Planes receive mysterious false midair collision alerts near Reagan Airport | Hacker News Reader

Planes receive mysterious false midair collision alerts near Reagan Airport

cnn.com

8 pointshackernj6 comments

It's almost like somebody's happy to start flexing new signals equipment, perhaps some actor with lots of recent experience screwing around with commercial flight navigation.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/trump-russia...

Or maybe someone with a vested interest in making it look like the FAA is incompetent and air traffic control is dangerously flawed and needs a company to take over the work? https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/27/business/elon-musk-faa-air-tr...

On further consideration, por que no los dos, with mutual cooperation and interest?

> A person familiar with the matter who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity said analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency.

I am starting to think that corruptible admin officials are doing this to benefit foreign actors, for what should be an amazing sum.

Traitors are often surprisingly cheap, considering the risks. Robert Hanssen only got $1.4M for fifteen years of top-level spying.

I wonder how much of that is due to, er, negative incentives: "Do us a favor, and we'll give you some money, but more importantly we won't anybody about the other favors you've been doing for us and money you've got stashed away. For now."

That's why background-checks are so important: Properly done, it's not about finding virtuous employees at all, but just ensuring there's no blackmail material that an enemy could use to open up that cascade of ever-growing favors that become blackmail for the next favor.

Hmm I hope they drove their car around the perimeter and tried localizing someone with a HackRF.

Another explanation is that they added the black hawk as a static signal to avoid future crashes.

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