About Wave Farm
NSA, FBI still scouring local frequencies
Jun 02, 2015 11:24 pm
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The "USA Freedom Act" passed the Senate 67-32 on June 2, and President Barack Obama signed it with three parts of the Patriot Act — including the controversial Section 215 — coming back into practice after a brief shutdown June 1. In America this week, the politicians who still condemned Edward Snowden, the former security contractor with the National Security Agency whose leaks made the programs public, for leaking those policies, as they voted to change some of the domestic spying laws. Snowden, meanwhile, on June 2 won the Bjornson Prize from the Norwegian Academy of Literature and Freedom of Expression, “for his work protecting privacy and for shining a critical light on U.S. surveillance of its citizens and others.” There's plenty of other government snooping of radio frequencies at the federal level. An Associated Press investigation forced the FBI to admit that it uses at least 13 dummy corporations with planes to fly low-and-slow aerial spy missions over U.S. cities. The planes are outfitted with antennae and captured video and sometimes cellular signals from 30 cities in 11 states in a recent month, according to the report. John Wiseman, a technologist in Los Angeles, in a Fusion article also out this week, used public records to discover the FBI's spy planes in Los Angeles and was able to use a device he programmed to intercept airplane transmissions, to track the spy planes overhead in L.A. in real time. Wiseman wrote up his findings in a Hacker News post last month. "He realized the spy planes associated with these companies were using a distinct transmission code or “squawk” as well as a unique call sign, leading him to believe the planes he was seeing overhead with some frequency were probably operated by the feds," the Fusion story says. “I decided to check my database for planes that have squawked 4414/4415 or used one of the suspicious callsigns: I found 8 aircraft in the past 2 months, several of which exhibit suspicious behavior,” he wrote on Hacker News last month, naming several of the suspicious companies cited in today’s AP report. “Flying for hours at a time without going anywhere in particular (I don’t have position information for them, but I know they’re in the air and not leaving the LA area), flying almost every day for months at a time.”
The "USA Freedom Act" passed the Senate 67-32 on June 2, and President Barack Obama signed it with three parts of the Patriot Act — including the controversial Section 215 — coming back into practice after a brief shutdown June 1. In America this week, the politicians who still condemned Edward Snowden, the former security contractor with the National Security Agency whose leaks made the programs public, for leaking those policies, as they voted to change some of the domestic spying laws. Snowden, meanwhile, on June 2 won the Bjornson Prize from the Norwegian Academy of Literature and Freedom of Expression, “for his work protecting privacy and for shining a critical light on U.S. surveillance of its citizens and others.” There's plenty of other government snooping of radio frequencies at the federal level. An Associated Press investigation forced the FBI to admit that it uses at least 13 dummy corporations with planes to fly low-and-slow aerial spy missions over U.S. cities. The planes are outfitted with antennae and captured video and sometimes cellular signals from 30 cities in 11 states in a recent month, according to the report. John Wiseman, a technologist in Los Angeles, in a Fusion article also out this week, used public records to discover the FBI's spy planes in Los Angeles and was able to use a device he programmed to intercept airplane transmissions, to track the spy planes overhead in L.A. in real time. Wiseman wrote up his findings in a Hacker News post last month. "He realized the spy planes associated with these companies were using a distinct transmission code or “squawk” as well as a unique call sign, leading him to believe the planes he was seeing overhead with some frequency were probably operated by the feds," the Fusion story says. “I decided to check my database for planes that have squawked 4414/4415 or used one of the suspicious callsigns: I found 8 aircraft in the past 2 months, several of which exhibit suspicious behavior,” he wrote on Hacker News last month, naming several of the suspicious companies cited in today’s AP report. “Flying for hours at a time without going anywhere in particular (I don’t have position information for them, but I know they’re in the air and not leaving the LA area), flying almost every day for months at a time.”