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.yc

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 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 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_richards_the_guy_who_broke_the_fbi_aerial/crvcmke 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-spy-planes/ http://fusion.net/story/143739/how-you-can-track-the-fbis-sp...