-Freddie Gray!
Small surveillance planes were spotted over West Baltimore
after the riots.
ACLU is now demanding answers.
There was this Cessna flying around, circling the protests.
But the plane wasn’t registered to the FBI.
It was registered to just some little company.
And I thought, “Oh, that’s pretty interesting.”
So I started looking at the data they had
and who it was registered to, who’s the owner.
I mean, right away I was like, “This is kind of weird.
They’re all named three letters
and then ‘leasing’ or ‘aviation.’”
They seem like they’re front companies.
I felt kind of paranoid because I was like,
“Am I the only person who knows about this? This is so weird.
Like, there’s a lot of planes doing this,
and they’re flying over my neighborhood.”
And I would find, you know, people online talking about it,
like, “Oh, that Cessna that’s been flying around our city in circles.”
And also, you know, people on YouTube,
mentally ill people who are like, “The government is spying on me.
There’s this plane that keeps flying around.”
And eventually I was like, “Well, you are half right.
It’s a secret government surveillance spy plane.
They’re just not-- They’re probably not looking at you.”
[Super_Users]
[I Uncovered an FBI Plane Surveillance Program]
I’m John Wiseman. I live in Los Angeles, California,
and I’m interested in technology.
I’m a nerd. I program computers.
Plane tracking was something that I’ve been interested in
for 15 years or more,
and I remember the day that it really started.
It was soon after I moved to Los Angeles,
and I was living in this neighborhood
where there were a lot of helicopters.
And one day, I was in an apartment, and I had to go to the laundry room,
and there’s this police helicopter overhead.
And suddenly, the spotlight came down,
like, shining right on me.
I’m just holding my basket,
looking up into this beam of light coming from the sky.
And I was like, ’Wow.” It just struck me.
And then I started thinking more about
these helicopters that are always up there,
and I always hear them, and what are they doing?
And I started thinking of them like birds,
like, where do the birds migrate to and from and where do they nest?
So it was just something that was on my mind for many years
until finally, I started hearing about these virtual radar systems,
like, “Oh, someone built a radio
that can pick up the transponder pings from aircraft.”
And then there was a point where someone figured out
how to take this $20 USB dongle,
which is meant for picking up digital TV,
and use it to decode the same transponder pings.
I immediately got one of those,
and I can receive transponder pings, approximately 100-mile range.
And those pings often contain the aircraft ID,
so you can uniquely identify which aircraft it is
and then look up using public info who is it registered to.
It often contains information about speed and location,
so you can plot it on a map.
A lot of aircraft are going somewhere.
They’re going from A to B.
But the ones that are circling, they're doing something different.
And it can be police or news, firefighting, or FBI surveillance.
About seven years ago,
there were protests in Baltimore about Freddie Gray.
I saw an article
where they were talking about how there was this Cessna flying around,
circling the protests,
and someone thought it was an FBI surveillance plane.
But the plane wasn’t registered to the FBI.
It was registered to just some little company.
And I thought, “Oh, that’s pretty interesting.”
I started researching it,
and people online were sort of talking about this phenomenon,
FBI just using these little Cessnas for surveillance.
And then I saw someone mention,
“Oh, it’s weird, but they all broadcast the same squawk code,
4414 or 4415.”
And so I started looking at the data they had,
and there were these companies that, I mean, right away I was like,
“This is kind of weird.
They’re all named three letters
and then ‘leasing’ or ‘aviation.’”
I was like, “That’s kind of a weird pattern.”
And then, you know, at that time,
I think I got it up to maybe 100 planes
and 20 different companies,
which I was already--
You know, at this point, I was like,
“These seem like they’re front companies.”
I thought, “Maybe it’s the CIA.” I don’t know.
But then I found they accidentally use the same PO boxes,
the Department of Justice.
So that was a real concrete link in my mind.
I felt kind of paranoid
because I was like, “Am I the only person that knows about this?
This is so weird.
There’s a lot of planes doing this,
and they’re flying over my neighborhood.”
And I would find people online talking about it, like,
“That Cessna that’s been flying around our city in circles.”
And also people on YouTube, like mentally ill people,
who are like, “The government is spying on me.
There’s this plane that keeps flying around.”
And eventually I was like, “Well, you are half right.
It’s a secret government surveillance spy plane.
They’re just not-- they’re probably not looking at you.”
But then what completely sealed it was,
I mean, this is after about a month of my doing this research
and finding these links,
the Associated Press published an article saying that
the FBI admitted that that original plane in Baltimore was them,
at which point I thought, “That’s it.
That is the linchpin now
that the rest of my network has a solid connection to reality.”
So that was a very vindicating moment.
At this point, people have gotten hold of
the videos that they actually shoot from those planes,
so you can see exactly what they’re looking at.
There’s, like, 100, 120 planes at least that I knew of
that were doing this every day over the United States.
I mean, they’re just part of their everyday investigation of
drug dealers and other criminals.
They're just doing surveillance on those people.
I don’t even know if most people know that’s happening,
like, all the time.
One part of this project I like
is taking the same or similar sorts of technologies
or surveillance techniques that the government uses on its citizens
and finding out that an individual can do it
and turn it around and aim it at the government.
There’s probably a lot more of that turning around those tools
and aiming them at authorities that could probably be done.