public attention about US Gov's disinterest in protecting the privacy of all Americans - which is a massively larger and much more important issue.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/29/the-u-s-finally-passes-a...

When you're rich, you can skirt laws by paying cops, courts and lawyers as cost of business.

When you're super rich, you have lunch with politicians and they change the laws for you.

I think if all your data broker data was logged and tracked on twitter it would be a congressional priority.

Wealthy people use youtube and tiktok too.

Privacy guys win another battle. Good for them, I suppose. Bit by bit, public information is protected.

Poor jet owners too.

I mean a) this is the right thing to do. b) it’s pathetic that this can be accomplished yet cell location tracking and and ALPRS data has not been addressed

The objection should really be not that this was passed--and, yes, the people involved could probably layer on some LLCs if they wanted to obfuscate as I assume corporations tend to. But that there is really a ton of personal data available to the obsessive, especially if they're willing to spend a few dollars.

> it’s pathetic

I think the word you're looking for is "corrupt". The interests of people who can afford private jets are obviously taking precedence over the interests of the rest of us.

This is a toxic post by someone peeved about not being to stalk people of affluence. There are other ways to address emissions attributed to private jets, such as taxes, while respecting people's privacy.

"People of affluence" what does this mean?

It's recently (last few years?) become popular in some crowds to replace "_____ people" with "people of _____". It's based on the theory that the former implies an inherent trait while the latter implies a current status. (It's also of course become popular in other crowds to mock this construction by using it in ways that its original proponents would presumably object to.)

Considering tech billionaires got rich by destroying our privacy, why do only they deserve a law protecting their privacy?

The same way children and women get special laws related to crimes that disproportionately affect them...

How do you tell me you have no empathy for people higher up the status latter than you without telling me you have no empathy for people higher up the status ladder than you?

I think it's foolish to have empathy for people that have no empathy for me. I don't want to be tracked. A lot of very wealthy people have made their career (and fortune) off of tracking me against my will. Why would I care about their desire not to be tracked now?

If they can afford a private jet they can afford a security detail. Yes, my empathy is limited at problems they can solve for themselves but choose not to, instead taking something from the rest of us.

This is asinine. Flying in a private plane is a choice. Being a woman or a child is not.

Nice victim blaming. Wearing that dress was a choice too.

Maybe don't be a creepy piece of crap.

Billionaires are not a protected class subject to undue discrimination.

>How do you tell me you have no empathy for people higher up the status latter than you without telling me you have no empathy for people higher up the status ladder than you?

Why should I have empathy for those who exploit me for their own personal gain?

You don't need to empathize. You simply need to respect privacy. People have lost privacy, and that's an issue to address directly rather than take privacy away from others.

Everyone's foaming at the mouth so hard to eat the rich that they don't mind eating themselves to get there.

...which is exactly how all of their revolutions have gone in practice...

Jealousy is a powerful intoxicant.

Right, but the biggest advocates for the destruction of privacy are the ones who just received legal protection for their private jets. They're getting protection for what they got rich destroying for the rest of us.

I don't understand why this is so difficult to understand.

Zuckerberg and his ilk got rich destroying my privacy, but somehow it's unseemly for me to not respect their privacy? Privacy for me but not for thee?

I don't fucking think so.

the carbon shaming of celebrities seems to tap into a sort of “sneer at the rich” morality that is very attractive to the masses and thus is probably effective at motivating people to pass things like carbon taxes

Some of those people of affluence hold opinions like this:

> “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Moreover the companies many of them operate are more than happy to stalk people for ad dollars. So... I'm not sure why we're going out of our way to protect them specifically.

I've always considered the trade-off to be more straightforward: If you're going to fly a multi-ton vehicle over my head without me having the right to tell you to get the hell out of the property I own ("from hell to sky" is the traditional parcel of land owned in the English common law system), then at the very least I should have the right to know who you are.

The government took our property rights to build airspace as a common highway, and we ought to get something out of further taking.

That's an interesting argument, but why do you not have the right to know who is driving next to you on a road yet claim to have the right to know who is flying above?

I don't have a traditional property right to the road next to my owned land parcel.

I do have a traditional property right to the airspace above my owned land parcel.

That property right was abridged by the formation of the national airspace system, but there were agreements put into place regarding what safeguards people had against other people abusing that new highway. This is an abridgment of those existing agreements.

(... I think the case can be made that it's a reasonable abridgment, but to a first approximation it looks an awful lot like 'forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges' when only the elite can afford private jets).

Great! Maybe this will cause a decrease in the total number of people getting harassed by jerks on the internet.

Interesting that people seem to not like your comment. Isn't harassment and doxxing against the rules around here? What's the principle that disagrees with this statement that doesn't also apply to everything else on site?

The rule is against doxxing and harassment here. That doesn't mean we can't support or advocate for their use elsewhere.

Not that I am trying to do that per se. But just pointing out that HN doesn't & can't really demand ideological commitment to not using specific conflict tactics broadly.

You've misunderstood me, in a way that doesn't make sense as unintentional. Of course I'm not commenting on the rules of HN. Why would I comment in support of a user who just restates those rules then?

Sorry I misunderstood you. It really was not intentional. People state the rules of HN all the time, I really thought that was all you were doing.

> The U.S. yet yet to pass even a basic internet-era privacy law — or regulate data brokers. And while there’s a lot of misdirection and pretense to the contrary, the primary reason is (1) because the U.S. government is too corrupt; and (2) because the U.S. government really enjoys being able to purchase massive amounts of sensitive citizen data from data brokers without having to get a pesky warrant.

No, this is false. There exists, today, a bipartisan proposal for a basic Internet-era privacy law called the American Privacy Rights Act. As Techdirt has covered in the past, advocacy groups like the EFF don't think it should be passed as is, but it's advancing along in the process and may well end up being passed after some amendments.

(Of course, while this information is critical to anyone who cares about internet privacy in the US, it would have made the article less effective as ragebait. Which is why the author didn't include it.)

https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/committee-chairs-rodg...

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/23/any-privacy-law-is-going...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/04/americans-deserve-more...

A "law" has been finalized, passed by both halves of Congress, and ratified. A "bill" is an incomplete proposal at any stage of this process. There is a catchy song [1] to help everyone remember this.

A bill is the same as a pull request that has not yet been merged.

So the statement, "The U.S. [has] yet to pass even a basic internet-era privacy law..." is correct.

In other words: The American Privacy Rights Act is just a bill, yes it's only a bill, and it's sitting there on Capitol Hill...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyeJ55o3El0

The first part of the sentence is right - what's not correct is to blame it on corruption or dysfunction, as though nobody's working on it.

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