Tactical SIGINT Part 2: Tracking Spy Planes

the FBI has been secretly flying over our homes right here in the valley with equipment designed to track phone calls and record video Pentagon officials are telling CBS News tonight they are monitoring a suspected Chinese spy balloon that's been flying at high altitude over the U.S confrontation in the skies between U.S fighter jets and nuclear-capable Russian bombers not far from American Shores an unarmed Russian Air Force jet flew over several key landmarks here in the Washington area at low altitude today including the capital the Pentagon CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia and Joint Base Andrews home of Air Force One of course the flight was part of a long-standing treaty that allows militaries of the U.S and Russia to observe the other from the air the aerial investigative research or air pilot program flew over Baltimore City for six months and the city's spending board officially nixed it in February a ruling file Thursday says the persistent surveillance violated the Constitution with a lot of people becoming aware of how widespread government surveillance really is inevitably people start getting interested with tracking certain aircraft the widespread use of aerial assets to Target innocent civilians during the past few years the use of intelligence collection assets on U.S soil and even things like the actions of the Rich and Famous to conceal the location of their personal aircraft have all resulted in a lot of people looking to the skies above them and starting to notice what's going on up there now what if I were to tell you that you can track spy planes that may or may not be flying over your head collecting Intelligence on you right now what if you could track the same aircraft that conducted the rendition flights of the 2000s or even the aircraft flown by a rich and powerful people around the globe how about Air Force One or military aircraft or sophisticated intelligence collection assets and what if you could do all of this without internet access from a simple tablet or laptop in the middle of the woods it may sound a bit difficult but if we we take this step by step it's not too hard so let's get right to it one of the things that will help you right off the bat is to take a look at the video we did previously on the topic of tactical Signet you really don't have to I guess but it will make a lot more sense if you do since I cover the installation of the main software package that we're going to be talking about today which is plane plotter plane plotter is a software package that when used in conjunction with an SDR dongle helps us to recognize and visualize adsp transponder data from aircraft again we cover the basics of this in the first video on this topic in which we've figured out how to track basic aircraft getting all of this to work first is a prerequisite for what we're about to do alright so let's Dive Right into this if you have plain plotter working and you're able to receive different kinds of aircraft and you're all set up to go on that front now we can start bringing in the database there are two main ways to do this you can do things the easy way or the hard way the easy way is to just use the file that I provide you you below this is a file that I have compiled myself using a lot of Open Source sources and the hard way is to do do the file yourself create the file from scratch now we're going to cover both ways but we'll cover the easy way first so if you download the file that I have provided below the base station.sqb file you should get it somewhere in your downloads folder and it will go right here in your log files folder now if you install plain plotter just to your routine C drive it's going to be in local disk C drive right there tools COA plane plotter log files so that's where your base station file is going to go now remember if you download plain plotter and install it you're not going to get this file you have to download it yourself which I'll show you how to do later plane plotter installs with an empty file you can leave that there that's no problem but if you want to use the file that I provide to you just go ahead and add that file right to your log file folder so there we go that's it you are pretty much done now we can launch plain plotter once we bring plane plotter up we can confirm and make sure that plane plotter is actually receiving and working off of that base station file so we go to options directories sqb aircraft database and there we go it is running off of basestation.sqb you can delete the empty one or you can just leave it there it doesn't really matter what does matter is the file has to be named base station.sqb otherwise plain plutter is not going to not going to recognize it but you can define a different database here if you wish so we're just going to use basestation.sqb the the default configuration now to get fully set up with alerts what we're going to do is kind of backtrack to what we talked about in the first second video and we're going to set up some alerts so we're going to go over here to options alert alert fields and what we're going to do is make sure that what we want is uh is tagged right so what I personally like is I like to keep the registration number that's that's handy if you're tracking multiple aircraft types I want to know the altitude because I want to be able to look down at a quick glance at the alert notification and see all right is this a low level asset or is this it like cruising altitude I want to know how far away it is from me if we have that data available and I want to know what user tag I have given this and we'll talk more about that when we talk about putting together the file itself and I want to make sure that we get alerts for all interested aircraft so interested is the tag it is the categorization of aircraft that plane plotter uses to say hey this is in in important aircraft that's just the word they've chosen interest is a good kind of word if you're and if you are interested in an aircraft you can tag it as interested in the database and you can now use this for alerts and a bunch of other different cool stuff we can talk about later if you have a lot of different alerts set up uh checking the alert origin would be very handy because that will let you know what kind of alert you got is this an interested aircraft or is this alert that I'm getting because of a new aircraft or because of an aircraft that flies into my uh tracking zone no you know whatever you want to set up the alert origin tag there might be helpful so I'm just going to leave that turned on doesn't really matter for this now as a side note before we kind of conclude the easy way of doing things if you are in an area in which you get a lot of aircraft overhead like if you're out in Texas near a few of the training bases uh for military aircraft or if you're up and down the east coast and you get a lot of cargo aircraft you might want to set alert zones rather than just all alerts because what this with this configuration I've just set up will do is alert you give you an alert on your your interface here it will send an alert whenever any of these interested aircraft are detected and you might not want that if you are near like a training base or something where you might get constantly get you know just get bombarded with alerts and you really don't care about you know training Jets so much you might want to set up alert zones so what we can do for that is go to options alert alert Zone add and we can just draw a little polygon here then go back to options alert alert Zone and uncheck add and one more thing we can go to options alert let's see here alert Zone and make sure exclusive is checked now what that's going to do is make it so that not every aircraft that flies into the Zone will be alerted so it can get kind of confusing with the alert so let me try to explain that a little bit clearer if you just leave this as an alert Zone you will get an alert on your screen every single time any aircraft whatsoever flies into this little polygon here you might not want that we covered that in the first video if you're kind of interested in tracking every aircraft that's fine but for me I live on the east coast so there are kind of a lot of different aircraft flying by at any given time and I just get constant alerts so I want to get alerts when an interested aircraft flies within this polygon here so by leaving that as Exclusive by leaving that tag on that means that exclusively aircraft that are interested will fly uh into this Zone and then trigger an alert so it's kind of Handy if you want to do that uh to make sure that you don't get so many alerts uh moving forward now you might be asking what is this going to do what kinds of aircraft are are going to trigger an alert well to explain that let's talk about how this file is made this mystery database file right this base station.sqb file what is the deal with this mystery base station file and what information is going to get pulled into plane plotter so to do that let's talk about how to do this whole process from scratch from the very start so from the very start this base station file base station.sqb that is the master database of a lot of different aircraft as of right now of the publishing of this video it's around 197 000 different airframes that are actually in this file it is a master database of every single aircraft in the world almost there are quite a few missing but it is basically a database of all of the aircraft that plane plotter users have detected logged and you know distributed to the plane plotter system if you were connected in feeding in data and data to it so it's not every aircraft in the world but it's a good chunk of the the airframes we have flying around the planet essentially what we are doing is taking this base station file and tagging different aircraft with different things right so that we're able to get an alert instead of any aircraft we want to only focus on certain aircraft like spy planes right so to do that we need to get the base station file like I mentioned before the base station file is not included when you install plane plotter you need to download that after the you install let me show you how to do that first we go to options scroll down to sqb hex database options and click fetch sqb hex database now when I click that it is going to start downloading that file to my log files folder if I already have a base station file there it is going to override it as far as I know so make sure that you don't already have one there if you already have a base station file there you can save it to another place and then kind of merge them later but if you're using the file that I give you you're going to erase it and start from scratch so just make sure you you're keeping tabs on which files you're using and also make sure once you download this if you're starting from absolute scratch and you've never downloaded this before make sure once you download it to make a a copy so that you don't mess anything up later you can of course just re-download it if you want through this you know through plane plotter but it's just easier just to keep a copy just so that you don't make any mistakes once you have that downloaded we can start to edit it and actually view the data that's inside this database file but to do that you actually need a third-party program and the one that I'm using is some free software called dbrowser for SQL Lite or sqlite right so here is what I'm using for this the installation is pretty easy you can get it from the website that I showed you uh the link is below of course and once you install this it's pretty simple to install we can now load the database into this it could not be easier just up here at the top left click open database and we're going to navigate to where we have our database file stored so let me make sure that I'm getting the right one here and make sure to click uh all file extensions otherwise it might not show up so right here is where I have mine saved here's the installation file you're going to get and this is the base station.sqb that I'm going to be working out of so let me go ahead and open that and you're going to get a lot of gibberish if you don't understand what database files look like once we load that database file in we can click browse data in the upper left hand corner right here and here are all of our aircraft as we can see if we scroll down to the very bottom of the list we have a little over 195 000 aircraft now granted a lot of these I've put in myself because they were not in the original database I put in some aircraft that are either deregistered or they are they've been sold to somebody else but we'll talk about the data sources here in a minute really what we need to focus on are a few different parts of the toolbar up here right here is your registration number this is the tail number in the United States it is called an in number that delineates the registration for the aircraft that's the most important number because from the registration number you can get a lot of stuff so just keep in mind the registration number the in Number the tail number is very very important you can also scroll over here and see different kinds of Manufacturers and if we scroll all the way over here the other column that you need to know about is registered owners now this is going to change quite a lot because people you know buy and sell different aircraft but if a government agency owns a an aircraft it's probably going to be right here now moving over quite a bit to the far side of this spreadsheet here we have the interested column now this is a very important column this is how you're going to tag different aircraft as being interested remember when I showed you the easy way of doing things we set up the alerts to alert us if an interested aircraft does something if we detect it at all it's going to get an alert or if it flies into a Zone we're going to get an alert that's how you're able to determine the difference between means say an aircraft that you don't really care about and aircraft that you are interested in thus the tag here so in this in this database a value of zero means you are not interested in the aircraft and it's not going to trigger anything and a value of 1 means you are interested that is now tagged as an interested aircraft right beside the interested column is a column called user tag now if you remember again this is another field another data field that will pop up in our alert column so what I use the user tag column 4 is to let me know what kind of aircraft this is with regards to like capabilities so if we scroll down to the bottom here of of my own little personal database we can see that if I get some kind of indication some kind of notification through open source intelligence you know processing and stuff like that that an airframe is a somehow linked to a federal agency with regards to surveillance I'll put it there I'll put spy plane that's just an easy quick way for me to look down at a tablet or look at a computer screen you know out in the field and say oh okay spy plane overhead now it doesn't have to be just spy plane you can make it be anything you want so let me actually sort my user tag here as you can see most the aircraft in the world don't really have don't really have anything but some aircraft do so like Transport Aircraft I have tagged a lot of let's say ch-47 you know ch47 Chinooks so those are Transport Aircraft right and we can Define any kind of tag we want we've got fuelers we've got all different kinds of things right so this is how you were to edit this file now I have not done every aircraft in the world like this I've only only done the ones that I've gotten to so far so I may end up updating this in the future just just let just to let you know but that's how you work to tag aircraft if you were kind of interested in them and that's pretty much all the data fields that I really care about uh also if you wanted to add your own aircraft say you were to go online and do a little Google Foo or searching online in some way and you find a an aircraft a tail number of an aircraft that is suspicious or someone somewhere in The Ether of the internet thinks that it is linked to a National Intelligence service not even just American but you know other nations intelligent services and you're kind of concerned about that potential surveillance aircraft and you put the registration number in here and it doesn't come up with anything well you can then put your own aircraft in so you can go right here and add another aircraft to the very bottom row now there are some requirements for putting this in this this particular database you must know the registration number and you also must know the mode s transponder code the little six digit uh hex code that is assigned to the aircraft's transponder there are ways to put this in the database without this but it's very strongly recommended to have this because you can find it very easily usually when you look up the registration number that hex number will be there that modes transponder number will be there now I can explain what that is and what that's used for a little bit later because it doesn't help us now but you're going to need it later for some other stuff that we're going to talk about in future videos so that's pretty much it once you have added the aircraft you want or if you've tagged things as interested or you've added a little user tags to things you click write changes right there and that will write those changes to the database then you bring in that file again to plain plotter and there you go you've just you know created your own interested database now now the grand question becomes what aircraft do I want to tag as interested and what aircraft have I tagged as interested if you're using my my base station file so uh let's go ahead and sort this by interested and I'll just run down some of the some of the aircraft that I find are interesting so uh first of all I have tagged a little over 13 000 aircraft as being interested for me now most of these that I'm super interested in the ones that I have marked as spy planes our aircraft that are linked with either FBI or CIA or DHS surveillance on American soil now again where did I get these numbers from well it's pretty simple we can go to really the internet right and we can find a lot of stories a buzzfeed a few years ago created had a news article regarding aerial surveillance they did a whole expose on the FBI's secret front companies and the dhs's secret front companies that actually uh are you know companies that don't really exist at all but the FBI is using them as a front name to run surveillance here aircraft right because when you go to the faa's website right and you search for an in number it's going to come up with registration but it's not going to have FBI right it's going to have some front company so a lot of the times in the ocean World especially when it comes to surveillance you're going to get possible possible is one of those probabilistic language terms that we used to say we don't really know what this is but we know that it's important enough to track it and that's my criteria for putting it on the list and tagging it as interested I don't have you know proof beyond all doubt that these aircraft are being used as spy aircraft but I can get pretty close right so that's pretty much where I'm getting all of these spy plane tail numbers at least for the FBI and DHS now most of the Department of Homeland Security aircraft are listed as such in this database FBI not so much we had to go and find the front companies that they're that they're registering these these aircraft underneath you know still to this day or put them in my myself so a lot of these are going to be aircraft that are not being used anymore I've after the story kind of broke in the 2015-2016 time frame a lot of these aircraft were decommissioned they were deregistered or they let the registrations expire so yeah this is really just a list of random tail numbers I was able to find on a bunch of random different websites just by Googling around and seeing what I could find something else that can help you quite a lot is history so if we were able to just Google around or have are kind of old enough to remember the Renditions scandals of the past those CIA torture flights outside the country we can find a few companies that still exist like Tepper Aviation this company is a it is one of the operating companies for the Central Intelligence Agency and they're still active to this day as we can see it looks like a normal you know Aviation company except for the fact that they maintain two C-130 platforms right two different serial numbers so again who knows what they're up to both of these aircraft or at least I think one of them was spotted in Iraq Syria past couple of years so there's still very much being used and I want to make sure that I'm tagging these as well to make sure that I know that it's temper Aviation so kind of an interesting way of keeping an eye on one of the cia's companies that they use for different kinds of things like that so if you Google rendition flights you can find a lot of different companies that you can either search for or add yourself and a lot of different tail numbers to add as well again most of those are not being used anymore most of the rendition planes have either been sold or scrapped or decommissioned in some way so I didn't put them on this master list what I did put on this master list besides the obvious spy aircraft are pretty much every military aircraft in the world or at least the ones that I could uh sort and find very easily again this is a total of 13 000 ish aircraft so uh you know forgive me if there's a few aircraft that are you know missed or ones that I've tagged and I probably shouldn't have tagged because they're like Museum pieces now but as you can see I've tagged most of the uh police aircraft Air Force aircraft things like that you know the US Army's aircraft if it's tagged it's uh you know if it's in got the word army or Air Force in the name that's how I kind of found those so so yeah a lot of these are going to be cargo aircraft let me see if I could scroll down and find some of the more interesting ones um let's see here uh-60s mh60s yeah easy to easy day you know tracking Blackhawks is kind of interesting again most of these aircraft you're not they're not going to be flying around with their transponder on or it's going to be in like modes if that's what they have and you're not going to see them on the map again same thing for in for instance with the Russian Air Force just as an FYI most Russian military aircraft you're you're not going to see on any adsb platform they just don't fly with their transponders on they do not really care about civilian traffic that's just the way things are so if you see one of these it's going to be pretty rare at least from from what I've seen so let's scroll down here and find some of the more interesting ones we can sort by type actually as well and that might help a little bit some of these are kind of interesting aircraft that you might not have realized are there uh actually let's go and search by type for VC 25 I know that one off the top of my head so this is a vc25 a and b variant run by the United States Air Force as you can see I have them tagged interested you might know this platform as Air Force One at least when the president is on board again certain kinds of aircraft if you're using online tracking services like flat Radar 24 or adsb exchange or since adsb exchanges had some kind of drama with regards to ownership that that might be a less reliable source or it might uh go to a different domain name in the future but you get my drift any online Source has the potential to for for being filtered and for instance these aircraft right here you will not find on flat Radar 24 because flat Radar 24 specifically cooperates you know willfully and joyfully with the US government in censoring the location of assets like Air Force One that's why if you were to have an offline soar course for tracking aircraft like plane plotter you would get an alert whenever Air Force One flies overhead and you'll be able to track it across the sky because these aircraft even though they are blacklisted a lot of times from these flight tracking websites you're still going to be able to pick them up because they're flying in American airspace they're going to have to have a transponder on most of the time and again if we're trying to pick what kind of aircraft that we are interested in along those lines I'm I'm really interested in tracking forbidden aircraft aircraft that we're not supposed to track right in terms of intelligence collection you know on U.S soil Air Force One is not really a really big concern it's a transport aircraft a command and control Suite it's kind of interesting I think it's you know fascinating aircraft airframe to follow but it's not really a threat to me on the ground and neither is Elon musk's airplane and this is a Hot Topic right this is one that he is in the past you know said you know the richest man in the world says that you know he lets his aircraft be tracked on Twitter and then suddenly he doesn't want that happening anymore so uh you can actually see right here very recently as recently as December 20 2022 wired as writing articles about how Elon musk's private jet is conspicuously missing from the two main flight tracking platforms FlightAware and flight radar 24. interestingly it's due to a lot of bureaucracy but I think we all know how that happens the richest man in the world doesn't want us playing on the internet and so he is making it so interestingly enough this particular news article right here has the tail number in 628 TS so let's go ahead and grab that tail number and let's bring it in to our plane plotter database here let's see if we can remove that filter and we can search by registration again there it is it is a Gulf Stream G650 ER extended range variant and as we can see I have already edited the name putting Elon Musk right there and I've also added the user tag Elon Musk so again not really a threat to me it's just kind of interesting and I personally uh like tracking things that very rich and powerful people don't want me to track so uh I thought that was kind of an interesting addition to this database so again you can add whatever aircraft you want to the database it's up to you I have provided some of the aircraft I'm interested in tracking I'm sure that as I find more and more interesting aircraft I will add them to this list and we'll see about updating it at some point but this is a good start and if you wanted to create your own this is an even better start as well if you're in a specific area you might not want to run with the entire database of the world these 13 different thousand different you know aircraft you might want to run just the local aircraft that are in your area or the ones that you are specifically interested in the sky's the limit with this kind of stuff and you can really do whatever you want to so now that we've gotten our database all configured and running in plain plotter let's talk about some of the disadvantages that this system brings all of this is well and good right and it sounds like this is a really magical piece of software and it really is helpful but there are some disadvantages not necessarily with the software but just the nature of how adsb works if you haven't figured it out by now the biggest disadvantage to this entire system is that you can only detect aircraft within a certain range of your location you aren't going to be able to track aircraft around the world like you would using online adsb tracking websites those websites get their data from platforms like this that are connected to the internet and feed in the data to these main tracking websites so these are all networked together via the Internet well if you don't have internet or you're trying to be you know off-grid or something like that you're not going to have the ability to feed into these platforms that's why it's kind of important to have an offline adsb platform even though you're kind of limited to your local area it's kind of a side note it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have an online adsb app or website or something when you're in the field it's really better to go with an offline completely blacked out receive only system because if you're trying to avoid intelligence collection aircraft then it wouldn't be a super great idea to only know about those aircraft because you're using a smartphone right that's kind of counter-intuitive if your detection system relies on you using a spy sensor basically the most in dense collection of spy sensors in the world your smartphone if that's what you have to use to access the internet to find out if there's a spy aircraft overhead do you see how kind of backwards that is so even though the disadvantage with this entire system is that you can only use it for a local area and it's not networked to the internet that's really just the nature of the Beast that you're going to have to kind of deal with for now you can form ad hoc networks as needed and link up with friends or contacts you might have in local areas if you want a real world example of this is if there's a high profile event going on in some City some kind of civil unrest or a riot or something something where I know there's going to be some kind of aerial asset collecting Intelligence on the people on the ground I can make contact with a friend or a local in the area shoot him a text message or an email and see if they see anything on their adsb scope there are some ways to automate this link and we're working on some ways to do this without an internet connection at all but for now simple networks of Aviation enthusiasts are very helpful for being aware of certain aircraft all around the world another main disadvantage of this process is that not every aircraft is on this list you can of course add as many as you like if you find new ones but not every aircraft even has adsb for instance the classic B2 Spirit stealth bombers and also their sort of replacement the brand new B-21 Raiders don't have adsb so they're not going to show up no matter what sort of along those same lines another big disadvantage to this is that this is all relying on an aircraft having their transponder turned on I am sure the keyboard Warriors in the comments section have pointed this out by now if the pilot turns the transponder off you can't track them anymore this is completely true however as we have pointed out many times before the most important word in that sentence is if in the overwhelming number of cases aircraft are going to keep their transponder turned on even if they are doing sketchy or illegal stuff at least in the United States or Western Europe where the airspace is super congested any Secret Squirrel up to no good who turns their transponder off is going to get lit up by every Airport's radar anyway and they are going to start getting interrogated by air traffic control to find out who they are and why they are breaking the rules by flying with their transponder turned off remember most of the FBI's spy planes are registered under fictitious companies so it's not like the dude sitting in the air traffic control tower can see that it's the FBI doing spooky stuff they are going to treat that aircraft like it's anybody else and in populated areas like major cities any aircraft flying with their transponder off is going to get treated like it's a threat and I'm just guessing but I don't think the FBI agents in a random Cessna circling above Miami or Baltimore or wherever I don't think they want to see an F-16 off their wing ordering them to land so the spy planes fly with their transponders on almost all of the time the exception is obviously low level flight in unrestricted airspace in the middle of nowhere for those situations we have to rely on some other tools to detect the ultra spooky aircraft which we can talk about later the other main problem with this method as it stands is that to display the position of these aircraft on the map the aircraft have to use specific transponder modes now we're going to get more into this a little little bit lighter but for now just know that some transponder modes do not require the aircraft to report its position so in plane plotter you won't see anything on the map but you will see call signs flight numbers and registrations in the list of aircraft you are picking up the good news is that with all of this work we've done today you will still get the alert if an interested aircraft is detected you just won't know where it is for most intelligence collection this is perfectly fine if you can pick up an aircraft transponder it can collect Intelligence on you so you don't really need to know exactly where it is only that it's close enough to spy on you and as a slight spoiler of a side note there is a workaround for mapping aircraft that aren't transmitting their location which we will be talking about later it's really complicated but it's well worth the effort if you can get it to work but again more on that later for now hopefully we can see the benefit of keeping an eye on certain aircraft and getting alerts when certain aircraft are over her head tracking aircraft with an adsb receiver is such a powerful capability I I can't put it into words it's almost a freebie a cheap tool that you can use to close the gap between powerful entities and normal people like us with a total cost of about 50 bucks you can make billions of dollars worth of surveillance tools completely irrelevant when it comes to domestic spying the FBI and the CIA know the power that adsb receivers have but they can't really do anything about it at least not yet otherwise they wouldn't bother with shell corporations and potentially getting egg on their face when people like us find out about them but they have to rely on these secrets because they know the power that the average citizen has so get ahead of the curve and get your adsb receiver up and running and using the features we've talked about today you can set up alerts to take note of aircraft that you might want to know about when they start making slow left hand turns around your location in today's world this could be a symbol way to let you know when to turn your cell phone off and something as simple as that can make all the difference in the world especially if you are trying to fight in the shade [Music] foreign