With an update from the National Business Aviation Association below.
Good news for paparazzi, stalkers, and corporate spies: 'Private' jets are about to become significantly less private.
At the Defcon security conference later this week, two security researchers plan to release a tool that aims to expose a little-seen list of hidden private aircraft flight plans--the so-called Block Aircraft Registration Request or BARR list, a collection of aircraft whose owners have worked to keep their whereabouts out of the Federal Aviation Administration's public database of flights.
Dustin Hoffman and Semon Rezchikov have built OpenBarr.net, a website that will make public the tail numbers and locations of planes whose owners have explicitly tried to make them untrackable. In some cases, the planes' destinations will even be posted prior to their arrival, such that a resourceful paparazzi could arrive at the airport ready to catch his or her target stepping out the door.
"TMZ would probably love to know where Jay Z’s plane is going to land and when," says Hoffman, who runs the IT consultancy Exigent Systems and frequently pilots his own plane. "Or if you want your product on the shelves at Walmart and a competitor's executives are flying their corporate jet into Bentonville, Arkansas, knowing that could be very advantageous."
Since the year 2000, private aircraft have been able to file a request with the FAA and have their flight plans excluded from the public database accessible to sites like FlightAware.com, which allows anyone to look up a plane's location and upcoming destinations based on its tail number. "Anyone who's interesting who you might want to track is already on the BARR list," says Hoffman. "If someone wants to travel discreetly, why not?"
But Hoffman and Rezchikov found a clever way to maneuver around the list's privacy protections. Even private planes signal their arrival to air traffic control towers over public frequencies that anyone can access with a bit of radio savvy. Air traffic control enthusiasts eavesdrop on those communications and collect them at sites like LiveATC.net, where they can be streamed or downloaded in archives.
So the two researchers developed speech-to-text software that allows them to download the audio files and convert them to publicly-accessible alerts about which planes are arriving where in as little as five minutes. "They simply can't get in without talking on the radio," says Hoffman. "We suck up the mp3s and scrape them. There's no way around it."
For now, OpenBarr only tracks flights going into or coming out of the three Las Vegas airports: McCarren International, Henderson, and North Las Vegas. But Hoffman and Rezchikov have plans to expand it soon--possibly with volunteer help from the site's users--to other cities including Miami and Los Angeles.
Parsing a noisy feed of jargon-filled air-traffic-control communications isn't easy. (The recordings sound like this.) But Rezchikov, a freshman at MIT and a Thiel Fellow, used an open source system called Sphinx developed at Carnegie Mellon, and honed the program's understanding of air traffic vocabulary with 70 hours of air traffic control transcripts provided by the Linguistic Data Consortium along with hours more of transcripts he and Hoffman produced themselves. With significant tweaking, the program can now recognize 80% of words in the recordings, Rezchikov says, though its accuracy for recognizing digits such as plane tail numbers is much higher.
Adding more cities to OpenBarr.net will require more transcribing of feeds from other airports, to "teach the thing to understand every acoustic environment," says Rezchikov. But he and Hoffman may request that OpenBarr users who want a new airport added spend a few minutes transcribing recordings from its control tower and submitting them to the site.
The BARR list became a subject of debate last year when the FAA sought to change flying rules to cancel the opt-out privacy protection. But after the National Business Aviation Association and privacy advocates lobbied in favor of maintaining the option, it was reinstated in November of last year.
Update: Needless to say, the NBAA isn't happy about about Hoffman and Rezchikov's work.
"It's regrettable that someone would seek to violate another person's security 'for fun and profit' as this person, in his own words, says he wants to do," writes Dan Hubbard, a spokesperson for the association, referring to the somewhat playful title of the pair's Defcon talk: "Tracking 'Untrackable' Private Aircraft for Fun & Profit."
"Getting on an airplane shouldn't amount to forfeiting your security and privacy to anyone, anywhere in the world with an Internet connection," adds Hubbard. "That’s why a law was passed to create a program that allows citizens and companies to opt out from having their flights tracked. Attempts to compromise that opt-out ability amount to nothing less than an unwarranted invasion of the privacy of aircraft owners and operators, a threat to the competitiveness of U.S. companies and a potential security risk to the persons aboard aircraft."
Hoffman, himself a private pilot, says he's conflicted about exposing the BARR list, but felt it was important to show that it didn't provide complete secrecy, rather than to maintain what he describes as the illusion of privacy. "I was kind of torn at times," he says of his work. "But if Semon and I can pull this off—and this isn’t even our full time job--someone else is already doing it."
In fact, Hoffman says he's in favor of stronger protections for the privacy of flyers; But he believes--and aims to prove--that the BARR list doesn't provide it. "I’m a libertarian. I don’t think it’s anyone’s business where you travel to," he says. "But what’s worse, for everyone to know it’s easy to track you, or to have a false assurance you can’t be tracked?"
