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How I found a secret U.S. government aerial surveillance program
Who am I?
John Wiseman
Disney R&D Imagineer
Interested in robotics, natural language processing, drones, aviation
@lemonodor
What is this about?
Tracking police helicopters
Easy to set up for < $100
FA dump1090
Dashboard
Goodyear blimp
Fire in Eagle Rock
LAPD
Burbank & Glendale PD
Sterile Insect Technique
Tour of California TV relay
Chalk 2, Inc.
U-2
U-2 (and Air Cerberus)
C-17 Jedi
San Bernardino Sheriff
Keystone Aerial Surveys
Aperture Aviation (mapping) (Wells Fargo)
Keystone Aerial Surveys (and SIT)
Aerial imagery? (Aeroptic Inc.)
3x military surveillance training
3x military surveillance training
“Air Cerberus”
“Air Cerberus”
Busy day: SIT, 4 different police departments (N420LE)
Busy day: 2x news, 2x LAFD, 2x police, SIT, Air Cerberus
DHS
DHS
DHS, Subject driving 405 north
DHS, Subject driving 10 east
DHS Shift change
2x Silver Creek Aviation (DEA)
OK, this isn’t really about police helicopters
Uncovering aerial surveillance by the FBI
...with Unix (& Clojure & postgres)
Persistent sousveillance
Using historical sensor data to retroactively identify and track new government targets.
What info do I have?
Presence, not position.
Speed, altitude, transponder squawk code
But the internet.
Starting to get weird: Two companies w/ PO boxes in Bristow VA?�Seeing this output was the precise moment I began to think I might have stumbled on to something big.
N301A - Worldwide Aircraft Leasing Corp.
N404KR - OBR Leasing
N496WW - National Aircraft Leasing Corp.
N515JW - Aerographics Inc.
Really?
I was able to expand the list from the 8 aircraft I had directly observed to 105 (suspected) aircraft, almost 2 dozen (suspected) front companies.
Definitely weird
Evidence all pretty circumstantial:
Large scale aerial program?
More than 100 aircraft, almost 2 dozen front companies, over lots of even medium-sized cities.
Large scale aerial program?
Lots of local news stories about people complaining about mysterious Cessnas circling overhead.
Obviously mentally ill people with videos on YouTube about these specific planes!
Large scale aerial program?
Did I fall into the same paranoid trap as the people on the fringe web forums I’ve been reading?
Then two things happened:
1. A few days after initial WaPo story, FBI admitted “NG Research” was them!
2. 4 weeks later, AP broke the story of > 50 planes & front companies!
Large scale aerial program
Not totally unknown: Knew FBI was using small planes for aerial surveillance.
Not known viscerally: Huge scale of the program.
What are they doing?
video surveillance
IMSI catching/StingRay
Persistent video surveillance?
How often is N404KR overhead?
Checklist of suspicious plane behavior
The FBI issued a rare public statement on their aviation program.
Summary
Next steps
Automatic telescopic observation
Opportunistic use of existing public webcams
Links
Baltimore FBI aerial surveillance video
“Tracking planes with RTL-SDR” intro from MAKE
“How you can track the FBI’s spy planes”
Planes over LA.2 map
“Cheap ADS-B on amateur drones”
“Augmented reality display of air traffic for amateur drones”
List of aircraft & front companies
ADS-B Exchange (the only uncensored multilateration network, run by amateurs)
My github (DB ingestion, analysis)
@lemonodor twitter