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I found a secret US Government surveillance program (2019)
- xrayarx 4y agoThis is about the use of persistent video surveillance in American Cities. This seems to be a PowerPoint? Rather uncomfortable to read.
- fourthark 4y agoNothing to read afaict. Lots of provocative flight paths to look at.
- culi 4y agoIt's a pretty scary technology tbh. In a nearby city to me during the George Floyd protests, protestors got caught outside with police cars blocking streets. The police then decided to call a curfew of <definitely not enough time to gtfo of there> and arrested a lot of them. With technology like this they could actually trace back almost every single person who attended a protest like this and arrest them weeks or even months later
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y agoThe ensuing shit storm wouldn't be worth it for them, not for something like this.
- xrayarx 4y agoThis github repo is linked from the ‚powerpoint‘: https://github.com/wiseman https://github.com/wiseman
- yasp 4y ago(2015)
- dang 4y agoThere's a 2019 timestamp in there so that's at least a lower bound.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago... and posted a Google docs. Some irony in that.
- Scoundreller 4y agoProbably one of the many that trusts Google more than shadowy government spy ops. Can’t fault ‘em.
- smolder 4y agoOn the contrary, I can fault em' for trusting google more. Both Google and the US federal government use the "collect everything you reasonably can, since we might need it later" approach. In both cases you have to trust them to handle our data right in perpetuity.
- yazzku 4y agoNext time just post it on the FBI's website so that they can get all the HN visitors logged. Removes one level of indirection. Also, the link returns an error to me presumably because of traffic. Can somebody double-post this elsewhere?
- jjwiseman 4y agoSpeaking of tracking, you should see who visits the gpsjam.org website (CCCC IIII AAAA) and what they look at (UUU SSS AAA). Maybe checking to see if my data is consistent with theirs. :)
- Kadin 4y agoWell, the alternative is probably paying some contractor a great deal of money for the same information. Just think of all the taxpayer money you're saving!
- thebeardisred 4y agoFYI, Wiseman's work has been the foundation for later projects like https://github.com/cnelson/maho https://github.com/cnelson/maho
- maerF0x0 4y ago@fortran77 It's community practice to add (YYYY) to items that are not from the current year
- b112 4y agoDon't you mean 0YYYY? (kidding)
- gumby 4y agoThis looks like local government surveillance. The military ("US Government") flights are almost all in places you would expect (airbases, loosely populated areas, and Palmdale). Perhaps the actual talk has some clarity on this but all I saw was slides.
- deepsun 4y agoWhy "secret"? It might also be legitimate surveillance orders, issued by a judge (hence DoJ), that allows for lawful communications interception, external surveillance, etc on a particular subject. The planes tracks look like they mostly circle some single spot or a driving car, or search for something. I don't argue it's legitimate. I argue there's no evidence the other way.
- pessimizer 4y agoNo, you fail to argue that "legitimate" and "secret" are opposites.
- deepsun 4y agoI mean the "secret government program" might not be "secret", but a part of public legal system "program".
- tmpburning 4y ago[dead]
- wolverine876 4y agoIf we wait for smoking guns, we greatly empower people who decieve us.
- deepsun 4y agoYep, but what do you propose in the case they're legitimate? To post publicly what investigation orders agents received? That defeats the whole purpose.
- wolverine876 4y agoWe could post publicly the orders in general terms, in ways that will not identify the targets. And as soon as possible, post the remainder of the order. Transparency is essential to rule of, by, and for the people.
- abujazar 4y agoSo, two years after the Snowden revelations, someone’s surprised the US govt uses planes for mass surveillance. And the «secret» program turned out not to be even classified. This is not really a story.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoMaybe not classified, but secret in the sense of not being well known. And the details were completely unknown, at least to most of us.
- walrus01 4y agoIf anyone's seen UAV development programs for 'serious' things run by the US feds in some extremely rural areas, this isn't secret. Anything flying around emitting ADS-B isn't secret. It's maybe slightly obfuscated with corporate ownership/lease of small aircraft. Go look at something like the data that has come out (ten years ago, now!) about the RQ170 program if you want "secret".
- daniel_reetz 4y agoMany interesting and important things hide in plain sight. I'm glad the author investigated, documented, and pointed this out. And as a former Imagineer I'm not at all surprised that they followed their curiosity.
- jjwiseman 4y agoI'm still at R&D, which I'm guessing you have some familiarity with...
- daniel_reetz 4y agoThat was unclear, I meant that I'm a former Imagineer/Disney Researcher. Cheers ;)
- etchalon 4y agoIncredibly detailed and interesting, but seems like it wasn't all that secret, just not widely known?
- ctippett 4y agoI recorded a similar flight pattern[1] above London not too long ago by the RAF's Shadow R1 Beechcraft plane[2]. I figured it was some sort of training flight as they were circling above Northholt air force base (just north of Heathrow airport). [1] https://imgur.com/a/1IHUfUt https://imgur.com/a/1IHUfUt [2] https://www.raf.mod.uk/aircraft/shadow-r1/ https://www.raf.mod.uk/aircraft/shadow-r1/
- AviationAtom 4y agoThought this was just going to be another "check this out, I just discovered ADSB" article. I am glad I kept reading, as the correlation aspect was cool to see. If you really want to see some wild stuff then lookup the Baltimore aerial DVR program.
- jjwiseman 4y agoIf a mod could replace the link with this one, it includes presenter notes and will prevent a lot of confusion and give readers much more information: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sowJrQQfgxnLCErb-CvUV8VGXdtca6SWYWWLRPZgaHI/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sowJrQQfgxnLCErb-CvU...
- dang 4y agoDone. Thanks! What year was this made? (The second last slide has a 2019 timestamp, so I've gone with that for now.) I know there were other HN threads related to this work/topic, but I don't know how to find them exactly, so if anyone wants to bring up some links, that would be great.
- atemerev 4y agoGorgon Stare?
- Vecr 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare pretty much high resolution cameras on a drone that enable surveillance recording of an entire city over a long enough period of time so you can back-track cars that met up with a person or vehicle of interest, so you can figure out who's talking to who.
- xrayarx 4y agoI was just going to write this.
- avidiax 4y agoThe gravity of this isn't captured at all by the article/presentation. Many of these planes simply capture high resolution panorama timelapses of a large portion of the city. The police can then wait for a crime to happen (e.g. a burglary), and then if they have coverage of the time, they can just play their timelapse in reverse to figure out where the vehicles involved came from or went. Then, they use "parallel construction" to erase the fact that they used persistent mass surveillance to catch the criminals. They already know whodunit, so it's just a matter of coming up with a "lucky break" or an "anonymous tip" or whatever to explain how they caught someone, without ever exposing the surveillance to the scrutiny of the court.
- powera 4y agoIn what sense is it a bad thing that the government can see who drove to the scene of a crime? Especially when, to prevent abuse or mistakes, that isn't sufficient on its own to justify police action?
- sejje 4y agoBecause the government also decides what are crimes.
- avidiax 4y agoThere are two parts to this. First, what is the ideal amount of crime? It's not zero. Zero-crime is a police state. The people must have some power to inflict damage on the government and elements of society. I think it would be rather difficult to conduct the civil rights movement today. Monitoring protests and targeting not just the leaders but even the participants is just too easy now. Second, parallel construction is the most corrosive concept to ever enter US law enforcement. It completely runs around the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine. When the DEA gets a tip-off from the NSA, that obviously illegal abuse of power never gets a debate in a court-room, because a "routine police stop" lucked upon the evidence.
- generalizations 4y agoThere was an investigative article from years ago that I recall said exactly what you're describing, complete with images from the planes demoing the ability to track suspects. Wish I could remember a way to dig that up now.
- jjwiseman 4y agoHi, I did this. The link that was posted doesn't include presenter notes by default, which is leading to some confusion. Check out https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sowJrQQfgxnLCErb-CvUV8VGXdtca6SWYWWLRPZgaHI/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sowJrQQfgxnLCErb-CvU... instead. IIRC the term the FBI used to describe these activities was "confidential", which is why they registered the planes to front companies they made up. Congress wanted to know more, so the FBI gave them a confidential briefing (https://apnews.com/article/1240a8a42edf4a86aff72a0246525a95 https://apnews.com/article/1240a8a42edf4a86aff72a0246525a95): The FBI assured Congress in an unusual, confidential briefing that its plane surveillance program is a by-the-books operation short on high-definition cameras — with some planes equipped with binoculars — and said only five times in five years has it tracked cellphones from the sky. The FBI would not openly answer some questions about its planes, which routinely orbit major U.S. cities and rural areas. Although the FBI has described the program as unclassified and not secret, it declined to disclose during an unclassified portion of a Capitol Hill briefing any details about how many planes it flies or how much the program costs. In a 2009 budget document, the FBI said it had 115 planes in its fleet. In case you missed it, pretty much the first place I posted about what I'd found was here at HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9508812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9508812). Since then, I've done some other stuff in a similar vein. I created the Advisory Circular network of twitter bots that post, in real-time, whenever they see aircraft circling (https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1294002338215034880 https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1294002338215034880). The code is all open source. The bots have helped me (and hopefully other people) discover all sorts of interesting things that aircraft are doing, often right over our heads: power line inspections, dropping sterile fruit flies, tests of new military technologies over the Mojave desert, retired attack helicopters fighting fires, and more. ADS-B data includes information about navigation accuracy, and it turns out it's pretty easy to see when an aircraft is experiencing GPS/GNSS interference, and even map it. I created GPSJam (https://gpsjam.org https://gpsjam.org) to make that data accessible to the public (instead of, say, paying tens of thousands of dollars to geospatial intelligence companies). On that map you can see things like conflict zones, U.S. military tests and training in the Southwest, and Russia's concern over increased risk of drone strikes deep into their territory. The coolest thing about all this stuff is that it's not really very hard to do. It turns out as soon as you start paying attention to aircraft over the course of days, and weeks, you immediately find mysteries to solve.
- solarpunk 4y agoOh hey, some more work, following in the vein of https://twitter.com/MinneapoliSam https://twitter.com/MinneapoliSam 's old FBISkySpies story for North Star Post. Always cool to see this stuff.
- miguelazo 4y agoWhat a massive violation of citizens' privacy and a waste of taxpayers' resources. No wonder this empire is rapidly crumbling.
- culi 4y agoWhile it's an optimistic thought that violating people's privacy and giving our tax dollars to private corporations will necessarily lead to the crumbling of the empire, I don't actually think this is a given. We have to be the ones to make it crumble.
- greggarious 4y agoI cannot read this in Tor without enabling Javascript OP. Please be mindful of that, it's useless to cite something that cannot be read privately. (And what do you want, a cookie? I've been told that finding a secret US surveillance program is like an etymologist finding a new bug -- the amount of work that goes into formalizing it is such that often folks leave it for someone newer to the field to make their mark rather than focus on something that won't deliver them income when they're fairly certain if they went through the rigamarole they could name some new... thing.)
- jjwiseman 4y agoWhat I wanted was a congressional inquiry—and I got it!
- greggarious 4y agoI’ve met those idiots. They keep forcing people to add citations to 1 pagers from the 90s because they’ll only read… one page. (Carried by a 22 year old intern.)
- system2 4y agoI expect thousands of sky colored solar drones to comb the cities soon and become a norm.
- eye_street 4y agoKinda related, I saw this fascinating presentation by Trevor Paglen recently. It's about the footprint of secrecy. It's almost a decade old, but still very much worth your time. https://youtu.be/j56s46e97Lo?t=48 https://youtu.be/j56s46e97Lo?t=48
- jjwiseman 4y agoThanks, I'll check that out. I really liked his book _Blank Spots on the Map_ (https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Spots-Map-Geography-Pentagons/dp/0451229169 https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Spots-Map-Geography-Pentagons/d...).
- motohagiography 4y agoCan any pilots comment on why the buzzfeed report concluded from their data that counter-clockwise flight paths were the most highty indicative of being a surveillance flight? (slide 85, steer2)
- jjwiseman 4y agoI’m not a pilot, but my guess is that it is because pilots usually sit on the left, giving them a better view out the left side of the aircraft. I think this is why the standard traffic pattern for airports is to make left turns. Surveillance flights, more than others, will require orbiting a specific point on the ground—maybe even one that’s moving. I think it’s just easier for pilots to do that specific maneuver if they can look out the window next to them.
- Kadin 4y agoLots of the slides are just displayed as black for me. Is that a browser issue, or are there embedded links to now-dead resources in the deck...? (For instance, slides 51 and 52 are supposed to have content per the speaker's notes, but are just black in my version of the deck.)
- jjwiseman 4y agoWorks for me? But here they are: Slide 51: https://d.pr/i/PgQfqf https://d.pr/i/PgQfqf Slide 52: https://d.pr/i/a0bt3E https://d.pr/i/a0bt3E
- peter_d_sherman 4y agoInteresting article! Now, I am not interested in the government surveillance aspect of all of this... I mean, you have a city like L.A. where statistically, you'll have a higher incidence of crimes than say, a corn field in Nebraska, and you have the ability to be an "eye in the sky" (looking down at a city from the sky is technically a public view -- that is, not opposed by the 4th Amendment) -- so why wouldn't [city/state/federal] governments -- use that as a means for preventing/understanding/solving crimes? I don't endorse it -- but I don't oppose it... (could I, even if I wanted to?) I'll let the civil liberties lawyers and politicians and social philosophers and podcasting pundits -- have that debate -- but to me it's a waste of time. All of that being said, here's my key takeaway from the article: >"But then this amazing thing happened: Someone figured out the RTL dongle for receiving digital TV transmissions could be used as a wideband SDR and pick up all sorts of stuff, including the aircraft transponder packets on 1090 MHz that sometimes include aircraft position." Now, that is interesting and useful information! In other words, if someone wanted to -- they could potentially track (you might ask, "who's surveilling who?" in this scenario! <g>) all aircraft moving around a certain vicinity of space, anywhere in the world -- via transponder radio packets, and transponder radio packets alone! Oh sure, they might miss one or two stealth aircraft(!) <g> -- but for the most part it should work! Also, another related idea here might be to use SDR to implement a home-brewed version of radar... Like, I didn't think of either of these two things before reading this article(!) -- but now that I read this article, I think to myself: "yeah, either of those things might be possible!" So, a thank you to the author for expanding (and pardon the pun here! <g>) -- my horizon! <g>