Legislation just signed into law has made it exceedingly to difficult to track private jet activity.
Congress is working on issues that matter to the American people.
Like making sure the wealthy are even less accountable.
Its the Tragedy of the Commons. No single individual really has an incentive to stop flying, outside of the marginal impact on PR. So everyone just says its someone else’s problem.
The FAA is toothless. The EPA is toothless. The individual industry leaders are more legally beholden to shareholders than any regulatory body. Even in aggregate, the emission volume of flights pale beside the emissions caused by coal stacks and automotive emissions and bunker fuel from bulk cargo shipping, so its the billionaire equivalent of saying “At least I’m recycling” when pushed about what you’re doing to curb greenhouse gases.
At the end of the day, what we need is a comprehensive investment in high speed mass transit. But fossil fuel companies hate that. Aeronautics companies hate that. Politicians fixated on quarterly budget figures hate that. And the folks that would actually build rail in this country no longer exist.
So whatchagonna do? Shrug, blame “the system”, and go with the flow because everyone else is doing it.
bill that was passed last week will allow private aircraft owners to anonymize their registration information
Private planes fly anonymously? Even if order and justice was restored to the world, we couldn’t find the next Epstein’s island.
And how will this affect drug trafficking? If you can’t trace private planes, it becomes the Wild West.
You don’t know? Rich people is above suspect and law
Oh, the anonymity only counts for the public. The alphabet soup guys will know.
investigative reporting should exist
Even if order and justice was restored to the world, we couldn’t find the next Epstein’s island.
Which is probably the whole idea.
It’s about Swift and not one of the richest people in the world who lives in the kleptocracy that passed this legislation and historically has made a big fuss over this issue?
He is also in the article, yes.
As with the ticketmaster story, if you put Taylor Swift’s picture on the headline it gets more clicks.
It’s just that simple.
I blind clicked hoping that wasn’t the answer
Not that you are wrong, but I think we should keep using Taylor Swift as the face of this because:
- She is the worst offender in this case, even if not the only.
- She is on the “left” (what passes for left in the us, a leftist billionare is obviously a contradiction). So this is a clear signal from us that this is not about us vs them. This is an issue even when done by someone on our “side” (like Taylor Swift is in our side lol, but for MAGAs and similar extremists she is).
- At the end of the day, any meassure stoping Taylor Swift from contaminating with her stupid jet will also help us stop all the other assholes.
- We don’t owe shit to Taylor Swift or any other celebrity, fuck her. We can talk after she stops being a deca millionare, in the mean time fuck her lol.
So get mad at her, use her bad image in this issue to push for change, and seriously, fuck her almost as hard as any other rich assholes. The fact that she is sligthly better than people pushing for a return to feudalism doesn’t make her a good person lol.
Neo feudalism just checked another box against democracy.
Right, they did it for Taylor Swift.
It definitely had nothing to do with Elon Musk or Ken Griffin. Definitely not.
Just at a glance I’d say it had absolutely nothing to do with swift, just a false flag operation to announce the change and ignore the reason. Now we just need a hero to find a workaround.
I honestly believe that people are tracking Swift’s jet just to make the Elon trackers seem ridiculous. Like, who gives a shit where she’s going? Swifties and… literally nobody else is affected.
Dammit, I guess we can’t complain anymore about how much fuel they waste every day, so we are fine. Oh wait, no they are still pieces of shit.
It’s a big club, and we ain’t in it.
I’ve never wanted to be in that club. In fact, I think I’m happier because I’m not.
I’m glad for people like you, because I’ve spent a good chunk of my life desperately wishing to be in that club, and then another chunk being sad that I wouldn’t be able to be. I was miserable and latched onto something that I believed would alleviate it, but I nowadays definitely think I’m happier not being in that club.
I’ve never really wanted to be in the private jet billionare club but I have always wanted to be in the “have a nice paid off house and enough money to safely start a small business” club. Sure, being a billionare would get me that but what would I do with the other 99.999% of the money?
I think I mostly just wanted to be in the "so rich I never have to think about money again. Growing up super poor left its marks on me and now even though I am relatively secure and comfortable, I still have a background anxiety about whether I’ll have enough.
There’s an instinct within me that screams that I shouldn’t share resources with other people unless I’m sure I have more than enough for myself. If I indulged that instinct, that would mean that in a situation where there’s enough for everyone, I’d feel most comfortable with 3 or more shares, because then even if I gave away one of my shares to someone else, I’d still have what I need, plus some buffer. There’s a reason I work very hard to not indulge that instinct though, because I don’t want to hoard at the expense of other people like me.
Like I say, it’s just part of a wish of not having to think about money at all. I had some very rich friends in uni, and sometimes they’d shop in places where the clothes didn’t have price tags, the kinds of places where if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford it. I envied the fact that they didn’t have to think about money more than I did the material luxuries they could afford
That works for them.
For now. But my club has more members, and they are getting very, very angry.
laughs in oligarch
Unfortunately, this will also make aviation safety analysis more difficult for us.
The plane crash we don’t hear about is one we don’t worry about. Good news for the aviation industry.
So if the only thing hidden is the airplanes ID seems like it would still be relatively easy to have a program sift through the data.2
Yeah all we need is to track which private plane specifically went on the exact pattern of her tours
Probably the oligarchs, based in this law, can use their lawyers to sue the person who dares to do so publicly.
Depends on how the law is written. If there is language against deanonymizing the now anonymous data? Yeah, they’ll get Jacks ass. But if not, there’s really not much they can do.
Personally I don’t care where celebrities are at any given time. But I do think it’s interesting, for example to see how international climate summits are some of the biggest environmental impacts as far as carbon footprint etc for example, or seeing how celebrities take personal jets to go to the convenience store
As much as I say fuck the billionaires, they have actually already had methods of doing this for about 50 years. Only the dumb billionaires who registered the planes in their name were annoyed about the rules. They could have always registered it under a trust, like almost every other rich person private jet out there. People can still figure out the plane tail registration and track you through that, and that will never change. So the billionaires that are happy about this regulation change still have their tail numbers known by the public to be associated with them and can still be tracked. Now they just have to change their tail numbers (giant pain) and wait for people to do slightly more difficult digging to figure out what plane is theirs.
This is going to help bring down everyday prices, stop Genocide and will ensure another Epstein type billionaire who privately flies people to his pedophile island will receive swift Justice!
Is it “impossible” or is it “exceedingly difficult?”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Celebrities and billionaires have long complained that it’s just way too easy for random people on the internet to monitor how much fuel exhaust they waste as they flit through the skies via their private jets.
An amendment in the Federal Aviation Administration re-authorization bill that was passed last week will allow private aircraft owners to anonymize their registration information.
Jet tracking has been made possible up until this point because private plane owners were forced to register aircraft ownership information with the FAA civil registry.
The Warzone originally reported that the new FAA reauthorization bill, which was introduced last June, will effectively make it impossible (or, at the very least, very, very hard) to track the jet activity of the well-to-do.
That’s a bummer, since in an age of environmental concerns, it’s been helpful to know which members of America’s gilded class are spewing jet fuel into the atmosphere.
Elon Musk famously threatened to sue Jack Sweeney, an undergraduate at the University of Florida, after the student made a Twitter account that tracked the billionaire’s private jet activity, ElonJet, in 2020.
The original article contains 598 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
So congress does actually work?
Of course they do, just not for you
I would bet that every single person commenting here thinks of him- or herself as being deeply invested in privacy, ranting against things like ad tracking, etc. But as soon as someone (or some ones) you don’t like, or have no affinity with, wants to have the same privacy afforded to every single person who drives a car, all bets are off.
Or are you suggesting that people (including the police!) should be allowed to have real time, constant information about where you drive to every day?
Just because it’s a plane, and just because it’s a rich person, doesn’t make it any less of a privacy violation.
Aren’t all commercial planes currently tracked and have their data open to the public? Why should anyone be exempt except for military?
I think most people on Lemmy would agree that private planes simply shouldn’t exist, at least on a personal use level. I don’t actually care at all where these rich bozos are going, but the ability to shame them for their method of travel outweighs any potential privacy concern. Airports are public places, airplanes (were) a matter of public record. If they truly want privacy, they should find an alternative means of conveyance. If they absolutely need to travel incognito, they could just charter a plane, for Pete’s sake.
They do have the same privacy afforded to every single person who drives a car. Maybe they should stay in the car, then?
there is nothing from us keeping a database and tracking cars like this, It is just not required by law to do this with active updates. I mean with all the cameras in cars (and I am sure their are insurance companies that are looking into putting more AI cameras in cars to track not only your driving [progressive did a massive push on this already] but also those around you) you can just machine learn those plates and pool them in a public area where we can all pull and push info about these drivers. The airways we can still do this with, and we will, they will anon the info, but I am sure it will be an easy thing to overcome.
Nothing is anonymized for me, wanna know my house address, just look up the name on the internet, it will give you an idea and then just call the local county clerk, they will hand over any details about properties owned by me in that area. Its a matter of public record. My car has an ID on it that is required by law to be shown and not hidden until asked for by the government. Hell all your siblings and children, they are a matter of public record, so I can find out a LOT about you, just by knowing small info about you. (try it, look up an old partner on a search engine, they will give you known addresses for like 20 years.)
So please dont make this about, they wanna just be as private as you are. I dont have shell companies to hide all my properties onto. I dont get laws that state I can randomize my lic plate on my car. And also least we forget, the police can already have access to your cars real time data, the car companies are selling that info, so is your phone provider.
This is actually a really good point and I’m not sure why you’re being down voted for it. I hadn’t thought about it that way
Because it’s a false equivalence. Why should they be above the law? Cars and planes are not the same thing in the slightest.
It’s a giga-stupid post, barely worth refuting, but private jets are not cars.
You can track every flight I’ve ever been on, if you know the flight number, or plane ID. Now billionaires have their own special carve out.
