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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Didn't they change the law so you can't track private flights anymore? Or was Melon Husk just trying to get that done? Or was that just me imagining things again? 🤔
As far as I know, you can still track Elon's flights. It's not illegal since it was all publicly available information to begin with.
It's also not something that you can really stop people from doing.
You might be able to stop people sharing the information freely, but, the transponders that people track and the protocols and standards for the communication are well known internationally. It doesn't take more than $50 in parts to set up your own receiver and connect it to a computer.
I'd consider any law prohibiting the observation of air traffic by the public to be impossible to enforce. How can you stop someone from listening by law?
Sharing the information, however, that's a bit different.
They can't prevent tracking because aircraft are required to broadcast their information when in flight.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillance%E2%80%93Broadcast
The FAA reauthorization act slipped in that ownership of private jets could remain anonymous. So you can still track them, because all flight plans are public and need to be for safety reasons, but they no longer have to tell you who owns what tail number. A dedicated tracker can figure out what plane belongs to who, either by showing up at the airport, or by comparing flight logs with other information about celebrity locations.
I feel like that has a little bit to do with how journalists tracked down a bunch of FBI shell companies that operated spy planes over BLM(and other) protests.