hello um thank you thank you everyone
for being here at 10 o'clock I know when
I got the the timeslot announced when I
was worried no one would come but
delighted to see you all here so welcome
to making sense of the ether connecting
radio frequencies with public data so
I'm mark de Costa I kind of a both a a
radio and a data nerd of different
stripes I do a lot of work working with
public records in public data and kind
of combining them cleaning them and
trying to make them useful as a way to
understand the world in which we live
I'll just go back quickly as some of the
notes and references and slides and
stuff are available on a github repo
which you can find there if you're
interested so I'm going to be talking a
lot about public data in this talk and I
thought is a good way to kind of kick
things off and start I wanted to kind of
set a little bit of parameters and give
you guys a little bit of a look and feel
of what I mean when I talk about public
data so so kind of run through some
examples public data is is kind of
amazing because it's you can kind of
think of it as like the exhaust that
comes off of government regulation in a
way so this is an example is an FEC
Federal Election Commission filing from
the Trump campaign years ago and you can
see it's a hundred and forty dollar
Hoover disbursement and what's really
cool about this data set is you can see
you know all of the line items of those
sorts of things this is of course a
McDonald's drive-through and you might
say what does this have to do with
public data but what's really cool and
what I'll be talking about a little bit
later is every or most of the McDonald's
drive-throughs in the countries are
connected to the restaurants through
commercial radios which means that you
can find records of them in public data
and use them to understand what's going
on you know also this is just a slide
from a 990 kind of not-for-profit tax
filing you can see some curators at the
Museum of Modern Art in the city here
make a tremendous amount of money what's
really cool any time you walk into an
elevator you probably see a placard like
this
and every state has you know a record of
every elevator in in the state and who
runs it and how fast it is and things
like that this is a copy of the deed for
the hotel that we're standing in
aircrafts of course are all registered
and you I think there's a hundred
thousand or so of them registered in the
country which you can all go fine and
this is actually one of my favorite
examples of public data it's an import
Bill of Lading record from the return of
the Apollo 11 moon mission because they
were importing space rocks into the air
moon rocks into the earth they had to
fill out a form and you know I think it
it goes a long way to kind of
understanding like all of the kind of
weird stuff that is reflected in public
data so you know I'm sure a lot of you
guys have been to you hope before and of
course club monta is a part of the
experience and the culture and I was
really excited to see like what could I
find out about club mottai in public
data as an example and you might be
surprised to know but the 2600
enterprises incorporated imported almost
2700 kilograms of club mate' for the
event here and what's really cool is you
know I was able to go search through
through the public records and find that
you know they all came from this brewery
in Germany which has really cool
machines that are used to manufacture
and to brew the club mottai it you know
went to Bremen Haven port on the 30th of
April this year went into a very
specific shipping container sailed on a
very specific ship the vecchio bridge
and then arrived in the port of Newark
you know just two months before the
event and so we can of course thankthank
that wonderful supply chain for being
able to be at a clock at 10 o'clock
tonight in any event you know to sort of
just grant that is a little bit of
ground work and get down to really the
meat of the talk I want us to kind of
think about how we can use you know the
RF spectrum in public data to help
really understand that the world around
us
and I'm sure as many of you know the
electromagnetic spectrum is really big
you know we of course usually live in
this like tiny little slice of the
visual spectrum but we sort of see but
you know across all of this there is a
very big band of things that we usually
think about is radio radio is of course
one of the people that's really given
credit for its invention is Marconi and
in the early 20th century when it was
being commercialized it was happening
you know under a context without
regulation and it was really kind of a
free-for-all and interestingly the
sinking of the Titanic is is kind of
considered to be one of the origin
moments of the current regime of a sort
of electromagnetic spectrum regulation
we have right now you know the Titanic
was kind of a state-of-the-art ship at
the time it had an onboard you know
radio transmission station and when the
ship ran into trouble they were
broadcasting SOS signals but what sort
of came out later was that because of
all of the radio frequency interference
on the land base stations and cities and
things like this those SS SOS signals
didn't really come through and so this
sort of by extension wound up leading to
the radioactive 19:12 which set the
groundwork for the current FCC and the
sort of regulatory regimes that we have
at the moment and what's really
interesting about that and this image
will be a little bit of a touchstone
throughout the talk is that you know
given all of this kind of government
regulatory systems that are in place we
have you know a really clearly
demarcated and a really you know hyper
specific set of rules about how and for
what the radio spectrum can be used so
this map is really interesting it I
think it goes something from three
kilohertz all the way up basically to 30
gigahertz and along the way it allocates
those bands for different uses so just
to zoom in a little bit here to kind of
put this into a bit of context that
maybe will be more familiar you know we
can see sort of it in the top
Center there we've got a band basically
from 88 megahertz to 108 megahertz that
of course is carved out for FM broadcast
radio like we listen to you in our car
or whatever but also you know one thing
that I think is really interesting to
kind of recognize is that you know along
this spectrum there are so many
different sort of zones that are cut out
for different uses so you can see a
little bit further down the spectrum in
the kind of 150
megahertz zone is where a maritime ship
position data is is broadcast on the
radio spectrum and I'll be talking a
little bit more about that later and you
know even kind of continuing down we can
see that there's a big chunk reserved
for things like aircraft navigation and
each one of these little slots has all
sorts of you know very specific with
people that are allowed to use it and
applications and protocols for which it
is used and you know of course the the
radio spectrum is like a highly you know
politicized and economically important
thing you know just recently with the
kind of retirement of analog television
broadcasting big swaths of the spectrum
were opened up and you know last year
there was a large auction and you had
twenty billion dollars changing hand
hands basically for that spectrum you
know as you can see the people that are
buying it are like t-mobile and AT&T and
Dish Network and folks like that but
this is you know sort of certainly a
very octave an important space and you
know the kind of upside of the
regulatory regime in which all this
stuff sits is that there's a tremendous
amount of kind of data exhaust and
information about how the spectrum is
being used that's produced not what's
really very easy to work with but it is
kind of out there and in the United
States the two main sort of databases
that exist are both run by the FCC the
first one at the top as you can see you
know looks like something from the 90s
and it's it
is it's the universal licensing system
and it's it's certainly the place where
you can get the richest degree of data
about how the spectrum is being used so
each different class has its own sort of
forums and things that get filled out
and they all sort of flow they're a
project that came out of the FCC under
the Obama administration that reboot FCC
gov is this license view database and
what's really nice about that is it
drops out a lot of the ancillary fields
and the really high resolution that you
get from the universal licensing system
but the upside of that is you can go and
get sort of one file that describes more
or less all of the licenses that exist
and the the great thing about that is
you know in the US there's about 30
million licenses that have been given
out and these things run the spectrum
from you know from a McDonald's
drive-thru to a Verizon base station and
so it's really quite a rich thing this
data itself is a little tricky to work
with this is a link to a github repo of
a repository I made that sort of helps
you bootstrap working with this data so
we'll sort of download it load it into a
post Grise database that you presumably
have running locally geocoded and and
sort of do some basic cleaning and the
thing that's interesting about this data
set and having it sort of prepared in
that form is you can really start asking
questions of it straight out of the gate
so this which I hope you guys can see is
just a you know really simple sort of
you know geo query that I did of this
data set to basically ask the question
you know who are the people within a
kilometer of this hotel that have radio
licenses and by doing this you know in
this of course varies by location but
you can start to understand you know who
are you know who are the actors who are
the people that are are kind of out
there you know living in the broader
spectrum around us you know not not
surprisingly where we are now but the
city of New York and the NYPD really
have the lion's share of the spectrum
around us but you also start to learn
you know other things about the kook
environment that we are so there's a lot
of TV studios so we can see you know Fox
and NBC and CBS and other folks this was
what sort of one a little bit further
down that jumped out at me that was
really surprising kind of in my broader
investigations in New York was to
realize that Northrop Grumman has a
massive wireless network in the city
they have thousands and thousands of of
transmitters right across and you know
at first blush seeing a defense
contractor was such a big network in the
city was quite surprising
apparently it's part of a we what wound
up being a very underutilized sort of
you know city level wireless network
that was deployed but certainly
interesting to see and at the at the
bottom we can see with McDonald's and a
Swiss bank are well represented here and
so you know I don't know how familiar
you all are with using software-defined
radios and sort of how that technology
has evolved over the last maybe ten
years at this point but it's really
great there's you know because of the
influx of low-cost digital TV tuners
there were some very clever hackers that
realize that you could basically
repurpose the chipsets in those tuners
in order to not just tune into a
broadcast television but you know really
take a pretty broad range I think
somewhere from maybe thirty megahertz to
to just over a Giga hurt and they're
like twenty bucks or less and really
great tools for getting started with
exploring the all of the transmissions
that are in the air around us there's
really great you know sort of software
around there this is sort of a really
easy standard one called GQ rx which is
a tuner built on new radio that you know
right now 93.9 megahertz is what it's
tuned to which is the local National
Public Radio affiliate but you could
just as easily tune into any sort of
simplex transmissions that are happening
on any any bit of that band that the
tuner can go into so of course today
we're we're gathered in the hotel
Pennsylvania which I don't know if
anyone here has seen this Netflix
documentary called wormwood
a bit of an aside but very interesting
documentary by Errol Morris about a
government scientist in the 50s that was
thrown out of a window of a hotel for
objecting to biological weapons research
that the government was doing and it
just so turns out that actually was this
hotel which is something I discovered
recently it had a different name then
but you know the great thing is we can
start to dig into this FCC data and and
even start to ask questions of you know
what's going on in this very hotel so I
looked up the hotel Pennsylvania and
found you know some sort of interesting
ancillary information we can find okay
here is the actual license filing they
have we can see there's a call sign in
there that could be interesting this
stuff is also really great you know
there were some social engineering talks
lately but in terms of you know starting
to understand some of the management
structure of organizations so this was
really interesting they're able to find
this fellow Eugene rudder Minh who's
actually the director of engineering of
the hotel and is in charge of all the
licenses and this hotel like many other
businesses uses sort of a third party to
actually file and manage these kind of
regulatory licenses and here at the
bottom we can see that's a micro magic 2
way which can all be useful bits of
information you know but what's great
about this is by finding this license we
can then kind of back into what are the
you know the particular broadcast
frequencies that the hotel is using and
it's you know super interesting they
have it looks like over 100 you know
radio units that they're permitted to
use and these are sort of the
frequencies on which they transmit so if
you were to use energy qrx assuming
these are simplex transmissions it's a
little more complicated if it's like a
trunk radio system but this is
presumably where you know the bellhops
will be called in the maintenance and
all these sorts of things which can be
interesting for a bunch of reasons and
to kind of come back and kind of put
this stuff back in context this is again
kind of a zoom in on that kind of 450 to
500 megahertz bit of that broader
spectrum map and we can see that you
know all of these different uses of the
wireless spectrum are you know they they
kind of live next door to each other so
you
we can see you know the hotel
Pennsylvania coming in in the 460 range
and just a bit further down is the
reserved section for law enforcement and
things like that but you know this the
usage of kind of public data and of
software-defined radio certainly goes
beyond just picking up voice
transmissions so this is the NOAA 19
satellite it's very cool it's an earth
imaging satellite I think it revisits
the surface of the earth you know once
every maybe 10 or 14 days or something
like that
and what's really interesting is you
know it's up there in space it's taking
these photos and the way it gets the
photos back down to earth is it it just
kind of beams them down in an
unencrypted way so these satellites you
know the downlink happens at 137
megahertz and as you can see it's kind
of cool you know that there are these
kind of dedicated bits of the spectrum
that are for space downlink
transmissions and a friend of mine
actually built a an antenna that was
sort of optimized for picking up those
sorts of transmissions and from his
rooftop in Brooklyn was actually able to
download directly from the satellite the
image is that it's blasting down the
caveat there is you need to know when
the satellite will be overhead but
because they follow very predictable
paths he actually set up something that
put Google Calendar reminders in his in
his calendar so that he knew when to go
outside but you know there's there's
more that we can do than just sort of
being in a relationship with the radio
sort of spectrum where we're just kind
of you know passively downloading a
project that I worked on a little while
ago is kind of asking the question of
you know could we use public data and
radios to effectively look inside of
cargo ships so what's really interesting
here is you know kind of a shot of you
know maybe like our fishing like a small
sort of private boat or whatever it is
you can see not surprisingly these boats
are just loaded with loaded with radios
of all different kinds you know here
we've got you know there's a cell
repeater for for use onboard Wi-Fi of
course GPS and up here on the left you
can see a really important thing called
the AIS Class B
tenna so a is stands for automated
identification system and it's basically
like a safety protocol so every time a
ship is underway it sends out regular
transmissions that basically announce
you know who the ship is and its heading
and speed and things like that those
radios have a fairly limited range when
you're on the surface so you have to be
more or less line of sight which is fine
when you're out at sea but picking them
up in the city can become difficult
however on the flip side there are
companies like marine traffic and others
that actually lease satellite kind of
reception capacity and they produce
these really amazing real-time ship
position maps by listening to these
transmissions what's cool though is if
you are in sort of you know eyesight of
of a port or of waterway these things
are fairly simple to pick up so using
one of these $20 SDR dongles and there's
a you know really nice program called
RTL AIS which is you know works on Mac
or Linux and it's built off of good new
radio and it sets up a really simple
server that basically decodes in a first
step what's coming across the frequency
into the the kind of underlying packets
of data that are there so this is just
kind of a screen shot example of what
each of these individual messages look
like not super useful in that format but
the they do come across in in kind of
clear text like that once you decode
them and so in this project I was like
okay I set up a receiver on Governors
Island which is sort of right at the
mouth of New York Harbor and start
whisking I'm starting to pull these
messages down but you know certainly
wanted to get to the point where I could
move from just these kind of encoded
messages into stuff that I could start
to work with so there's you know just a
great that there's a you know pretty
clear spec on how this encoding happens
someone made a really nice Python
library called Lib AIS which lets you go
from those payload those message
payloads which is basically what's just
being put in line 4 into that func
and from that pullout the structured
data that it contains and as you can see
here there's things like you know rate
of turn and you know XY coordinates
where the ship is but importantly you
also get in this transmission something
called an MMS I number and MMS I stands
for a mobile maritime subscriber
identifier and it's basically like you
could think of it as like the cell phone
number of the ship or whatever it's how
you would address a radio transmission
directly to the ship and what's nice is
the the UN through the international
telecommunication union maintains they
have a you know as you can see kind of a
pretty primitive search form but one
that's easy enough to kind of put a
scraper around and it lets you turn that
MMS I number into information about the
ship's registry so here I don't know if
you guys can read but you know I had
seen a cargo ship that had a Liberian
flag the ER Sweden and so that's great
once you know the name of the ship and
you know the kind of time of the
observation and where it happened you
can then take the step of starting to
look inside of it so in the United
States as an example the Customs and
Border Protection office is the agency
that deals with all of these bills of
lading which are the kind of customs tax
filings that have to come in it in
advance of cargo being offloaded from a
ship and they all have of course the
vessel name as sort of a somewhat unique
identifier what's kind of crazy about
this data is the Customs and Border
Protection office is the only they're
the only folks that have that data in
the US or at least they're the primary
generator of it and the only way they
make it available to anyone is on cd-rom
so it's $100 per day and if you pay that
you can go to the office and pick up a
cd-rom and therein lies lots of kind of
fixed-width files that describe all the
shipping containers that are sort of do
in that day a company that I started
years ago called enigma has a whole sort
of search engine of these sort of public
records and one of the things that we
aggregate is these bills of lading so by
effectively being able to
you know sit on Governors Island with a
radio listen and sort of set up a series
of scripts to listen to the ships going
by and join them with this underlying
information from the Bill of Lading
registry you're actually able to kind of
see what's what's going on inside the
ship be it pallets of club Mattei or you
know buckets of widgets or whatever it
might be so that's kind of like you know
one example that hopefully will kind of
get you guys thinking a little bit about
sort of how we can use you know sort of
real-time data gathering through you
know things like software-defined radios
and then this kind of contextual outside
information that can kind of help us
make some sort of sense of what it is
that's going on I don't know how many of
you guys have seen this story but at
BuzzFeed over the last couple of years
they've come out with a series of
stories effectively tracking law
enforcement usage of stingrays and you
know a common way in which sting way
stingrays are used or by basically
putting them in helicopters are small
aircraft and flying them in circles
above you know a target so that it sort
of becomes a persistent fake cell phone
tower that those phones are getting
caught up in so similar to the AIS
transmissions that ships have planes
broadcast a sort of positioning
information data called a DSB and as we
can see there's actually a pretty big
chunk of the spectrum it's that's carved
out for that and it is one of these
things that if you do get an STR it's
like a great kind of hello world because
you know pretty much wherever you are
there's gonna be some sort of air
traffic going on overhead and there's
lots of really easy tools that you can
download to just kind of jump in
immediately this is one if you're
interested that's good for for Mac OS
called cocoa 1090 called 1090 cuz that's
the 1090 megahertz is usually where
these things are broadcast and so you
can see this is from that BuzzFeed
article on by Peter old house and some
other folks where they were looking
around New York City had just sort of
set up
one of these receivers we're pulling at
all this information and then started to
analyze it for for flight paths that
were kind of going in these repeated
circles because you know it's certainly
like a kind of anomalous and unusual way
to fly a plane unless you're doing
something like like this and likewise
the if you go to the FAA there's
something called the FAA aircraft
registry which is really cool because it
has all of the information about you
know every plane that's registered to
fly in the US it's tail number owner and
so on and so forth and so one of the
things they were able to do in this
story is working with a third-party
vendor that actually collects this kind
of a DSP data for the whole country
they were able to basically go to the
FAA registry search for airplanes that
you know are actually registered to like
Homeland Security or other potentially
interesting government agencies find
those tail numbers and then query this
broader data set of all the flight paths
to see which ones exhibited that sort of
you know anomalous flying in a circle
behavior that indicates the likelihood
of of a stingray being used they
actually took it also a step further
which was I think really interesting is
they were able to using sort of some
somewhat simple machine learning
techniques to basically observe planes
that they knew to be used by law
enforcement in order to you know to
basically go out with with stingrays for
surveillance and use that basically as
training data into a classifier to kind
of figure out like what are the maybe
underlying patterns of that kind of
flying of a plane and then use that to
apply to all of the flight records they
had and by doing that they were able to
identify a bunch of additional airplanes
that were registered to shell companies
that wouldn't obviously be operated by
DHS or someone like that but who you
know certainly had suspicious kind of
flight pattern activity and then who
upon further investigation they were
able to find that their shell companies
do
have what seemed to be kind of clear
links to you to law-enforcement agencies
you know in these sorts of of techniques
instead of thinking about how radios and
the sort of ancillary data can be used
to understand the world can become
important for you know all sorts of
reasons and so you know I was speaking
with someone who was an activist that
was at the Standing Rock protests a few
years ago and they were actually
collecting a DSV data while they were
there specifically trying to identify
and become aware of when stingrays were
sort of being used in the vicinity and
so I think it's certainly that was a
very interesting example to me because
it sort of speaks to I think some of the
the creative and and sort of expanded
applications of this kind of technology
and of course I think like importantly
you know we live in in a world that's
you know uh turley saturated with
wireless infrastructure of all different
kinds and you know all of these things
are existing on different parts of the
spectrum and you know using either you
know cheap or slightly more expensive SD
ours there are things that we can
interrogate and try to understand and I
you know often times actually you know
discover really important things there
was a workshop given earlier today by a
Brandon Dorsey who's a really
interesting kind of artist researcher
who did a project on the pedra networks
so it's kind of crazy as an example
about pagers is there still actually
used quite a bit in this country but
largely by in hospitals and by doctors
and the crazy thing about pagers is that
you know all of the traffic is not only
unencrypted but it's it's broadcast to
the entire city it's the pager itself
that sort of self selects which messages
to pull out of the air and display but
using an SDR it's relatively trivial to
make sort of like a super pager that
will just receive and decode all of the
messages going through a city and this
of course is like massive implications
when you think about the fact that you
know today pagers are basically just
part of hospital infrastructure and
consequently
you know have a tremendous amount of
sometimes very personal and potentially
compromising information about people so
you know one of the things that I think
is really interesting is you know not
only this question of how can we engage
the spectrum around us but how can we
use these sort of more general residue
about how how the radio spectrum is
being used to to kind of dig into other
I guess issues of concern when I was
working with this FCC license spectrum
database one of the things that I became
really curious about is you know what
does the radio activity look like along
the us-mexico border so this is just a
really kind of simple somewhat
interpolated map of you know all of the
radio licenses that are that have been
issued within 10 kilometers of the
border and so when I was looking at that
you know I started to kind of explore
and zoom in and you know these are some
examples of you know what these kind of
licenses look like when they're mapped
on to you know pretty big metropolitan
centers so you can see as you'd expect
like kind of pretty broadly distributed
these things are going all over the
place but as I was kind of digging it a
little bit more and kind of following
the border along I just kind of observed
these sort of patterns of kind of you
know evenly spaced antennas being
installed in places that you know there
really wasn't much other radio activity
happening and so I became really curious
about like what you know who are
installing these things what are they
being used for like what what's going on
here this this one here you can see it
was put on or sort of filed by this
company M SAR so I started looking said
ok what is M SAR do well I found out
that you know M SAR is basically a
company that makes kind of the ground
radar modules for Predator drones and
other things like that so I thought well
that's interesting you know presumably
therap sort of trying to set up some
sort of like radar networks along the
border this is kind of interesting so I
sort of wanted to dig in a little bit
more deeply and I said ok you know for
all of these radio licenses along this
kind
this kind of 10 kilometer band along the
border you know what's going on who
what's the activity been like who are
filing these things so one of the things
that I think is actually really
interesting to note about this dataset
is as you might expect there's like of
course many different classes of FCC
licenses you can file you know there are
ones that are really specific to like
commercial radio like you might use at a
McDonald's or in a hotel there are
others that are really specific for you
know putting out you know 100 mega watt
or 100 whatever sort of like FM
broadcast stations or whatever and then
there's also a really interesting class
of experimental licenses and these are
things that you know usually hardware
manufacturers or others will file for
and they only kind of generally lost for
a window of time and they you know
basically the FCC gives people
permission to sort of do stuff that you
know maybe hasn't been fully vetted in
terms of how it's going to impact you
know the broader spectrum but in order
to run an experiment to approve stuff so
this is just a count and sort of view
into all of these experimental licenses
that were being filed along the border
and so I started to kind of dig in and
say well who are these companies I'm
sorry sort of researching them and all
the ones with red arrows next to them
are effectively defense contractors so
it was really interesting for me to
learn that and I guess not so surprising
and in hindsight but that you know
there's actually kind of a you know
hundreds of individual experiments that
are sort of starting to be launched by
defense contractors presumably in
advance of sort of competing for
business and things like that to start
to install them sort of some sort of
surveillance network there and as I
actually started digging into these
companies and sort of seeing asking who
is it that was that is sort of actively
experimenting along the border I wound
up on a lot of kind of very very strange
websites I would say so you know one of
the big companies there was called Chi
column they make these inflatable I
think they're called aerostatic
sort of basically like drones that they
can stick in place and
can stay aloft for a long time and
they're sort of stable as sort of
surveillance platforms you know there's
the company called Leonardo DRS which is
an Italian defense contractor that does
a lot of work with the US government and
they sort of have lots of materials like
that another one telephonic that also
suit ourselves these ground radars
another one which is this is an Israeli
defense contractor ELT a that makes a
lot of in one of the things that they do
a lot of is you know sort of sort of
border surveillance stuff for sort of
the israeli-palestinian border as well
as sort of anti-ballistic missile radar
systems and things like that another one
elbit systems which has an you know a
lot of these sort of both optical and
radio surveillance platforms that are
used and it's interesting a lot of this
technology wound up getting kind of
developed and refined as a result of
sort of United States's military
activity and places like Iraq and
Afghanistan where there was sort of a
need to be able to stand up these these
sort of surveillance systems and so
certainly like now that you know I sort
of had found hundreds of these kind of
radio experiments
I was curious to see you know what what
where can we go from there can we dig in
a little bit more deeply so this is just
kind of a screenshot of you know one
specific license that I had found and
you know it's kind of interesting like
to the extent to which you want to dig
into this you can get some sense of what
the equipment is because you can see the
you know the sort of band widths that
are the frequencies that are being used
and the kind of power output and really
interestingly you know kind of the time
in place of where these transmissions
were happening and so kind of from there
you can of course pivot over to like
Google Earth or Google Maps and start to
just kind of take a look like what's
what's going on here this I don't know
how well you can see here but there's
sort of a pickup truck with a antenna on
the back of it which was kind of
interesting to see especially when you
sort of see the broader or landscapes
here I mean there's absolutely nothing
there so kind of finding these ox
Rhodes and these install sites are
really interesting here's another one
certainly a bit more of a fully built
structure and I think it looks like it
has a combination both of kind of
networking sort of technology to connect
these towers together in addition to
some sort of surveillance radar system
these sites sometimes get actually much
more even you know sort of
well-established of course
infrastructure is really difficult to
run out to these places so a lot of them
have a degree of you know sort of self
generation in terms of power and things
of like sort of going through this one
of the things that kind of came to the
surface for me was that it's actually
extremely hard to from a technical
perspective to build this sort of border
surveillance technology there was a
really famous as I found out sort of
like disaster that happened in terms of
you know government as far as government
contracting goes where Boeing I think
under President George W Bush had gotten
a really big contract they basically
said you know hey for I think you know
three or four billion dollars we'll be
able to take care of the whole border
with like a super high-tech surveillance
system but I mean what actually wound up
happening I think is it wound up costing
them a billion dollars to just do 53
miles of the border and you know a lot
of the challenges that they apparently
were running into or I mean in terms of
actually being able to you know identify
people versus grass moving or animals
and things like that and being able to
work in these very kind of remote
inhospitable places but you know I think
one of the things that is quite
interesting to me about this is you know
this is a project that wound up getting
shut down I think back in 2011 and of
course now that there's so much kind of
increased you know attention and sort of
effort being put towards things like
border security this data I think can
provide a very interesting
and to you know what is the government
actually doing what you know sort of
what sorts of surveillance technologies
are we purchasing and maybe what are the
broader kind of implications of that you
know I think one of the things that for
me is a big take away around all of this
is that there's a tremendous amount of
kind of public information out there and
one of the really I think fun and
interesting challenges as a researcher
you know in whatever capacity you might
work is to sort of think about how can
we find these sort of lateral
connections and other sources of
information because of course as we know
the truth is out there we just have to
find it hopefully and yeah so that's
that's all I have for you guys today
this is again the the kind of repo if
you're interested in I think we still
have some time so I'd be happy to take
any questions if there are any
[Applause]
[Music]
is this data getting used as economic
signals by sort of people following
markets people finding out things about
companies you would you one would
imagine that this would be a significant
economic sort of activity indicator is
that something if people figured out
that that the various pieces of data
that you are talking about here can be
used for that purpose I think you're
absolutely I think you're absolutely
right to call out the fact that there
probably is a lot of really interesting
signal in you know in these sort of
obscure data sets that could be used for
those sorts of purposes I think we're
still in a world where a lot of this
data is still kind of quite clumped like
really difficult to work with really
obscure and you know I don't personally
know of any examples of this being used
for like trading algorithms or things
like that but one could certainly
imagine it I'd say this was great thank
you I had a question about the flight
path data hmm is that available before
the flights happen or is it something
that's posted afterwards like what's the
lead time yeah there so I think there's
two there's two pieces of it one is
using the this kind of a BSB receiver
that's actually kind of getting
real-time position data of where the
flights are so that of course they've
got to be in the air and move in that's
where that data comes from separately
from that and this is not something I'm
a full expert on but I do know that
planes do file flight paths or flight
plan data with the FAA ahead of time and
it is I think it is obtainable if it's
something you're interested in I would
suggest looking up a woman named Margot
Williams who is the research editor at
the intercept and she's done a
tremendous amount of work on this but it
does exist I don't think it's like a you
know certainly not at the extent there's
an API and you can query it but I there
are ways of doing it
but just as a final caveat not all I
think that not all planes I I don't know
I think there's some complexity about
not all planes maybe needing to file it
and just as a last point some planes can
kind of opt out of a view of a security
or privacy concern you can opt out of
some of these
flight tracking systems I just wondering
about predictive ability around like
sensitive areas like protests or
something if you could figure that in
advance but that's really cool thank you
absolutely yeah hello
so do you foresee or do you suspect
there might be any risks to supply
chains based on the fact that you can
track ships and figure out and that it's
public to see what's on the ships what's
in the containers what sort of attacks
do you think might actually be
facilitated by this information yeah
it's an interesting question I mean I
know certainly you know piracy has been
a big issue for ever you know in places
like I think the Malacca Straits and and
elsewhere you know and I presumably I
don't actually know enough about how
like sort of the the sort of functioning
of piracy crime and sort of what the
motivations it was sort of like I don't
know that to the extent which they're
offloading material versus you know what
the kind of financial endgame winds up
being but I think certainly I mean you
know people are enterprising in in there
sort of a crime planning it could be it
one could imagine it being used and
final aside what's the lead time on
getting that data from the I forgot
exactly who provides it
yeah the Customs and Border Protection
yeah yeah it's a great question I think
I know that it's it's only published on
a daily basis but there is a combination
of both kind of trailing and lagging
shipments so some people advance file
bill of ladings so you can kind of see
things ahead of time others you're just
kind of getting a rearview mirror look
at it I am so you mentioned of course
the the BuzzFeed planes story and
intercept has done some things and
there's a court story and a few things I
think around Davos so so there's there's
a burgeoning like SDR investigative
journalism scene is it your is it your
sense that this is still something that
is is like technically difficult enough
that there's there's a lot of pasture
there or is this something that you
think there's where is there some an
area where you think see that expanding
or or where journalists can be doing
more work in that area definitely I mean
I think the thing that's really kind of
cool and interesting is that the
technical difficulty has sort of you
know is just like reducing daily
especially is more and more great kind
of like guides and things like that are
written and so I think that opens up the
field for a lot of creativity I'll give
you an example there was someone did a
project where they set up one of these
receivers in somewhere in Switzerland
either Zurich or wherever and basically
like what they were trying to do is see
when like dictator planes were going to
visit their Swiss banks or whatever what
was interesting is like they you know
manually had identified like some
handful dozens or whatever of tail
numbers that they said okay these are
you know dictator airplanes or whatever
but I think the kind of interesting
investigative work in a context like
that is I think you know there's a lot
of work to be done I'm sure there's you
know thousands of planes that could be
of interest in this regard on thinking
about you know how would you expand a
corpus like that and then what do you do
once you actually find oh you know that
you know this particular head of state
is traveling here at this time you know
how can we kind of dig further with that
the technical issues aside you know
obviously these a lot of these you know
this stuff is capable with $20 sticks
you could buy on Amazon are there
regulatory issues that prohibit the
reception of license spectrum for you
know swathes of these frequencies so you
know I I'm certainly not a full expert
on it and wouldn't want to be you know
giving kind of guidance to anyone in
that regard
my understanding is for the most part
you know the the regulation really kicks
in when you're starting to transmit
stuff I do know that some states have
regulations around like receiving police
scanner data when you're in like a
vehicle that's in motion and there's
certainly local regulation about those
things but my general understanding and
I would encourage you to find someone
who actually knows the answer is that
when you're receiving things it's it's
generally fine
all right the can you come up with a
better title for this talk than making
sense of the ether I'd be open to
suggestions do you have one well I have
to write one down please do and bring it
up after the talk I'd love to see it
thank you
hey great talk so you talked a lot about
um unencrypted radio protocols and I was
wondering do you see encrypted ones much
and do you know have any interesting
ones that you could talk about a little
bit yeah it's there's definitely a of
course a bunch of that going on there's
been actually I mean I think you know I
think some of the interesting like sort
of at least attacks that I've seen in
that regard are around sort of like
replay attacks ooh there's been a lot a
lot of sort of work and research done
around inert like sort of intervening
with sort of remote car starts and
remote car kind of door unlocks and
things like that where people have been
able to not necessarily get so far is
actually decrypting and understanding
what the signals were but being close
enough to just actually record them and
then be able to replay them at a later
time to gain access to it but it's
certainly there's also is an interesting
project that's some Eastern European
artists did or perhaps Brazilian around
sort of identifying this sort of
transmission frequencies that like
military planes use and sort of created
an artwork that just sort of indicated
when there was there were sort of you
know transmissions on those frequencies
even if they didn't know what they were
actually saying the kind of presence of
them was was interesting and something
that they created like an interface for
high excellent talk thank you very much
I'm so amazed that is I live in the
Northeast
I hear transatlantic flights still on HF
like three point four megahertz and
they'll go ahead and announce themselves
to Gander that hey I'm going to do
transatlantic but I was always trying to
figure out is Gander in does roll
acknowledge the airplane and then like
stand by for your tone and you hear
something sounds like almost touch-tone
just sending out in the HF frequency do
you know
have an idea that is I'm sure it's a
very old system because I want to go
look up the system and like there's
documented files of protocol they
actually have to use HF for
transatlantic as I got back up I was
just amazed that with all the satellites
and everything else that was still
something to be done yeah that's super
interesting and unfortunately I don't I
don't know much about it but I'd love to
learn more yeah an hour rtl-sdr
and if you tuned in around between 3.5
and-and-and 3.3 megahertz you'll hear
stuff and it's just interesting and then
you just take the they'll say the tail
number to play and just go ahead and a
flight or comm like okay who is that so
thank you cool thanks and I think if
there's a time for one more question if
there is any okay otherwise well thank
you guys very much this is a lot of fun
[Applause]