How I tracked FBI aerial surveillance | Hacker News Reader

How I tracked FBI aerial surveillance

arstechnica.com

149 pointsGarbage19 comments

It's being talked about like this is a new finding, but it's been discussed on various fora for the better part of a decade.

For example:

http://forums.radioreference.com/547816-post2559.html

The author's quip (while simultaneously claiming to "scoop" this):

"These forums were usually conspiracy/paranoia/gun rights types of sites, but maybe they were right this time."

Well, that's helpful.

Precisely. He found confirmation of something that other people already knew and told him.

The author apparently didn't consider the possibility that those people on the "conspiracy/paranoia/gun rights" sites may have already done the same research that he did.

If one spends enough time in these circles, one can get a pretty good sense of who should be wearing a tinfoil hat, who just seems to be an interested observer and who just might have intelligence service connections.

Separating the wheat from the chaff is often tiresome but some of the people out there know things.

I feel like I documented what I learned from other people and what I discovered myself. Is there something I portrayed inaccurately?

Really, I'm just glad people decided the story of the scope of the FBI aerial surveillance was important enough that they investigated it, and are telling it now. It doesn't matter so much who did it first.

I did enjoy saying I "scooped" AP because for a long time I was unsure whether I had uncovered something real and maybe instead I'd fallen into unreasonable paranoia, and then they came along a month later and confirmed everything I had discovered. But they went far beyond that and did actual reporting, talking to the FBI and digging up documents. I just had an SDR and Google. They're the professionals and did 10x as much work as I did, and got more impressive results.

If you're infuriated by "people talking about things like this is a new finding, but it's been well known for years", you'll LOVE the Hillary Clinton private-email-for-work-business story, which was well-documented in 2013 and ignored until March 2015.

The issue isn't that it's old news, the issue is about how smug the author sounds saying he discovered this himself, when he even documented himself proof that others had already discovered this before.

I'm a self-documented jerk! There, see, I did it again!

The post you linked to has 2 planes that it claims are FBI that used JENNA callsigns. That's 2% of the planes that have been discovered, most of which did not use JENNA callsigns and were discovered by other means. That's one tiny part of the story.

> Well, that's helpful

Did I slight your favorite conspiracy/paranoia/gun rights site?

> Did I slight your favorite conspiracy/paranoia/gun rights site?

Again, helpful. I have no particular interest in any sites you'd consider one of the above, but nice rhetoric.

I was about to take the time to reply to your first point–which is fair and worth talking about–but the trolling afterwards leads me to believe it's fairly unlikely you're interested in discussing it on its merits.

It's all so recursive, man.

That's the Ars re-publishing of a storify post I whipped up in 15 minutes so I could post it here on HN 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9647468

And you can see my initial comment on HN from a month ago where I laid out the beginnings of what I had found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9508812

As far as I know, the list of almost 20 front companies and 100 aircraft is new, but maybe someone can show me where that was published before. And while it might be new, it wasn't actually difficult to come up with, and has at this point been independently compiled 3 or 4 times by different people. (One of the things I tried to do with my post was show how easy it actually was, and hopefully inspire other people to do similar research, or keep going with this story.)

Certainly going years back there were a handful of aircraft mentioned as possibly being FBI, and a couple companies mentioned as being fronts, and there were people claiming that planes squawking 4414 or 4415 or using JENA or JENNA callsigns were doing FBI surveillance, and it was those pieces of information that helped me synthesize the larger context and identify the specific aircraft involved.

Ted Bridis, an AP editor who worked on the AP story that broke the story in the mainstream media, wrote a really awesome comment on reddit that described their investigation and the background of all the fragmented pieces of related info that predated their work, and gives a great illustration of what real journalism is: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/38eoud/im_sam_richard...

> The author apparently didn't consider the possibility that those people on the 'conspiracy/paranoia/gun rights' sites may have already done the same research that he did

Like I said, it would be neat to find that someone had compiled these lists already. If you can find a link, there would be some journalists who would be interested in seeing it.

It's also true that this isn't "new" in the sense that we've known for years that the FBI is doing aerial surveillance, and we could guess at the scale (but we didn't actually know the scale, and now we have some sense of it). But I think now that we see how many planes are involved, how often they're flying over so many cities, and we have lots of screenshots of circular tracks, people (including a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee) feel it more viscerally and aren't necessarily happy about it.

This article by Kashmir Hill is much better than my slapdash post, with context and stuff: http://fusion.net/story/143739/how-you-can-track-the-fbis-sp...

jjwiseman is a user here and quite awesome.

More interesting is the first comment in this URL:

You should have removed the gear when you Photoshopped that picture of a parked F-22. Update: that's the Mojave Desert, and the original photo is of the first 'raptor' prototype parked at Edwards AFB. - qzpdljpn

What photo are you referring to? I don't see an F-22 picture in the Ars link.

Pretty sure they are talking about this article:

http://techti.me/2015/06/04/us-air-force-targets-and-destroy...

Haha, that photoshop is obvious with the landing gear. Thanks!

Good point. When you blow-up the image in Photoshop and see the pixelation around the perimeter of the forward wheel assembly and little elsewhere it does suggest a bad hack job.

And they wouldn't be flying with landing gear out at that altitude.

Seriously. Unless you want something dogging your tail to shoot past and you're outfitted with a very robust landing gear assembly. Doesn't look like those conditions are being met here.

This is an official USAF photo of a F-22 coming in for a landing. What people perceive as "photoshop" is a result of the suns positioning relative to the plane and camera.

original source is here: https://storify.com/jjwiseman/tracking-fbi-aerial-surveillan...

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