Secret federal aircraft spy network implodes
It’s been thrilling to watch one of my favorite topics, aviation in covert operations, hit the bigtime over the last few news cycles. A few tweets about suspicious plane hovering over Baltimore ‘disturbances’ registered to a ghostly “NG Research” at a Bristow, Virginia PO Box cued the story. The FBI conceding to Washington Post that it was their flight set the stage for this. These stories have quietly been leaching out for years. As far back as 2003 (or 2006 in WIRED) references to small aircraft doing domestic surveillance have been popping up. After the Boston Marathon bombing, a small aircraft was traced to the same Bristow VA cluster. Today the story hit turbo with a big AP story, FBI behind mysterious surveillance aircraft over US cities, but there are lots more to find because the AP didn’t really go outside of Bristow. You’ll find plenty of N Numbers to snoop on below – and cool new tracking techniques too!! Quote of the year?
The FBI asked the AP not to disclose the names of the fake companies it uncovered, saying that would saddle taxpayers with the expense of creating new cover companies to shield the government’s involvement, and could endanger the planes and integrity of the surveillance missions. The AP declined the FBI’s request because the companies’ names — as well as common addresses linked to the Justice Department — are listed on public documents and in government databases.
In my own scoping in the last week or so it appears that these shell company registration were mostly set up around 2010 or 2011, making this an Obama operation through and through. I apologize for not tipping yall more quickly to this impending development but I have been too busy!
And now! Grassley presses FBI for answers on mysterious surveillance flights | TheHill (June 2 2015)
This story shows that secret airlines are becoming an obsolete method for the [deep] state, because with the Internet and planespotters it becomes possible to observe and end-run around the secrecy of the networks, as the last big wave of awareness around secret detainee flights in the Bush years really revealed (though mostly in Eurasia, not North America).
Now the FBI is an onerous position where they have to turn over, de-register or re-register all of these planes, somehow reconciling rebuilding the secrecy of the fleet exposed above with the FAA’s registration system, and the hordes of planespotters out there now reinforced by tons of interested activists cued into the national scope of this operation. Good luck Feds!
