Elon Musk and the Dangers of Censoring Real-Time Flight Trackers

I woke up Friday morning to the message I’d been expecting: “Your account, @Justin_Ling has been locked for violating the Twitter Rules.”

Below was the offending tweet: a link to one of the few websites that provide real-time private jet flight data that “chief twit” Elon Musk, I wrote, “hasn’t bullied into suppressing his flight data.”

Musk has accused these flight trackers of providing “basically assassination coordinates.” He has launched a crusade against these apps and anyone who shares them on his recently acquired social media platform. Accounts like mine were locked, while others were banned entirely—from the @ElonJet bot, which shared the location of Musk’s private plane, to reporters who picked up on his campaign. Twitter rules were rewritten on the fly to forbid publishing anyone’s “physical location.”

The chaotic few days prompted the European Union to warn Musk that silencing journalists would likely result in sanctions from EU regulators. US Representative Adam Schiff demanded that Musk reinstate the suspended accounts and explain to Congress why he decided to retaliate against the press in the first place.

As of Monday, following a poll asking users when he should lift the account suspensions, Musk reinstated some—but not all—of those accounts.

Lost in the chaos is just how successful Musk has been at suppressing that real-time flight data on the internet. In so doing, he’s taking aim at an incredibly valuable source of information—which has helped researchers, journalists, and experts with everything from tracking Russian oligarchs to investigating the fate of missing aircraft to tracking down international hitmen. Musk isn’t the only one trying to keep this type of information out of the public’s hands.

Both real-time and historical information on Musk’s main private jet—a 2015 Gulfstream G650ER, tail number N628TS—is conspicuously missing from the two main flight-tracking platforms: FlightAware and FlightRadar24.

FlightAware reports that its real-time data on Musk’s jet is unavailable “due to European government data rules,” while its historical data about the plane’s comings and goings was removed “per request from the owner/operator.” Looking up Musk’s jet on FlightRadar24 returns the message: “we could not find data.”

Even smaller tracking platforms, like AirportInfo—the account that led to my Twitter being locked—have taken Musk’s flight information offline.

“The ongoing hullabaloo about the location of Elon Musk’s airplane has caused us to stop displaying his plane at the moment,” says Christian Rommes, an AirportInfo administrator. “Because Musk is threatening legal action, we don’t want to take any risks.”

While Rommes says his office hasn’t heard from Musk’s legal team, they took the step as a precaution. “Don’t mess with the (former) richest man of the world,” he says.

Aircraft operators are required to report detailed information on their flight path to various national regulators, including the Federal Aviation Administration. That data is generally a matter of public record and is published to various websites popular amongst airline enthusiasts.

Some companies, like FlightAware, augment government data with their own sources of real-time flight information. Other websites, like planespotters.net and airliners.net, allow users to submit photos taken of aircraft as they come and go around the world.

These services have proved incredibly useful for journalists and independent researchers in recent years.

When Malaysian Airlines flight 370 disappeared in 2014, these trackers provided the public with the same data investigators were puzzling over—a flight path that cut straight across Malaysia before stopping abruptly over the South China Sea. Those websites would become critical tools for independent researchers in the years that followed.

Journalists and the general public again turned to these services after Malaysia Airlines flight 17 and Ukrainian International Airlines flight 752 were shot down in 2014 and 2020, respectively. As early reports suggested disaster had struck, these websites showed clearly that the flights were interrupted in mid-air.

But the utility of real-time flight tracking goes far beyond disasters.

In more lighthearted examples, diehard soccer fans have used FlightRadar24 to figure out where prospective trades are heading ahead of a possible signing. In 2015, tens of thousands of football fanatics correctly identified star manager Jurgen Klopp’s private jet as it made its way to Liverpool, preempting the team’s announcement.

The availability of this data has made it possible to track everything from a shipment of US weapons to Ukraine to Nancy Pelosi’s tense visit to Taiwan, in defiance of Chinese warnings.

Some pilots have leaned into this new visibility. One made headlines after drawing a penis in the sky over Florida.

The websites have also contributed to embarrassment for some private jet owners. Thanks to @CelebJets, a bot account set up by 20-year-old programmer Jack Sweeney, who also created @ElonJet, scrutiny over the pace at which the rich and famous galavant around in their CO2-intensive private planes reached a fever pitch in 2022. Marketing agency Yard calculated just how much environmental damage was caused by these private jet trips—particularly short-haul flights, where driving or taking public transit would take only marginally longer. That report led to a massive public shaming of celebrities like Taylor Swift, whose private jet addiction put 1,184 times more CO2 into the atmosphere than the average person produces in a whole year.

A single Elon Musk flight from February burned nearly 4.5 tonnes of CO2.

Sweeney’s jet-tracking bots, which scraped that public flight data and sent it directly to Twitter, also published real-time information on Russian oligarchs. That bot helped open source investigators keep tabs on a cohort of the ultra-rich Russians mainly responsible for keeping Vladimir Putin’s regime running amid a costly war against Ukraine.

Investigative outlet Bellingcat recommends FlightRadar24 for open source investigators, and its researchers have relied on the tool to track likely Russian intelligence operatives, understand political tumult in Kazakhstan, follow the Venezuelan government’s semi-secret private jet, and keep tabs on NATO planes as they conduct operations. Other investigative outlets, like the Organized Crime and Corrupting Reporting Project, have similarly leveraged the data to hunt down shady dealings the world over.

But as Musk’s effort to suppress the information has shown, not everyone wants this data to remain public.

For starters, some planes can turn off their transponders, which relay their coordinates to flight regulators. That option is generally not available for private civilian aircraft.

More useful to someone like Musk is the FAA’s Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed list. Introduced by a 2018 act of Congress, it allows private jet owners to block their data from being disseminated by the FAA. A spokesperson for FlightRadar24 confirmed to WIRED that, as they rely primarily on the FAA’s data, they respect the block list.

Not everyone relies on the FAA, however. Planes regularly transmit basic information mid-flight, through Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast technology (ADS-B).

ADS-Bexchange, which describes itself as the “world’s largest source of unfiltered flight data,” has continued reporting real-time information on Musk’s Gulfstream using that technology. Sweeney relies on that website for his bots—which have since moved over to Instagram and Mastodon.

“The position data shown by ADSBexchange is available to anyone who can spend $50 on Amazon and put the parts together,” reads a Q&A on its website. “It’s not secret.”

Users on the site’s Discord channel have spent recent days mocking Musk’s attempt to go after this information and have been clear that they do not intend to remove his jet from the platform. “ADSBx does no blocking or hiding for any reason,” one moderator wrote.

Anyone keeping tabs on Musk’s jet would have known that the Twitter CEO was heading to Qatar for the World Cup finale on Sunday. Doha was a key player in Musk’s Twitter takeover. While there, Musk snapped a selfie with a Russian state broadcaster. (Musk has also relied on a Dubai-based financier with ties to Russian oligarchs to finance his $44 billion purchase of the social network.)

Given how much scrutiny this type of flight data has brought on him and his business dealings, perhaps it’s no surprise that Musk has taken some desperate measures to hide this information. He reportedly offered Sweeney $5,000 to take the @ElonJet bot down. Sweeney countered, asking for $50,000—but the pair do not appear to have ever made a deal. Despite vowing to respect Sweeney’s right to publish the information, Musk banned all of his bots and his personal Twitter account earlier this month, while ADS-B’s Twitter account was similarly removed.

Steffan Watkins is a Canadian Osint researcher who has spent years tracking planes and ships using this kind of publicly available data. Last year, he worked with a United Nations panel of experts to identify planes smuggling weapons into Libya.

“Simply put, because flight data is publicly available through many different flight trackers, the public is empowered to fact-check any statement from any source, government or private,” he says. “Unsurprisingly, there are powerful people who don’t want the transparency that provides.”

Knowing more about where government planes and private jets are going to and coming from can yield surprising results. Watkins points out that the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, which enabled the arbitrary detention and torture of suspected terrorists—many of whom were innocent—was exposed with the help of open source flight data.

“As the CIA kidnapped and flew citizens of other countries to black sites around the world for integration and torture on government-chartered bizjets, they left a trail of data in their wake that was used to unravel the routes used to ship their abductees,” Watkins told WIRED.

More recently, in 2018 researchers used ADS-B data to trace the route that a Saudi kill squad took on its way to murder Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Earlier this year, the Saudi government submitted a proposal to the International Civil Aviation Organization to encrypt and restrict access to this data. “The uncontrolled access to detailed/accurate ADS-B data on the internet raised concerns by aircraft operators and owners on safety, security, and privacy of flights,” the Saudis wrote to the Montreal-headquartered UN body.

“Oh, the country that flies assassins around the world wants to hide aviation info from the public because of ‘security’?” Watkins says. “How quaint.”

A Saudi prince, Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz, is the second-largest shareholder in Twitter. The site’s largest owner, Musk, is similarly relying on security concerns as he moves to ban this flight data from his platform.

In announcing the ban on real-time flight data last week, he alleged that a “crazy stalker” followed a car carrying one of his children. “Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family,” he tweeted.

The Los Angeles Police Department sees no link between his private jet’s coordinates and the alleged stalking, according to Washington Post reporters Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz—two journalists Musk banned on Twitter. A Bellingcat contributor geolocated the incident, which Musk recorded and published to Twitter (possibly in violation of his own rules), to a gas station miles away from the airport and nearly a full day after Musk’s jet had last been in the air.

Seeing how few—if any—of Musk’s critics and online tormentors have air-to-air intercept capabilities, and given that airports continue to be some of the most secure places in modern society, the Tesla owner’s security concerns appear overblown.

“Safety, security, and privacy sound like noble goals, but there isn’t a rash of violent attacks on private planes—or any planes—and no indication there will be,” Watkins says. “Musk’s gripes are almost Musk-specific; few people have a jet they themselves can call on and fly anywhere with on a whim.”