I desperately don't want to go over this paragraph by paragraph debunking it; the effort is high, payoff is low.
Because QAnon influencer and #disinfo-spreading rube #MonkeyWerx suckered @boydscott into publishing this, I guess I have publish something so others don't get taken.
🇺🇸 The American-registered 1979 Cessna 310-R N314HB is owned by Marc Inc, a surveying company that takes multispectral aerial photography, and can be seen quite frequently seen doing just that, all over CONUS. Their operations over Sioux Falls on 2021-08-11 are not unusual at all
"According to YouTube aerial guru Monkey Werx, there was a contract surveillance plane over the Cyber Symposium flying in a common grid pattern indicative of aerial data collection. In other words, someone was spying on the event from the sky."
Absolute nonsense.
"Here’s some of the equipment they keep on their planes, equipment that can do NSA-level spying on an event like the Cyber Symposium"
Does the NSA do aerial photography? I didn't think that was their bread and butter. All the things in these photos are sensors; cameras, no SIGINT
"The question that everyone should be asking is why a surveillance plane would have been contracted to spy on the symposium."
Easy, they're not. Correlation does not imply causation. 🤦♂️
"We know they were doing similar tracking operations during the Arizona audits."
Nope, we already disproved that one too. That was the @PhoenixPolice doing what they've done for the past ten years, patrol downtown Phoenix and support officers on the ground; completely normal ops
"These planes are also equipped with digital listening devices. They “hear” what’s happening through cellular data and can collect information that’s sent from devices at the symposium."
Nope. Total fabrication.
"you have to admit it’s at least quite strange that a spy plane was flying over the Cyber Symposium for the three days the event was held"
Nope.
Not a spy plane.
Not over the "symposium" for 3 days.
The story is a complete fabrication.
Look for yourself.
Here's the link to the ADSBexchange data for #N314HB|#A3565E so you can review their whole flight history for months, and see they operate everywhere.
🇺🇸 United States Air Force C-17A Globemaster III 95-0102 took off from Joint Base Charleston (or somewhere in that area) at ~21:30 Z using Mode-S, which is unusual; they use Mode-S when they don't want to be as noticeable, like over Iraq. #AE07E5#RCH233
Because they were using Mode-S, their location had to be geolocated using multilateration (MLAT) and only a few coordinates were seen from the ADSBexchange network.
🇨🇦 #RCAF CC-130J Hercules 130604 #C2B549 has been operating in the Middle East supporting various missions for months, like #OpIMPACT, and today I noticed they seemed to change their interpretation of their SOP while overflying #Iraq 🇮🇶.
🇨🇦 #RCAF CC-130J Hercules 130604 did not change their transponder from ADS-B to Mode-S when transiting Iraqi airspace, which is the norm for all RCAF flights over #Iraq, including their own previous flights, presumably for OPSEC reasons. #C2B549
( Someone who actually works in ATC will laugh at me, but I don't want to work for ATC 😂 )
Above 35,000ft we have at least 7 airliners, all broadcasting ADS-B, as commercial air traffic does.
We also have one #USAF E-11A BACN 11-9355 #AE4DE1 c/s #BLKWF13 at 36,000ft broadcasting Mode-S; a military plane, in the middle of the civ air traffic.
- No RC-135s in the air over the Black Sea that I know of.
- There could be a U-2 (because there could always be a U-2, they show up seldomly when they're taking off / landing / in transit)
🇺🇸 #USNavy Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Ross (MMSI:338822000|CS:NGWB), doing 13kn, is being tailed by another vessel labelled "U153" with an MMSI of 45678458 (invalid) #USSRoss#DDG71#6thFleet ⚓
It would be swell if @JohnMooneyST
influenced his editors to correct the headline at least. No #RuAF 🇷🇺 aircraft were in Irish airspace at any time. That's misinformation at best, #disinformation at worst; they were in international airspace the whole time thetimes.co.uk/article/concer…
Journalists are regularly fed bad info by their trusted sources who want to mislead them and spin the story, so I can hardly blame @JohnMooneyST who did his due diligence. The Flight Information Region #FIR is the correct term, the international airspace controlled by Irish ATC.
Sovereign Irish airspace extends 12 Nautical Miles out to sea, the flight information region #FIR extends hundreds of miles out to sea. #NORAD is much more diligent in explaining that difference, as they do in the linked PDF below, from a few years back.