Will tracking Elon Musk’s jet get even tougher? The system on which the famous Twitter account that irritates the American billionaire is based has been bought by a company. Some fear that this will lead the service to censor certain flights.
This is a case that has been agitating aviation enthusiasts since January 25: will it be more difficult to track the jet movements of certain personalities, such as Elon Musk? This is the background of the question that arises with the announcement of the acquisition by Jetnet of the ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) platform for an undisclosed sum.
For those unfamiliar with ADS-B, it’s an equivalent service to sites like FlightRadar24 and FlightAware. It allows you to view on a map of the globe – ADS-B Exchange – the position of aircraft, with various flight information (registration, speed, altitude, model, etc.). You can see where he started from and his route, among other things.
The particularity of this platform is its 100% community nature, noted Wired, in its January 29 edition. Volunteers around the world install receivers that are relatively cheap or easy to build. Data from aircraft in mid-flight is captured in real time and then sent back to ADS-B Exchange.
It is then up to the platform software to process all the information sent to it in order to display a coherent rendering on a map, usable and understandable by the public. FlightRadar24 and FlightAware also work with volunteers, amateurs or not, but only partially. Part of their data comes from feeds made available by the authorities.
ADS-B Exchange goes under corporate control
But here is where the discomfort lies. Jetnet is a private company, which has itself been owned by a private equity firm, Silversmith Capital Partners since July 2022. For Internet users affected by ADS-B, this is necessarily a bad sign. There will be censorship sooner or later. Clearly, some flight information, now public, may no longer be.
It is possible for aircraft owners to make a request to the American civil aviation authority (FAA — Federal Aviation Administration) to obtain a masking of their flight paths, to prevent the public from seeing them. The FAA may occasionally grant this request and sites like FlightRadar24 and FlightAware comply.
But ADS-B Exchange holds a different policy, refusing to hide flight data. And ADS-B having the particularity of not being encrypted, anyone can pick up the information transmitted by aircraft with a simple receiver. It is in fact not possible to censor upstream, today, ADS-B. But downstream, it is possible, by controlling a card like ADS-B Exchange.
This is a far from neutral issue, at a time when the subject of private jets has become an emblematic case of the difficulties in combating climate change. Proponents of stricter regulation, or even a ban on these flights, believe that this would be a powerful lever to reduce pollution in the air sector and, therefore, to achieve the objectives of lowering emissions.
A 2021 report observed that a passenger on a private jet pollutes between 5 and 14 times more than a passenger on an airliner. Accounts on Twitter have flourished in recent years, to challenge these extremely wealthy passengers and denounce certain seemingly absurd thefts. The jets of Bernard Arnault (president of LVMH) and Elon Musk are targeted.
Elon Musk is opposed to the publication of this information
It turns out that Elon Musk has expressed his opposition to this kind of broadcast – indeed, bots created like @ElonJet rely on ADS-B data in particular. The American entrepreneur, who became the owner of Twitter in 2022, ended up banning the disputed account, on the grounds of his personal safety (the broadcast was done in real time), and enacted a rule prohibiting the sharing of a location.
This story had raised a debate combining issues of privacy, personal security and access to public information. In France, the Cnil has offered a summary of the issues by showing the challenge there is to arbitrate between the rights of the person and those related to information – exactly as for the delicate subject of the right to be forgotten on the web.
Elon Musk and the owner of the @ElonJet account had posted their disagreements by interposed messages. The stratagem of the second to circumvent the arguments of the first was to propose another account on Twitter, @ElonJetbutDelayed. The principle ? Delay the publication of messages relating to the routes of the billionaire’s jet by 24 hours. No personal safety risk, like that.
” Elon Musk is trying to say that what I post is not public information. ADS-B is on all public frequencies and is acquired by organizations like ADS-B Exchange. That’s like saying that AM or FM signals [pour la radio, NDLR] are not public and receiving a frequency is private “, annoyed Jack Sweeney.
As Wired tells in its investigation, the subject goes beyond the scope of only wealthy Western travelers. The existence of ADS-B is also a subject of geopolitical tension, with powers such as China or Saudi Arabia, who view this platform with a dim view. Beijing has banned receivers, while Riyadh has advocated regulating ADS-B globally.
The arrival of Jetnet and Silversmith Capital Partners questions the transparency that ADS-B Exchange may still have in the long term, and the influences that the new owners could suffer. ” My fear has always been that someone will come along and destroy everything we’ve built “, testified James Stanford, one of the administrators of the site.
However, there is a much more immediate risk against ADS-B Exchange: Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks.
The day after the announcement of the takeover of the platform, Jack Sweeney noted that ” someone is running DDOS on ADS-B Exchange DDOS is saturating his 10 gigabit connection […] No data from ADS-B streams “. The story does not say if it is a gesture of humor from an angry redemption enthusiast or if the attack is carried out by other motivations.
Subscribe to Numerama on Google News to not miss any news!