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4414

Who am I?

John Wiseman

Robotics, NLP, drones, aviation

NASA, USAF Research Lab

Fired from Google

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@lemonodor

What is this about?

Tracking police helicopters

dump1090

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A couple weeks of transponder pings

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.

Out of 30,000 aircraft, only 8 squawked 4414.

What info do I have?

Presence, not position.

Speed, altitude, transponder squawk code

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But the internet.

Starting to get weird: Two companies w/ PO boxes in Bristow VA?

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:

• Squawk 4414
• Names like “ABC Aviation”
• PO boxes in Virginia

Large scale aerial program?

More than 100 aircraft, almost 2 dozen front companies, over lots of even medium-sized cities.

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Large scale aerial program?

Lots of local news stories about people complaining about mysterious Cessnas circling overhead.

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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.

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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

• Tail number or registered owner is on one of the published lists
• Squawks 4414 or 4415, or has a callsign “JENA” or “JENNA”
• Loiters for hours at around 5000 feet
• Flies in circles
• Owner in Bristow VA, Greenville DE, Wilmington DE, or Manassas VA

Summary

• This wasn’t hard: All I had to do was look.
• I used publically available data: transponder pings, planespotter photos, and FAA records.
• The paranoid were right this time.
• Multiple people were motivated to independently make this discovery.
• This is not news: articles as far back as 2003; possibly a surge in 2013.
• Behavior suggestive of persistent surveillance, not targeted investigation.
• Potential for more citizen investigation.

What next?

• Quantify flights: how often, how long, how many cities?
• Use IMSI catcher detector (maybe in a chase plane?).

Links

“Tracking planes with RTL-SDR” intro from MAKE

“How you can track the FBI’s spy planes”

Planes over LA.2 map

Police helicopter KML

orbital detector - code for logging, analysis & mapping

orbital detector notebook

“Cheap ADS-B on amateur drones”

“Augmented reality display of air traffic for amateur drones”

List of aircraft & front companies

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lemonodor twitter / lemondronor blog

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Addenda

Interesting aircraft I’ve observed over LA

• Air Force One & Executive One Foxtrot
• South Korean Air Force One
• Lots of military, mostly transports
• Lots of police helicopters
• Defense contractors (Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Dynamic Aviation)

Air Force One broadcasting position during takeoff at LAX

E-6B Mercury TACAMO/Doomsday

E-3 Sentry AWACS

U-2

ADS-B on a drone

ADS-B on a drone