Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions
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Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions
#2If you're big into crowd-sourcing:
There are super-inexpensive RTL-SDR dongles[1] that can be used to track airplanes such as this.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've fooled around with these dongles and a few programs enough to discern that Gov't aircraft absolutely need to broadcast their info on the 1090MHz band.
It wouldn't be much of a stretch to have a few people pop these up and see if they could monitor the airplanes that are monitoring the city! :)
Just to expand a little bit:
You get an SDR, plug it in and use a program like `dump1090` or FlightAware. The repurposed TV Tuner will then listen to data on 1090MHz and decode airplane's Active Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) messages.
The ADS-B messages typically contain flight callsign, location (lat,lon), altitude, heading, and a few other tidbits.
There's a really active community around things like this. [2]
[1] http://www.amazon.com/RTL-SDR-DVB-T-Stick-RTL2832U-R820T/dp/... [2] http://www.rtl-sdr.com
Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions
#3Do blimps have to file flight plans? I lived in DC when they first started testing surveillance blimps there around 2005 or so.
They were completely white with a black box on the bottom. I assumed that they had a similar function to rc-135s with some sort of side radar that can track all vehicles in real time.
Ah, well, here's an answer to one question: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2475827/data-privacy/ma...
The blimps in 2005 looked a bit different - they didn't have such a large obvious radar hump. Also, I'm pretty sure the blimps I saw were not tethered, but hard to say definitively.
I still haven't found any info on filing flight plans though.
Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions
#4" Among the companies offering this technology are major defense contractors working for the Pentagon and an Ohio company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, which is trying to sell it to local police departments."
I know this is an unpopular opinion these days but the people working for these companies should be ashamed. There is little use for this technology, especially on US soil, except mass surveillance of the population.
Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions
#5> The answer is, these are not your parents' surveillance aircraft.
But your grand-parents'. Nowadays they would use drones.
Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions
#6" Among the companies offering this technology are major defense contractors working for the Pentagon and an Ohio company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, which is trying to sell it to local police departments." I know this is an unpopular opinion these days but the people working for these companies should be ashamed. There is little use for this technology, especially on US soil, except mass surveillance of…
There are used in drug interdiction and other coast guard functions. My brother was an Air Force test pilot that tested these for that purpose (he was originally a surveillance pilot flying kc-135s). They are basically a kc-135 in a small jet (e.g., leer jet 35) form factor, and not carrying a team of technicians in the back but instead just equipment, or maybe a technician or two. Officially he's not supposed to know.
Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions
#7They mention gigapixel cameras, my (brief) googling couldn't find any evidence that such a thing exists, except for an experimental one at Duke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldQXHP7TFUE. Although I suppose a gigapixel photo can be made by taking pictures by multiple cameras at the same time just as well. Still, wouldn't that sort of thing be available commercially, at least for the enthusiasts out there?
Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions
#8" Among the companies offering this technology are major defense contractors working for the Pentagon and an Ohio company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, which is trying to sell it to local police departments." I know this is an unpopular opinion these days but the people working for these companies should be ashamed. There is little use for this technology, especially on US soil, except mass surveillance of…
Or any form of wide-area surveillance, which isn't necessarily the same as surveillance of mass amounts of people. From an article I read yesterday, the first documented use of FBI domestic surveillance planes was a bribery case that involved a payoff package tossed out of a train in the 30s.
So, these things do have other uses.
Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions
#9The government also runs high resolution satellite cameras, and runs the census.
Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions
#10They mention gigapixel cameras, my (brief) googling couldn't find any evidence that such a thing exists, except for an experimental one at Duke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldQXHP7TFUE . Although I suppose a gigapixel photo can be made by taking pictures by multiple cameras at the same time just as well. Still, wouldn't that sort of thing be available commercially, at least for the enthusiasts out there?
The Gaia space observatory has a gigapixel camera. It contains 106 CCD sensors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_%28spacecraft%29