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Comment by closewith | Hacker News Reader

While I broadly agree, I think the era of general freely available data such as aircraft movements is about to end. We're entering an era of siloes.

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I agree with your conclusion, but I'm really curious to know your reasons & predictions here. Can you elaborate?

The DOGE guy doesn't like it because people were tracking his plane and he also happens to be replacing FAA stuff with his starlink (which deorbits every 4 years and now will have more govt propping it up and guaranteeing redeployments, if the military stuff didn't already do that).

As long as I can stick a 1090 MHz ADS-B antenna on my roof and listen to transponders as they pass overhead (which I currently do), at least some data will be out there.

If your locale were to escalate to wartime-like measures for some reason (because of real threats, or some crazy/rogue leadership), couldn't recording aircraft movements and transmissions be suspicious, and sharing that data be suspected spying/treason?

Probably but then you'd have more pressing problems than just getting some flight statistics.

Also military planes on active war missions don't broadcast ADS-B for obvious reasons. We do sometimes see them on training missions though. Most platforms block them but ADS-B Exchange doesn't.

If anything, commercial / civilian planes would have ADS-B enabled near warzones so that those with anti-air know to avoid them. Didn't work for MH-17 though.

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