

How I tracked FBI aerial surveillance - Garbage
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/how-i-tracked-fbi-aerial-surveillance/

======
CONTRARlAN
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](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.

~~~
LordKano
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.

~~~
jjwiseman
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.

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jjwiseman
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_richard...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/38eoud/im_sam_richards_the_guy_who_broke_the_fbi_aerial/crvcmke)

> 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...](http://fusion.net/story/143739/how-you-can-track-the-fbis-spy-planes/)

------
deathhand
jjwiseman is a user here and quite awesome.

------
scottmcdot
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

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

~~~
tehwebguy
Pretty sure they are talking about this article:

[http://techti.me/2015/06/04/us-air-force-targets-and-
destroy...](http://techti.me/2015/06/04/us-air-force-targets-and-destroys-
isis-hq-building-after-spotting-it-through-social-media/)

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

~~~
escherplex
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.

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

~~~
dsl
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.

------
th0br0
original source is here: [https://storify.com/jjwiseman/tracking-fbi-aerial-
surveillan...](https://storify.com/jjwiseman/tracking-fbi-aerial-surveillance)

