Elon Musk, who in November bragged that his free-speech absolutism was so pure that wouldn’t ban an account devoted to tweeting his plane’s in-flight location, reversed course with a vengeance earlier this week. He banned not only the @ElonJet account but all the accounts belonging to its creator, Florida college student Jack Sweeney. Then Thursday night he went still further, suspending more than a half-dozen prominent journalists who had been covering the controversy.
In his defense, Musk argued that tweeting information about his flights was equivalent to “doxxing,” a practice in which online harassers publish a victim’s address, phone number, or other personal information in order to encourage other people to harass them.
“Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” Musk tweeted Thursday night. (He said that a stalker had used the information to track his young child in a car, though he doesn’t have appeared to have filed a police report, and he hadn’t used his jet on the day in question.)
The controversy has shined a spotlight into a previously little-discussed area of aircraft operations that been operating for years without significant controversy, raising the question: Why is aircraft location information made available freely and instantaneously?
It turns out there is actually a very good reason. “It’s a safety concern,” says Bob Joyce, director of aviation safety at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “Certain parts of the country are saturated with traffic,” he says; flight tracking helps keeps planes from flying into one another.
The need to keep aircraft separated has been the impetus behind aircraft surveillance for decades. In 1986, a single-engine Piper Archer and an Aeromexico DC-9 passenger jet collided midair over Los Angeles, killing 82 people. In the aftermath, the FAA began mandating that aircraft operating in busy airspace carry transponders, electronic devices that tell air traffic controllers where aircraft are. In 2020, the agency began requiring a more advanced system called ADS-B, which continually transmits information about the plane’s identity, location, and speed to other planes and to a network of ground-based receivers.
This information is instantly available not only to air traffic controllers but also to other pilots, who can see in real time all the other traffic around them. Because the information is unencrypted and freely available, anyone at all can pick it up and do whatever they want with it, and there are a number of websites that allow anyone to view air traffic around the world.
Knowing where everyone is all the time is invaluable for accident investigation. “It helps us narrow down who, when and where. It’s a big part of our investigative process,” says Joyce. When MH370 disappeared over the South China Sea in 2014, for instance, ADS-B data from the first 40 minutes of the flight was one of the most important early clues about what had happened to the plane.
While safety is the primary point of the aircraft surveillance system, the FAA recognizes that some users might have privacy concerns as well, and that it isn’t necessary to know every detail about a plane’s ownership and flight history to keep it from having a midair collision. For that reason the FAA launched a service called the Privacy ICAO Aircraft Address program that lets aircraft owners apply for a anonymized identification code.
It’s a laborious process, and codes cannot be changed more than once every 60 days. This means they can be of limited utility, since astute observers might be able to use other clues to figure out an aircraft owner’s identify. Musk takes part in the PIA program, so some of his supporters have argued that Sweeney isn’t using publicly available information. But his plane’s well-known past behavior was a dead giveaway. “Elon Musk, for example, has a Gulfstream and there’s only so many people that fly that particular plane out of Brownsville,” Sweeney told the website Insider.
The ease with which Musk can be spotted raises the question of how much responsibility he should bear for the situation. While it’s understandable that a wealthy man might want to shield himself from the public eye, an important part of being discreet is how one comports oneself. There’s only so much privacy one can expect when engaging in act as fundamentally public as flying through the national airspace in a $66.5 million jet.
In the aftermath of @ElonJet’s ejection from Twitter, other social media outlets picked up the slack. There’s now a subreddit devoted entirely to the Musk jet flight movements and coverage of the Twitter controversy. Anyone trying to link to the site from Twitter, however, will receive a warning that it has “been identified by Twitter … as being potentially harmful.” (Similar warnings are being given to any link to Mastodon, where Sweeney has set up an alternate account.)
If Musk really wants to avoid detection in the future, he might want to take a page from the man who recently replaced him as the world’s richest. Bernard Arnault, the CEO of the luxury goods company LVMH, told a French radio station that to avoid being tracked he sold his private jet and now rents instead.
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
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ElonJet: Is Musk right that flight tracking an invasion of privacy? - Slate
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