Without getting into the weeds on this specific issue, the idea that any public information being republished on social media can’t have safety consequences is absurd. If, for example, the information about where someone lives is buried on a buggy government website, packaging it up and broadcasting it onto Twitter to millions of people is a very meaningful event that has safety consequences to the person involved.
If Musk doesn't want to get tracked, he can take a regular airplane like other people, or maybe borrow a plane from someone he knows, and not use one that's registered to his business.
I’m not sure you’ll find many who agree with you in this definition. The natural followup to “not meant to be public” is “meant by who?” Oftentimes people are doxxed through collation of various public records, kept and published by the government. I’m thinking things like phone books, arrest records, property transfer records, business registration, WHOIS registration, and many more. Then there’s times when the victim themselves didn’t realize they were leaking information. Even seemingly innocuous photos can be used by determined individuals to get a precise location [1]. I realize this falls under “unintentional” by your definition but would it be fair to say the person doxxed themselves in this case? I don’t think so.
To me the essence of doxxing is putting together otherwise disparate info into an easily sharable package. Something which raises the profile of the individual datapoints and their relation to each other until finding the victims information is trivial for anyone with a basic search.
1: See GeoWizards fantastic series doing exactly this: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_japiE6QKWqMVC3JbyONau_0...
Bottom line is: there is no justifiable reason to publish real-time location info of somebody against his wishes other than to harm him.
The real issue here is people believing 'do unto others' is even remotely a concern for people in a position of power.
Everyone on the planet has a legitimate interest in knowing what Elon will do next with his obscene wealth. Thus, talking about where he is must be protected as free speech.
Whether you agree with that or not, until very recently, Elon suggested that he did.
Where is the real-time data on Putin & Biden's whereabouts then?
> what Elon will do next with his obscene wealth
What does that has anything to do with his location?
> free speech
Talking about and inviting others to do harm could very well be free speech, but that doesn't make the ones doing it less of a--holes.
His location is a hint to who he's talking to and what he's doing.
There has been no invitations to do harm. It's not about who's an asshole or not - it's about who's a hypocrite on free speech.
Google Maps is tracking me every day and I have no problem with it. But it would certainly piss me off if that info was fed into a dedicated social media account.
This data is not from the FAA, but from ADSBExchange, which crowdsources the data.
Sure, I get that Musk and his plane are probably inseparable, but it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.
I have absolutely no problem with a website like Twitter banning free speech like "where's musk's plane," since it is his website and he can do what he wants. As long as it isn't the government forcing a private party to say or not say something, then meh I don't really mind. In fact, I think Musk's comment about "as long as it isn't real-time location" is a pretty decent compromise.
I do wish he wouldn't be such a hypocrite about it, and I definitely wish people would stop acting like he is some free-speech absolutist hero, which he is definitely not.
> document for sharing
Google "Docs"-ing.
Now I get it.
There are countless videos of people screaming in fast food restaurants. If someone recognizes that area, looks up public addresses in the vicinity, and finds a name match, from there you can easily get a phone number, work place, etc.
Doxxing is less about information acquisition and more about intentions and location in which it’s shared. Angry mob posting online about some evil person in a video and you find the target’s address just by looking up their license plate? Most communities will ban you for doxxing if you post that info.
I know where 14 Premiership managers (and could probably have a good guess at ~150 Premiership players) are going to be on Boxing Day, with exact locations for a specific time range. Is that doxxing them?
[0] It sucks that personal private planes are even a thing, but that's a different issue.
As someone pointed out over in Fedi-land, this would be broad enough to cover sports fixtures because you know where players are going to be (live location) and you know how they're likely going to get there (coach from local hotels if you're a UK footballer).
But that's not what was said - there was no exception carved out for that.
The solution to people knowing the location of your private plane is really simple: Don't own a private plane. Most of us are already doing it.
That is of course the better solution. There's something perverse about the entire concept of a private plane.
Still, as much as I dislike his descent into madness, I do understand Musk's safety concerns here.
The information published is not constant: it is published only when a plane takes off or lands.
The information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
> the information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
So would you be comfortable with someone publishing the location of your car every time you get in your car?
Of course the location of your car isn't public, only its ownership. But the location of your house is. So what if someone publishes every time someone enters or leaves your home? I think that would be a pretty dramatic violation of privacy.
> It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
No, because nobody is flying jets for an audience outside that jet. Except maybe at air shows and the like. It's the audience that makes it a public event, not the fact that it happens outside and is not secret.
That would be a pretty stupid argument to make. Is it one you are seriously putting forward?
Cars are required to carry license plates, that doesn't mean that using a crowdsourced license plate reader to track and publish the live location of the car isn't a massive invasion of privacy.
Please stop arguing for legitimizing surveillance because you hate some rich white guy.
I think there are reasons why we should allow aggregating and publishing plane location data, (though a time delay does seem reasonable.) Those reasons have nothing to do the data being "already public" and are based on the value transparency and accountability outweighing the loss of privacy.
However, when people argue that the loss of privacy doesn't exist or doesn't matter, they help undermine expectations of privacy in other areas.
> Musk has also apparently requested, via the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), that his plane not be tracked on third-party sites like FlightAware ... “This aircraft is on the the FAA blocklist meaning it is not allowed to be displayed to the general public,” a FlightAware spokesperson said in an email to Motherboard. “This is something that all 3rd party trackers do usually follow as a list is sent out every month."
> ADS-B Out transmits flight data directly from the aircraft to internet vendors not participating in the LADD program. Non-participating internet vendors collect and post all ADS-B Out flight data on the internet. To address ADS-B Out privacy concerns, the FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program to improve the privacy of eligible aircraft.
ADSBExchange does not participate in the program that the blocklist is part of. They even cover this on their homepage
> First and foremost ADS-B Exchange does not participate in the filtering performed by most other flight tracking websites which do not share data on military or certain private aircraft. Because ADS-B Exchange does not use any FAA data there are no FAA BARR/LADD, military, or other “filters” preventing you from seeing the the data you collected. ADS-B Exchange simply does not accept payment or requests to remove aircraft from public tracking!
ADSB Exchange can't get around ICAO anonymizing just by looking at the transponder data.
> Elon uses the FAA PIA privacy program for a private plane ID. When using a PIA address, the owner is anon and private, not public. Sweeney’s workaround is (likely) to spot a (rare) ICAO plane resembling Musk’s & noting the private code.
You can no longer claim it's public. It was de-anonymized in some way.
It's no longer a case of reposting public information but someone going considerable lengths to post this information.
The @ElonJet guy even bragged about it:
> Elon got PIA but I've already identified it!
Registered owner: FALCON LANDING LLC at 1 Rocket Rd, Hawthorne, CA.
Google Maps known businesses at 1 Rocket Rd: SpaceX and Onsite Dental (huh?)
That’s not how you do anonymous.
> "These privacy mitigation programs are effective for real-time operations but do not guarantee absolute privacy," an FAA spokesperson said. "A flight can still be tracked in other ways such as a Freedom of Information Act request, www.LiveATC.com, ADSB Exchange, or a frequently departed airport."
His plane registration is not anonymized and is well-known[1].
1. https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...
Jack Sweeney's actions to deanonymize the plane clearly allowed the situation in which Musk's two year-old child was followed and the vehicle they were travelling in was ambushed. If the deanonymisation that Jack Sweeney is said to be doing can even be seen as a protected form of free speech, it should still be open to critique over the plausible threat it poses to lives.
Can I find this in the Twitter TOS?
Also, this application of the rules is completely in line with original policy about inciting harm, and as a private company, Twitter is well within their right to deplatform users that don't follow their rules.
What seems capricious to many right now might actually be even-handed enforcement of pre-existing rules towards people that had gotten used to special treatment. And if it's not even-handed I don't see how anything has changed from before, where some people were given a free pass from the rules while others weren't -- the only difference is who is blessed and who is cursed.
"where some people were given a free pass from the rules while others weren't -- the only difference is who is blessed and who is cursed."
Whataboutism.
There are written rules about inciting harassment and posting private information/locations without express approval. Ignorance of the rules shouldn't excuse people from following the rules.
It's not whataboutism to point out that these policies existed previously, and that if there are any differences at all it's that the rules weren't always applied for this violation previously. The fact is, certain Twitter accounts used to get a free pass -- I feel like the modern adage "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression" applies.
(Do I believe what I'm saying? Basically, it's one way of looking at things and I think that while this interpretation of the rules and their application is unproven and counter-narrative it is a viable argument that I expect Twitter to make as the new moderation team grows.)
Your link will only be valid until he again changes his ICAO number.
I know nothing about this, but was a rabbit hole to explore.
The tail number for his plane is well known. If you put that N-number into an ICAO conversion script (https://www.avionictools.com/icao.php), you get the same Hex number that you see from adsbexchange.com. From what I can tell, the script is using an algorithm and not doing a DB lookup. So, just based on the tail number, you could figure out the canonical ICAO code for the plane.
The strange thing is that adsbexchange also lists the plane as being part of the LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) program (but I don’t know the source of this annotation). AFAICT, LADD limits public display of information, but only for data distributed from the FAA. Crowd sourced data isn’t limited (nor could it be).
In order to address this privacy shortcoming, the PIA program exists. This would change the ICAO for the plane to be disconnected from the tail number. But from the tracking website, it seems like the ICAO number for his plane hasn’t been changed/anonymized(?!?). So either, they haven’t actually gotten the new ICAO number installed (after 10-ish months), or the plane isn’t eligible to be part of the program. PIA requires the plane to only fly domestically and have the right kind of transmitter. If the plane flys internationally, it can’t have an anonymized ICAO number.
See: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
Otherwise, I don’t see how anyone could track this particular plane if it did have a PIA ICAO identifier and you only knew the tail number.
Like I said, I don’t know very much about this, but it is a fascinating rabbit hole. Anyone want to correct where I went wrong?
I'm not sure that it does at this very moment, but public statements by Sweeny himself said that it did indeed have a PIA ICAO number and that Sweeny de-anonymized it. It's possible Elon stopped using it because of that de-anonymizing.
> The strange thing is that adsbexchange also lists the plane as being part of the LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) program (but I don’t know the source of this annotation). AFAICT, LADD limits public display of information, but only for data distributed from the FAA. Crowd sourced data isn’t limited (nor could it be).
Yes LADD is a different system and you're not required to follow it as a data provider. FlightRadar24 for example follows it and does not list any LADD aircraft as they use FAA's data feed which requires as it's terms of use that you follow the LADD program.
I read that too, but haven’t been able to find any source that wasn’t Sweeny on that. Without another source, I’m more inclined to believe that the plane is part of LADD, but not PIA (or isn’t anymore). And that the plane from the Sweeney tweet from February 2022 may have been another plane entirely. Maybe Musk’s plane was enrolled at one point, but it honestly doesn’t make much sense to me to have a plane enrolled in PIA.
I mean, if I had a private plane, I’d like to keep the option of flying it internationally, which you couldn’t do with an anonymized ICAO (again, according to my limited reading).
Also, given the limited number of PIA planes, it would be trivial to look for ICAO numbers that disappeared at one airport and then for a new private ICAO number to appear at the same airport. The system only makes sense from a privacy perspective if you don’t have continuous monitoring of the ADS-B transponders. As things currently exist, with a small number of PIA planes, it would be obvious to find new codes.
Even if you have PIA though, I don't thing you're restricted from flying internationally. I don't see any comment on the PIA page that says you can't fly internationally with it. Wouldn't you just revert to your original ICAO when doing international trips?
The FAA site made it seem like changing the codes was a non-trivial “process” that wouldn’t want to do regularly. You’d have to reprogram the transponder back to your canonical code, because other countries don’t have access to the private PIA conversion lookup tables. The private ICAO numbers might also conflict with other countries “number space”.
Maybe this is an easy thing, but most changes in aviation don’t seem “quick”.
It could be a procedural thing where after switching, the FAA won’t recognise your canonical one? That’s seems a little strange, though.
Imagine it were your child. Can you honestly say you wouldn’t change any opinions or practices when it came to personal security?
Things like libel, threats, blackmail, etc are also speech, and yet banned or restricted in some way. Social media are doing a lot of work exploring the edge cases of these, and it's possible laws need to be updated to account for the results.
[0] Years ago Musk cancelled a Tesla order from a critic. On Twitter, it didn't take him long to ban a lot of satirical accounts.
And remember, my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.
The 'won't somebody think of the children' argument doesn't play nice with 'free speech as long as it is legal'.
If Musk is so concerned about his children's privacy and safety then maybe he should stop tweeting out their whereabouts in real time himself?
The “speech” you speak of is automated broadcasting the movements of wealthy people in real-time. The primary group of people who have use for that information is kidnappers.
There’s zero connection between this “speech” and political freedoms.
Similarly, there’s a huge difference between you sharing you or your family’s location on social media occasionally on your own terms vs strangers tracking and sharing it regularly.
Nobody has any right to privacy regarding the flight movements of their aircraft, and indeed any idea in that light is antithetical to the entire principal of air traffic control and safe air travel. The idea that people would not be able to track his aircraft if this account is gone is ludicrous, as there are both other flight tracking websites, the ability in some areas to get full flight plans, and even if you're a stalker the ability to just listen into ATC radio near the routes his aircraft use.
You even have spotters who spend all their days at airports logging all aircraft and posting the results online, as they've done for decades, so there's no way for aircraft movements to remain secret for long.
By buying private jets and choosing to use them exclusively, Musk himself gave up his right to any privacy when flying on them. He has other options, such as flying commercially or chartering aircraft, as others in his position have done, but has chosen not to use them. He's now trying to change the rules for everyone else to carve out an exception for himself and other super wealthy individuals.
It's rank hypocrisy and bullying and I'm amazed so many people on HN are supporting him in this, and choosing to believe him rather than reading up on how open this data already is.
That doesn’t mean somebody putting those pieces of information together and regularly tweeting your movements isn’t creating a security risk for you. The choice that you make to buy a car or drive it in public also doesn’t mean that you have to welcome automated stalking.
This account wasn't even 'putting those pieces of information together', he was tweeting it directly from ADSB Exchange, one of a number of collators of ADS-B Out data.
Aircraft movements are not private and haven't been for decades. If you want privacy in your air travel, don't fly everywhere on 1-3 well known private jets.
That said it's just as legal for Musk to kick anybody he wants out of his new club house and even be a hypocrite about it.
I just wish he'd get back to saving the world and setting up Mars for my kids. As a social media icon he's basically worthless to the world.
That was never going to happen. It's just a way to get people to work their asses off to further his real goal, to amass as much wealth as possible. Ironically, buying Twitter may well end up undoing that.
Given he had no problem calling a random person a “pedo” knowing it would cause harassment, I’m going to go with “no.”
Previous strategy to appeal to tech was to pick last week's top post on /r/iamverysmart and state it as his philosophy.
Current strategy now that tech has soured on him the past few years, is transitioning to parroting fascist dogwhistles.
In two years he buys Whole Foods and will be ranting about holistic lifestyle chakra healing.
That is pretty literal
In such a case: "Died in front of me" would be accurate. "Died in my arms" is a lie.
If Lucy pulls away the football 27 times, you aren't required to go running at it the 28th.
But I expect there's something particularly poignant about the moment of death.
So to me, Musk's inaccuracy about that detail is very significant.
It was relevant to an election Biden was about to become the President. The hookers and meth was there to entertain the more base urges of audience.
It's mostly about Twitter fabrication of Hunter Biden was hacked (discovered during laptop dissembly) and the connections between federal government and Twitter's staff.
I'm grateful I was spared from H. Biden wang.
Links? You mean a picture of an https addresses that leads to a deleted tweet.
> Biden wasn’t part of federal government then FYI.
Sure but he had connections, and way to pull those images. See twit #8.
Yeah, obviously those pictures and associated tweets are deleted. That is why we are here. However, those are archived in WaybackMachine(archive.org). Copy/paste those links there.
So a picture of a link, of a deleted tweet, you have to access via Internet Archive, that's also deleted.
You know links are usually click and go, not transcribe, click, go back, go to Internet Archive and try there. Then do some internet sleuthing.
Still this isn't a case of they posted links to materials. Anyone that wants to find them needs to invest some effort to actually find them.
I mean, maybe?
I don't see a masked stalker doing much of anything in that video. In fact, the masked stalked in the car seems afraid of the person doing the filming (a security guard?). Certainly not showing much aggression. The claim is that this person then got out of the car and jumped on the hood of Elon's car preventing it from moving, but that wasn't caught on video?
People have been raising these kinds of concerns to free speech absolutists like Musk for a while, but until it impacts him they are theoretical concerns that aren't as important as his principles.
If he uses this personal experience as an opportunity to empathize with others and reconsider how Twitter handles speech which is legal but poses a safety risk to an individual or group then that is commendable.
If he maintained his commitment to free speech in the face of personal danger to his family I would respect such a principled stance.
However, if he only bans those who might cause him (or people he likes) harm while allowing and even encouraging those who use free speech to incite harm against others then that seems hypocritical.
The fact that Musk previously said he wouldn’t ban the account, then changed his mind (apparently after a personal incident) just shows Musk changed his mind, is all.
It certainly demonstrates he didn’t think through his previous decision, suggesting it was a spontaneous comment and not a rigorous policy. Which is worrying, because publishers such as Twitter need to have a consistent and coherent moderation policy.
But it’s still relevant if we’re to decide which position we agree with, and whether Musk was “right” previously or now.
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af
That Musk 'changed his mind' on the one thing that he said would set Twitter apart from 'the rest' is where I have a problem: this is a matter of principle so dear that it should override his personal affairs because that is what he is on the record about. If Musk's principles only hold water as long as he isn't personally affected then I'm fine with that but then he should get off his high horse and stop pretending.
Twitter before Musk was not perfect, but it was perfectly usable (even if they got stuff wrong every now and then, and in those cases they usually - but not always - eventually corrected themselves). What is on display right now is capriciousness of an entirely different degree.
There is about how you know which link to follow.
So Twitter is now unusable because elonjet has been banned? Social media companies change their policies all the time. You don't have to agree with the decision but holding it up as something so consequential is just silly.
Assuming what he said about his son being accosted is true, how could he not change his mind? Should he really not stop something that threatened his kids life because of a promise he made to internet strangers?
If he simply bans those who would cause him (or people he likes) harm but continue to allow and encourage "free speech" for those who would cause harm to others then that seems a bit hypocritical.
This includes criticizing him in various ways.
Say what you will about pre-Elon Twitter; I never heard about anyone getting their account banned for saying bad things about Dorsey.
He has banned parody accounts that don't specify 'parody' in the username, he's threatened to de-amplify negative tweets, and he's banned the ElonJet account. I vehemently disagree with all of those moves, but the idea that the site is now unusable to say anything that he doesn't like is absolutely hyperbole.
I don't think anyone would really care about this had he not made purchasing Twitter all about trying to save us from the evil Twitter censorship demons.
Free speech only counts when it's speech, sharing opinions and such, however controversial.
Petty "I'll share your itinerary" is hardly speech, let alone opinion.
We need to be careful about not (unintentionally) spreading misinformation.
(Your objection to Elon is correct of course.)
That won’t stop me saying he’s a hypocrite for doing so. Does he feel so strongly about accounts doxxing “the libs?”
But no matter how you slice it, this account (and it's owner's personal account) were targeted purely because they irked Musk, and he has given zero indication that he plans to enforce this rule for basically any other account.
But Musk owns Twitter and he can pick and choose what accounts he wants to allow.
I guess it is akin to me removing unwanted comments on my blog. His site, his rules, policies and ToS.
Musk had no problem insinuating that Yoel Roth was a pedophile (as is Musk's style), reportedly forcing Roth into hiding.
Does Musk recognize the ramifications of what he was doing in either case? No. At any rate, it's pretty clear that the "threats to personal safety" is a mask, he clearly is fine with doxxing and threatening other people's public safety... as long as he is the aggressor, not the victim.
Especially when it's not even accurate and misunderstood:
https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-be...
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Maybe he should just buy another jet or two, make sure the other jet(s) are in regular use (maybe shuttling SpaceX/Tesla/Twitter/etc employees around), and make sure he regularly swaps which one he is personally using. Extremely expensive solution, but not beyond his budget.
Or maybe he should just buy himself a private jet chartering firm. An even more expensive solution, but he can probably afford that too.
Only through a manual process that sounds like it can take a month or so to complete.
Perhaps, in future, this could be solved with technology that automates generation/randomisation of PIAs, much like MAC addresses on phones and laptops are randomised to prevent tracking?
Next-generation ADS-B transponders could communicate with the FAA (or appropriate local authority) via satellite or mobile network to generate/request a new, random PIA before every flight.
A small risk, and something that could be mitigated, but still there nonetheless.
The proposals to encrypt ADS-B data, being driven by corporations and wealthy individuals, are more risky in that they add key management to the mix and make it much more likely that something will go wrong and cause widespread ATC failures or aircraft going dark on ATC displays and in collision avoidance systems at critical moments. Especially as there'll be a mix of encrypted/non-encrypted transponders for decades to come.
There is also an argument for some sort of cryptographic signing of ADS-B messages in order to prevent spoofing.
Is all of this really necessary when billionaires have other means at their disposal to avoid scrutiny? Why add risk and complexity to a critical system just to make their lives easier?
Spoofing is not really a useful attack vector, for various reasons. In any case it's also not something that can easily be retrofitted for the same reasons, in that it takes decades to update these systems.
I can go on one of those websites, see all those flights, but I have no idea who the belong to or who's on board.
That changes once someone specifically links a private jet to someone.
Within the EU I'd be interested in the ramifications with regards to the GDPR.
the linking is done simply by looking up who the plane is registered to, and that is also public information.
you can of course always go the other way, look who owns a plane, and the go to flight information from there.
there is nothing private about any of the information used in the process.
I would ponder the GDPR's definition of personal data before making such definitive claim.
https://dataprivacymanager.net/who-does-the-eu-gdpr-apply-to...
No.
That's not true.
Another impulsive act despite other forces forming negative business opinions of all his impulsive actions.
He will be laughed out of court by any judge.
https://www.google.com/search?q=a835af
And if you don't have the registration that one more search. All of this information is public and that goes for pretty much all aircraft.
If the bar is 'low end stalkers that don't have internet' then yes, it will make a difference.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zygg/twitter-bans-elon-mus...
"Sweeney has been using sites such as ADS-B Exchange to track the movements of private jets blogging to celebrities, tech billionaires, and Russian oligarchs for years now. By law, the movement of these plans is publicly available information. “This account has every right to post jet whereabouts, ADS-B data is public, every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder, Even AF1 (@AirForceTrack) Twitter policy states data found on other sites is allowed to be shared here as well,” the account’s pinned tweet read before it was banned."
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af