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.
Your link will only be valid until he again changes his ICAO number.