Aircraft IDs are used for type lookups and uniqueness. Callsigns are already in the signal and must be the registration for anything other than commercial or military flights, as they're registered and there's a process for allocation. Weight category and other data being added would require a whole new revision of the standard and will not reach most systems for decades.
Is all of this really necessary when billionaires have other means at their disposal to avoid scrutiny? Why add risk and complexity to a critical system just to make their lives easier?
Spoofing is not really a useful attack vector, for various reasons. In any case it's also not something that can easily be retrofitted for the same reasons, in that it takes decades to update these systems.
Yes; I know. But similar to tracking a wireless client by MAC address, it could be possible to enhance the system to assign single-use identifiers to flight plans such that it would be radically more difficult to casually associate tracking data to specific aircraft in realtime. I'm not advocating for any change necessarily; just pointing out that RF emissions of a modern aircraft do nothing to belie its identity. The registration information itself is irrelevant to tracking the aircraft movements.
> Also - theres a privacy push to mask a plane's real tail number
Please, call them registrations. The majority of countries don't use numbers in aircraft registrations, and carry them on the fuselage instead of the tail...
As a technical solution: Could the identifier be per flight and anonymous, rather than having ID be per plane, with the owner/user published (where?)? Would that meet other needs?
The FAA could have a database connecting flight IDs with (confidential) plane IDs.
A very good point that embarrassingly highlights my lack of knowledge about it. Thank you for the correction.
I suppose a decent, easy system for evading its tracking would just be for rich people to swap keys to their private jets. Or chartering. Or flying commercial. Etc.
> Which would make the identifier itself, and its real-time location, public information, but the knowledge of who owns the identifier would remain as private information.
Yes and no. Tracking airplanes is something hobbyists have been doing for decades; there are people who hang out by airports and record every flight in and out. The PIA program can be useful for realtime masking but the information is far from secret — nor should it be, imo.
> "Elon Musk, for example, has a Gulfstream and there's only so many people that fly that particular plane out of Brownsville, Texas and fly to the same airports," Sweeney told Insider.
> ...
> "These privacy mitigation programs are effective for real-time operations but do not guarantee absolute privacy," an FAA spokesperson said. "A flight can still be tracked in other ways such as a Freedom of Information Act request, www.LiveATC.com, ADSB Exchange, or a frequently departed airport."
You've made no credible representation that identifiers will be time-variable in a non-predictable manner.
Which is required to defeat any level of time-based observational collection and correlation by third parties. As is commonly the place with present aviation tracking systems.
True. They are talking about including this new information in the same database that is used to register N-numbers for full sized aircraft. It's not really a new thing, and doesn't bother me too much.
However, their FAQ is very misleading. If the info will be public, fine, just be up front about it. At the moment, there is plain language that says the info will be kept private, but legal language that says it will be made publicly searchable.
Flights are clearly not public information. I cannot look up where you've been flying on regular airlines recently and that's how it works for virtually everyone.
Reality is, governments and the airline industry could make this system be sufficiently private if they wanted, or at least a lot harder to abuse. There's no particular reason personal details of jet owners have to be linked to the radio transponders.
While we are innovating in this space, perhaps it's time to address IATA's PNR (passenger Name record) Standard that is used by Sabre and Amadeus. Plenty of privacy issues in that old system.
Why are these planes even required? Cant the US government simply get this information directly from the phone carriers? Given all of the power the NSA seems to have, surely they have this capability already.
I suppose the benefit of knowing where everything is a security plus. Watching 9/11 documentaries, it was surprising how many aircraft the controllers couldn't account for.
It seems more attention seeking to me. If they really wanted the world to track the aircraft movements then they could post a list of names, aircraft and tail numbers. That would allow anyone to use FlightRadar24, FlightAware or the myriad of other tracking sites and their API's to track aircraft and would take the focus off the one person tracking them.
Every measure like that introduces safety risk into the critical air traffic control system by increasing the odds of data inconsistencies and other things going wrong. I don't believe it's worth it just to preserve the privacy of billionaires and corporations.
Is all of this really necessary when billionaires have other means at their disposal to avoid scrutiny? Why add risk and complexity to a critical system just to make their lives easier?
Spoofing is not really a useful attack vector, for various reasons. In any case it's also not something that can easily be retrofitted for the same reasons, in that it takes decades to update these systems.
reply