The surprising thing was how easy it was to do this. Really, all you had to do was look: These planes seem to literally use (unencrypted, easily decoded) transponder codes that mean "FBI surveillance", the public records show company names that mostly fit a simple regex, and one of the front companies even has the exact same address as the U.S. Dept of Justice.

JJ,

I love your research on this, with SDR Dongle.

I'm building up my ADS-B receiver with a NooTech SDR. One question, you talked about capturing squawks with your SDR - did you try for ADS-B or do you know if these aircraft employ it? This would give you location.

Kudos to you, man!

Yes, I use dump1090 which can decode Mode S/ADS-B with or without location and Mode A/C.

Since you can look up the aircraft based on the N number using the same transponder code doesn't really make much difference.

Yes, but I did it the other way around: I found the aircraft that were using the transponder code, then looked up who they were owned by and what other aircraft they had. That's how I was able to identify potential front companies that don't fit the "XYZ Aviation w/ PO Box in VA" template.

you do understand that flightaware data is crowdsourced, yes? the data format is trivial to fake, and subsequently upload. i am not saying thats the case here, but implicitly trusting user input makes me skeptical about the entire conclusion.

Read my link from the parent comment: https://storify.com/jjwiseman/tracking-fbi-aerial-surveillan...

tldr: I didn't use Flightaware; I observed these aircraft directly using my own receiver, decoding their callsigns and squawk codes, and correlated with FAA records and the company confirmed by the FBI itself to be a front.

But it's true, most of this evidence is still circumstantial. Just because a company with an odd name and no internet presence has the same PO Box as the DOJ doesn't prove it's a front company; but it's pretty suggestive.

almost like they weren't trying with that last point.

Hi John,

Had you heard about the discovery of the plane last year in Sacramento? Here [1] is the story where they figured out the "JENNA" call sign. Here is the story that started it all. [2]

[1] http://www.news10.net/story/news/local/arden-lariviera/2014/...

[2] http://www.news10.net/story/news/local/sacramento/2014/03/18...

Here's a reference to the FBI using "JENNA" from 2011: http://theaviationist.com/2011/05/15/the-white-fest-b757-and...

I found one link that claimed he found an FAA or DOJ publication that had at one time mentioned the JENNA callsign, but was then edited to remove the reference.

This is similar to the callsigns of the Area 51 planes flying from vegas. JANET was an acronym for Just Another Non-Existent Terminal[0]

Interested to see what JENNA stands for.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_(airline)

Someone on reddit claims they got a close up photo of the camera. http://postimg.org/image/hm861sw61/

Do you have a link to the reddit discussion?

I found it here: https://np.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/387jvf/the_fbi_i...

It's kind of fun to read a story with tweets intertwined. It's like tweets are the new bold.

Anyways, great to see this stuff still so accessible even if hidden at first glance.