Spies in the Skies

Posted by | April 6, 2016 17:57 | Filed under: Politics


America is being watched from above.

Each weekday, dozens of U.S. government aircraft take to the skies and slowly circle over American cities. Piloted by agents of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the planes are fitted with high-resolution video cameras, often working with “augmented reality” software that can superimpose onto the video images everything from street and business names to the owners of individual homes. At least a few planes have carried devices that can track the cell phones of people below. Most of the aircraft are small, flying a mile or so above ground, and many use exhaust mufflers to mute their engines — making them hard to detect by the people they’re spying on.

The government’s airborne surveillance has received little public scrutiny — until now. BuzzFeed News has assembled an unprecedented picture of the operation’s scale and sweep by analyzing aircraft location data collected by the flight-tracking websiteFlightradar24 from mid-August to the end of December last year, identifying about 200 federal aircraft. Day after day, dozens of these planes circled above cities across the nation.

 

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Copyright 2016 Liberaland
By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.

8 responses to Spies in the Skies

  1. Buford2k11 April 6th, 2016 at 19:05

    ok, third time on this site…is this one of them? I cannot find any markings, and haven’t found any other way to ID it….

    • Suzanne McFly April 6th, 2016 at 19:30

      This is the pic off the site. They are DHS aircraft that patrol the boarder.

      • Buford2k11 April 6th, 2016 at 19:55

        yes, but they have numbers on them…I haven’t found this airplane on any of the private aircraft sites…I was just reading about this model Cessna 182 is one of ten Cessna’s in use by the FBI, I can’t remember where I read another article about them…I was curious about the lack of numbers on the aircraft…

        • Suzanne McFly April 6th, 2016 at 20:22

          The lack of numbers is definitely odd, I do not have much knowledge about owning planes, but I am pretty sure they all have to be registered and have the designation numbers listed directly on the plane.

          • amersham46 April 6th, 2016 at 21:01

            Photoshop can do amazing things

    • Mike April 6th, 2016 at 20:53

      If you blow that picture up you can see the numbers were photo shopped off

      • Buford2k11 April 7th, 2016 at 07:47

        no…I took that photo…there never were any numbers at all…

  2. amersham46 April 6th, 2016 at 21:00

    Paranoia strikes deep
    Into your life it will creep
    It starts when you’re always afraid
    -with thanks to Buffalo Springfield-

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