[HN Gopher] I found a secret US Government surveillance program ...
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I found a secret US Government surveillance program (2019)
Author : fortran77
Score : 173 points
Date : 2022-12-23 19:10 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.google.com)
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| ... and posted a Google docs. Some irony in that.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Probably one of the many that trusts Google more than shadowy
| government spy ops. Can't fault 'em.
| yazzku wrote:
| Next 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 wrote:
| If 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-CvU...
| dang wrote:
| Done. 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.
| walrus01 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| Many 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 wrote:
| I'm still at R&D, which I'm guessing you have some
| familiarity with...
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| That was unclear, I meant that I'm a former
| Imagineer/Disney Researcher. Cheers ;)
| atemerev wrote:
| Gorgon Stare?
| Vecr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This github repo is linked from the ,powerpoint':
|
| https://github.com/wiseman
| etchalon wrote:
| Incredibly detailed and interesting, but seems like it wasn't all
| that secret, just not widely known?
| thebeardisred wrote:
| FYI, Wiseman's work has been the foundation for later projects
| like https://github.com/cnelson/maho
| yasp wrote:
| (2015)
| dang wrote:
| There's a 2019 timestamp in there so that's at least a lower
| bound.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| @fortran77
|
| It's community practice to add (YYYY) to items that are not from
| the current year
| bbarnett wrote:
| Don't you mean 0YYYY?
|
| (kidding)
| gumby wrote:
| This 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.
| ctippett wrote:
| I 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
|
| [2] https://www.raf.mod.uk/aircraft/shadow-r1/
| AviationAtom wrote:
| Thought 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.
| avidiax wrote:
| The 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| That's a pretty complicated explanation, given that (1) every
| major city PD already makes ample use of street-level CCTV
| footage, and (2) it involves local-federal cooperation (the FBI
| is seemingly the ones flying these planes).
|
| If we're speculating baselessly, my guess would be that, like
| all cops, the FBI has a bloated surveillance budget and _loves_
| trinkets. Why waste shoe leather or sit in a car for hours when
| you can justify a joy ride in a plane while you watch the bad
| guys?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| that sounds very expensive to do, doesn't it?
| specialist wrote:
| > _they can just play their timelapse in reverse_
|
| Similarly, with the combo of demographic and location
| databases, they can _rule out_ everyone with an alibi.
| dclusin wrote:
| Is this from actual investigative reporting with sources or
| just assumed from theoretical capability of tech? Not trying to
| say this isn't happening. Just saying that what's possible and
| what's happening don't always match up.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Parallel construction is a real thing. I would be surprised
| if this wasn't happening with FBI planes.
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/2014/02/03/parallel-construction-
| re...
| jjwiseman wrote:
| Hi, 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-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):
| 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).
|
| 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). 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) 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.
| jjwiseman wrote:
| One other less well-defined project I'll mention: Using whisper
| on aircraft radio traffic. I think of ATC radio as a completely
| unindexed, unsearchable, "dark web" of information, and Whisper
| can open it up and make it searchable. Whisper is the first
| speech recognition system I've seen that can handle not just
| the typically low quality audio, but also can take into account
| contextual information. E.g. some of the most useful
| information in a transmission on an ATC radio frequency is the
| call sign of the aircraft. But it's very hard for most speech
| recognizers to accurately transcribe: "7XY" is essentially just
| as likely as "1AC". Short, basically random utterances are hell
| on speech recognizers. But Whisper's killer feature IMO (but
| weirdly one that people rarely seem to use or even know about)
| is the powerful language model and its ability to be prompted.
|
| Level 1 prompt engineering for Whisper is simply using a prompt
| like "Let's pretend we're air traffic controllers" or something
| to prime it to expect the specialized ATC lingo vs. any other
| thing people might be talking about. This prompt is specific to
| ATC, but is otherwise very general.
|
| Level 2 becomes specific to the frequency you're transcribing:
| "Cessna, El Monte Tower, cleared for the option runway 01." Now
| Whisper knows that it's ATC, and that the name of the tower
| (which it will hear a lot) is El Monte, and that there's a
| runway numbered 01.
|
| Level 3 is where you add additional time- and situation-
| dependent prompting to increase accuracy. If you look at ADS-B
| data, you can figure out which aircraft are/were in the area
| when the audio was recorded, that might be communicating on the
| radio. You can create prompts using those call signs, greatly
| increasing accuracy of transcription. (Some researchers have
| done work along these lines, pre-Whisper.)
|
| An example of what Whisper makes possible: Here's a "supercut"
| of all the times either a pilot or ATC mentioned "laser",
| across multiple frequencies, across multiple days:
| https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1578516727549153280 Here's
| an example of what I'd like to be able to do (I created it
| manually, but I don't think it's too far out of reach), a video
| showing the aircraft map synchronized with ATC audio across
| frequencies, from a few days ago when a Cessna busted the
| presidential TFR near Philadelphia:
| https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1605293275333607424
|
| Not Whisper-related, but just a fun proof-of-concept of a
| browser extension that lets you click on aircraft on the map
| and listen to them on the radio:
| https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1521551159206416384
| ckdarby wrote:
| How many times do you "randomly" get stopped at the airport
| now?
| [deleted]
| cantrevealname wrote:
| Do you have an opinion on or evidence for/against this comment
| that the purpose is a continuous timelapse video of major
| portions of the city to backtrack vehicles after a crime has
| occurred?[1]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34110888
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Not OP, but that commemter's source seems to be "trust me
| bro".
|
| On top of that, if the FBI was showing these tapes to cops
| for crimes as common as burglary you'd think somebody would
| have spilled the beans by now.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've changed to the URL you suggested (submitted URL was
| https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sowJrQQfgxnLCErb-
| CvU...). Thanks!
| deepsun wrote:
| Why "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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| If we wait for smoking guns, we greatly empower people who
| decieve us.
| Lendal wrote:
| Okay, but are you referring to the criminals, or law
| enforcement? Both are involved in deception.
| deepsun wrote:
| Yep, 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 wrote:
| We 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| No, you fail to argue that "legitimate" and "secret" are
| opposites.
| tmpburning wrote:
| [dead]
| solarpunk wrote:
| Oh hey, some more work, following in the vein of
| https://twitter.com/MinneapoliSam 's old FBISkySpies story for
| North Star Post.
|
| Always cool to see this stuff.
| abujazar wrote:
| So, 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 wrote:
| Maybe not classified, but secret in the sense of not being well
| known. And the details were completely unknown, at least to
| most of us.
| xrayarx wrote:
| This is about the use of persistent video surveillance in
| American Cities.
|
| This seems to be a PowerPoint? Rather uncomfortable to read.
| fourthark wrote:
| Nothing to read afaict.
|
| Lots of provocative flight paths to look at.
| majestik wrote:
| See presenter notes
| deepsun wrote:
| And nothing about their legitimacy, only about the scale.
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