ICE uses celebrity loophole to hide deportation flights | Hacker News Reader

ICE uses celebrity loophole to hide deportation flights

jacobin.com

141 pointsJKCalhoun34 comments

All politics aside, I want to note that this is not a “little known” thing and I’ve never seen it talked about as a “loophole.”

I’m a pilot, I know hundreds more pilots. Most individuals who own a plane (even a Cessna that costs less than a car) know about and often use this program.

It’s very much well known in the aviation community. And outside of that I’d say it would be more surprising to people that the general public can track any aircraft public or private! (Imagine everyone’s car being able to be real time tracked by license plate by anyone anytime)

Now, bringing some politics in, it does feel like aircraft movement for the purpose of public government use should be documented and available.

> Imagine everyone’s car being able to be real time tracked by license plate by anyone anytime)

Except ... every plane is being tracked in real time by the FAA (or other aeronautical organizations) for the good of both those on the plane and those around it.

The question is not whether such tracking happens or not, but merely whether the data is publically available. The analogy with cars would require that someone is actually tracking car positions, which as far as we know is not happening at any significant scale.

Exactly right. That’s what I’m saying. The tracking itself for air traffic control purposes has an obvious good purpose. The side effect that any random public individual can access this from their couch does not.

So, perhaps to reword my “imagine:” imagine the government required a tracker on every car, AND that data would be available to anyone in the entire world who wants it at anytime with no restrictions whatsoever.

> Exactly right. That’s what I’m saying. The tracking itself for air traffic control purposes has an obvious good purpose.

Except there often exists tracking even when ATC is not involved, e.g., a VFR flight.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Access_Transceiver

* https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/researc...

I’m aware thank you. When I say air traffic I don’t mean exclusively ATC, I mean generally for all parties involved in air traffic (such as other pilots in the air). I don’t think such a use case exists for any person in the entire world on their couch.

> The tracking itself for air traffic control purposes has an obvious good purpose.

There's probably a way that the system could achieve the same safety benefits without invading privacy. Obviously, this FAA list is part of that. But there's probably even better tech that could achieve this too.

I'm not an aviation expert so I'll leave the details to those people. But we should be trying to find ways to improve the privacy of this system.

Give it time and people will try to justify real time tracking of all car traffic for "safety" reasons too...

> There's probably a way that the system could achieve the same safety benefits without invading privacy.

Probably, but the FAA and aviation in general leans towards "use the dumbest, most reliable technology possible" (for good reason, this isn't a dig at that). A relatively cheap wing-attachable beacon that beep boops on a frequency with no handshakes, encryption, etc. is one of the simplest possible thing.

Look at the fact that piston engines in aircraft still use magnetos and manual mixture controls. :) There's a ton of literature on that, we've had real world examples of more reliable alternatives, and yet... Luckily magento replacements such as SureFly are making some headway (after long, long long last). But they're a tiny tiny part of aviation today.

Yes. A good example is the continued use of AM modulation for aviation radio. While bandwidth inefficient, the failure modes of AM modulation are easy to understand and predictable, which is good for safety.

But, even then, there may still be something clever that can be done to improve privacy without something as heavy-weight as, say, encryption. We should be open to the possibility.

I'm not into aviation, but if this is about planes broadcasting their position publicly, I would imagine it's beneficial not just for the traffic control towers, but also for other pilots flying around in the area that can receive those signals, in case they're ever not within range of a working tower. It works as a redundancy option, for safety.

It also works in case there's unlicensed, radio-silent flyers, which is bad, but you turn a bad situation worse if they can't get info on what other aircraft they might bump into.

The unencrypted broadcasting of their position is like a trailer beeping as they're backing up. It's an alert for others to pay attention to them and stay out of their way.

At the bottom of the article, it’s noted that lawmakers very recently removed the ability to determine the owner of a tail number.

Thanks! That's a good step.

There was this funny Twitter account that was posting when dictators visited Geneve airport, but looks like it is taken down

https://x.com/gva_watcher

Cars are being tracked at significant scale. Police and private entities commonly use ALPR systems and that data gets fed back to the manufacturer for resale on the capitalist surveillance market. Combine that with an IMSI catcher and you can derive identities without access to the license plate database. This works in conjunction with vehicles that have cellular modems sending GPS position to the manufacturer, for resale, and phones that send GPS position to the network operator, for resale. The non-flying public is extensively tracked.

You’re a pilot, you can probably think of some differences in the way aircraft operate versus roadcraft, that makes tracking them a much more reasonable proposition.

> It’s very much well known in the aviation community

Do you think the article is speaking primarily to the "aviation community"?

Why am I still surprised that the wealthy have special laws just for their privacy?

It seems though that simple elimination would reveal the "flights we're not supposed to know about". Or perhaps we'll get actual human "plane spotters" around the airports to log these radio-silent flights.

The flights aren't radio silent, as that would result in significant safety risks. They have just been put on an ignorelist which is voluntarily honored by most commercial flight tracking websites, like FlightRadar24[0].

However, nothing is stopping you from creating your own flight detection network which doesn't follow the ignorelist. A well-known one is the volunteer-run ADS-B Exchange[1].

[0]: https://www.flightradar24.com

[1]: https://www.adsbexchange.com/

It doesn’t look like an ignore list to me. See “FAA Source” blocking here: https://www.faa.gov/pilots/ladd

Super easy to setup your own for under 50 bucks. Plus if you feed to the tracking sites many give you pro/business accounts in exchange.

> Why am I still surprised that the wealthy have special laws just for their privacy?

The status quo is you or I can travel without significant non-government privacy concerns, as we blend into the crowd of millions of normal air travelers. Celebrities can't do that, as they get noticed by the public. Keeping the movements of their planes private just helps celebrities get to enjoy a similar level of privacy as the rest of us. I see nothing wrong with that.

Furthermore, it's good that celebrities value their privacy. Everyone should. We can all members of society to value privacy and for those values to filter down into laws that also protect it.

When you're a celebrity, you can't have a cake and eat it too.

For many celebrities being famous and having no privacy is not a choice but rather an unwanted feature. Doesn’t mean that in order to fulfill your dream of being a top actor you have now to be at peace and accept all the paparazzi and fans.

Also, while not as relevant to the OP's post, remember that not everyone is famous and rich. I'm not rich. But I did get a degree of fame due to that ridiculous HBO documentary falsely accusing me of being Satoshi.

I'm not happy with the level of travel privacy out there and it would be definitely in my interests for it to be better. I have a very real risk that someone thinks I'm Satoshi and tries to track me down to get billions in BTC that I don't have.

What are you talking about? Since when can the general public travel in privacy?

My name is Peter Todd. I am a Canadian.

Tell me, where am I right now? I traveled there recently.

Governments certainly can find out that information, as my recent flights are recorded in lots of databases accessible to the. But it's much harder for non-government entities not directly involved in the travel to find this out due to privacy laws (particularly in the EU).

It has always been the case that the US was operated primarily for the benefit of those with capital, what is perhaps more novel is that where once economic growth was a 90-10 split between those who already had so much and those labouring, increasingly it's 100-0 or even worse, and so then there's no reason those doing the labour to achieve that growth ought to engage, better surely to eliminate the oppressors and reform the system. You would have to be really stupid to cause that but then, look at the people who did it, checks out.

Isn't the motto "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide?"

Might you have meant to type "Rules are for thee, but not for me"?

Oh, they definitely know they’ve done something wrong.

So there's a published list of aircraft that are trying to hide, but are still broadcasting their identity over the radio everywhere they go, while there's a whole hobby community receiving and sharing those broadcasts.

Interesting approach.

This is one of the worst written articles I've read in a while. It feels like a confused jumble of the authors personal grievances, clambering over each other trying to be heard. It's repetitive and mixes facts and opinion. I read through half the article before it got to discussing the point and even then I still have no clue what the author is talking about. Is it ICE? Is it evil celebrities? Is it the sinister Jet Lobby? Or is it something else entirely?

Agreed, it’s bad form to comment about this but good god is this writing bad. It’s like the first 5 paragraphs were repeating the same thing and only changing the wording

Do you have any specific criticism? Or are you just bloviating?

This part caught my attention: "People being flown out of the country by ICE are frequently shackled for the duration of the journey...". It made me think on how America was built: people forcibly put in shackles and brought in, from another continent, to work for free (for some), then other people shackled, when no longer of use (to some), when forcibly moved out.

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