Okay, so this episode is partially about protests, but not necessarily a specific one.

It's not really about Trump's military parade on Saturday, or the No King's protest and response to that.

It's not about the ice raids or the protests that have been going on in response to that for almost two weeks at this point.

I'm sure you've seen all that online.

But just to start us off, i live in Los Angeles where some of the biggest protests have been happening, and I've been out every day with my camera covering the protests.

Most of the time, it's pretty calm and peaceful.

Despite that, law enforcement presence has been massive, and it's not just the LAPD.

The National Guard is here and so are the Marines.

Officials estimated that this deployment would cost one hundred and thirty four million dollars.

It does get hectic.

I've seen tear gas canisters launched a protesters' heads.

I've seen police horses nearly trample multiple people, and an unhoused person who didn't seem to understand what was even going on being beaten up with a baton.

And that was in the space of half an hour on Saturday.

Afternoon.

This stuff is usually aimed at protesters, but journalists are not exempt from being pushed, having tear gas thrown at him, or even being shot at with one of those less lethal rounds.

I can confirm that because I've been hit by one of those rounds twice.

But again, this episode isn't about me or journalists in general.

It's also not even really about the protesters.

It's about the tools that are being used to watch all of them, and about surveillance and protests in general, and a trend that we're starting to see take shape.

If you're listening to this in June of twenty twenty five, the things you're about to hear in this episode might sound concerning to you.

If you're listening after that, all this might just sound kind of quaint.

But let's get into it.

I'm time.

From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts.

This is kill Switch.

I'm Dexter Thomas.

Goodbye.

On Tuesday, June tenth, Joseph Cox over at four or four Media noticed something weird going on in the flight data over LA.

When the protests started over the weekend.

I did what I often do when there's a protest or some sort of large event is I go and check flight data to adsb exchange dot com.

It's a website where volunteers they run basically little sensors that can detect flight traffic.

The website then makes this freely available.

But what I usually do is I go and I start seeing what aircraft are in the sky above this protest or this event.

And in this case, the skies were busy.

There was a lot going on up there.

Zerre one traffic couble clock one droll ma ab direction, another Troy Q nine to two drum seven three traffic cover clock eight miles the direction, another Troy nine two three drunk.

I'm sure people on the ground would have noticed this as well, But there were aircraft up there that you would have heard, would have seen, and then I think many others do you may not have even noticed as well.

So there are sort of two suspicious flight paths.

The first time, I was doing circles and I followed where it took off, and it took off and eventually landed from March Air Reserve Base, which is to the east of LA.

We don't fully actually know what that flight is.

I think it's a larger DHS plane.

I haven't fully verified that.

But the other one which we have verified is that there were these other really interesting flight patterns above downtown LA and Paramount, but they were in this very distinctive hexagonal pattern and it was a much higher altitude.

It was like over ten thousand feet something like that.

There's something in the sky at around ten thousand feet flying these hexagonal patterns.

Doesn't have a call sign.

What is a call sign?

Why would you expect a call sign from an aircraft?

I'll try my best because I'm definitely on an aviation expert, okay, but I am incredibly interested in it journalistically.

So a col sign is basically unique code and aircraft is going to broadcast, be assigned so it can identify itself of two other planes and to air traffic control.

So to be able to effectively organize air traffic, you need to know which plane is which.

You'll have Delta flight seven oh two or whatever, and obviously that's going to be a Delta one the DHS call sign or one that they often uses Troy Troo y.

So this is how planes identify themselves and how ATC can manage them.

If you don't have a call sign, that's interesting because it's obviously raised the question of why don't you want this plane to be identified?

And it does make it harder to figure out what agency is behind this craft.

Not impossible, yeah, but that information is out there and you cross reference it.

You'll look up FAA registration records, and that's usually how you'll go, oh, that's registered to DHS.

Oh that's registered to California Highway Patrol or something like that.

Yeah, it's kind of like driving that a license plate, which yeah, I suppose some agencies can do, yeah in the sky, driving with a licensed plane in the sky, that would raise them questions From.

Me, I'm immediately interested because I've seen those hexagans before, and that was when DHS flew predator drones above Minneapolis during the BLM protests in twenty twenty.

So that is immediately really interesting.

It's very distinctive, like you don't normally see those patterns on flight data.

Joseph started connecting the dats and he wrote an article on four or four media saying that it looked like two very similar drones were flying over the anti ice protests in LA and that these might belong to DHS, the Department of Homeland Security fly in a hexagon.

Yeah.

So again this is where the limit of my expertise shows itself.

I can't necessarily say they're flying exactly in a hexagon, or is that how the data is being interpreted by ADBs exchange or something like that.

But it appears as a hexagon, and that is an immediate red flag of that might be a predator drone.

In case that phrase predator drone sounds familiar to you, we're talking generally here about a series of unmanned aircraft developed by General Atomics, the MQ one, the Predator, and the MQ nine the Reaper.

These have been used for surveillance, including along the border between the US and Mexico, but they've also been used for so called targeted strikes and launching air to ground missiles to kill people in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Most people wouldn't expect that one of these drones were flying over a major American city.

You think of predator drones, you think of this as, oh, this is something used in wartime, this is use for war.

Just a backup, what usually would you associate a predator with?

I would usually associate a predator just broadly speaking, flying over a country like Afghanistan during the US's war on terror, I would associate it with maybe a convoy of cars is driving from one location to another, and intelligence of some veracity set that there is some sort of insurgent or some sort of al kaeda isis Taliban whoever leader inside this vehicle.

We're now going to fire the health fire missile and we're going to destroy that vehicle.

That would be the standard way of thinking about it.

And I think, of course, with the US's drone wars, it has targeted weddings as well.

Is done so called double tap processes, where you fire a drone strike, it kills people, people then go to help you, then fire a second missile because you want to get those as well.

These are weapons of assassination and weapons of war, and now those are flying above US soil.

To be clear, I'm pretty sure that DHS ones are not armed, so I want to be very clear about that.

But they are still incredibly powerful surveillance apparatus.

They have very high powers cameras on them.

They can potentially have very sophisticated electronic surveillance technology as well.

We don't know whether that's being used above these protests, but at.

This point Joseph wasn't one hundred percent sure who these aircraft belonged to.

And this is where a community of people who study this stuff come in.

An aviation enthusiast named aero Scout did some digging and finally helped connect that final dat.

I tried to see where it took off.

I can't figure it out.

Maybe it had this transponder off or whatever before that.

Eventually I see it flies to the US Mexican border, which is obviously where US Customs and Border Protection hangs out and stores some of their drones.

So they were very smart and they followed the flight path of what looked like the drone.

They found the relevant atc Audio, and in that haystack they found a couple of needles, including the mention of Troy, which is the DHS call sign.

Even though this drone is not broadcasting a call sign, it's mentioned there.

And then crucially, some of the audio says a Q nine, which is shorthand for the MQ nine, which is the official name for a Predator or a reaper drone.

So cross referencing it was confirmed.

I actually emailed Customs and Border protection.

First, when I first saw the hexagons, I was like, oh, I mean I have to immediately approach the comment.

Now.

They took several days to get back to me, like an unusually long time.

But then they got back to me and they confirmed that their MQ nine predators are supporting federal law enforcement in the Greater Los Angeles area, including quote, Immigration and Customs enforcement with aerial support of their operations.

Okay, so specifically ICE.

Also yes, because I asked, are you flying these for yourselves or you flying them for another agency?

This statement says, yes, we are flying them for ICE.

Interestingly, CBB says it is not engaged in the surveillance of First Amendment activities.

End quote, which is, well, you're flying above a protest, I hope, Like, are you just not gonna You're gonna not point the camera at the protest?

Yeah, I'm sorry.

Not read that sentence to me again.

I need to partse that again.

This is the four quote.

Additionally, they are providing officers safety surveillance ren requested by officers air and marine operations.

Is not engaged in the surveillance First Amendment activities.

First Amendment activities, I would certainly associate with the protest.

That is interesting, Okay.

I would say it's a few different ways to interpret it.

The one would be that, oh, no, we were asked by ICE to fly and provide situational awareness for the protection of our employee.

Is that sort of thing, and maybe we incidentally filmed people protesting.

That's one very charitable interpretation.

Another one would be that we don't view the protests's First Amendment protected speech because they're all violent or whatever.

And again this is me extrapolating from the statement.

But when you marry that statement with drone footage like DHS posted on Twitter, it says these protests that they are violent, California needs to get this under control.

And there's footage from a drone.

They don't say predator.

By'm going to presume it's the predator and it's specifically of the protest like it shows Peel protesting.

So I don't know.

It's very hard to square that statement with the fact that a predator drone flew not just above downtown LA, but also flew above Paramount.

It flew above the two areas where the protests were.

Let's talk real briefly if we could about this site where you're able to actually track stuff.

This data is basically freely available to anybody who wants to look at it.

Yeah, you can go to adsb exchange dot com right now.

You can then move your cursor over Los Angeles and then you can see the air traffic coming in and out.

But it is an amazing tool journalistically for researchers as well, and this information is available to anybody.

It's just a barrier to entry for interpreting it.

And again I'm absolutely non expert.

I'm just good enough to go that looks like a drone to me people who are a lot better than me.

So at first, there's a flight pattern that looks like it's a hexagon.

This looks like Minneapolis twenty twenty.

And actually tipping back to twenty twenty, when you first realized that there was a predator flying over Minneapolis, were you surprised at all?

I was entirely shocked, and that was the first time I had seen it.

My co founder, Jason Kubler has been covering drones is and years.

He may have been less surprised, but I think I almost had a benefit of coming in sort of clear eyed about it because they're flying predator drones for protests.

That's insane to me, as somebody way back when I was actually an intern at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, and I was one of my jobs was you need to enter into a spreadsheet the drone strikes from Obama's drone war inside Yemen and then subsequent administrations as well.

So for me journalistically, predator drones, reaper drones, they are a weapon for war, they are a weapon for assassination, and now they're flying essentially that same technology over protests inside the United States.

I was blown away by that.

I confirmed it with DHS at the time, and then I started to go back and look through more flight data associated with those drones and you could then go look through historical data and figure out, oh, they're actually flying these all over the country, sometimes over the one hundred mile border limit above US cities.

So this is actually happening for a long time.

It's just we don't necessarily understand or see that.

Customs and Border Protection published footage, so that they said was drone footage, and it's very clear you can see people running around and protesting and the police response and all of that.

So in this context, they're being used as a situational awareness tool, is what CPB told me.

But I still think it's wild and there's a big public interest in telling people there's like a dot in the sky watching this, and you may not realize that, and then we have a conversation about whether we want that where we think it's proportionate.

Some people might be okay, but we can't have that conversation.

That's what digging free flight, DATCHA and finding out in the first place.

So these situational awareness tools, that dot in the sky might feel distant, but it is watching.

That being said, that's not the only way people are being watched.

That's after the break.

If you go to a protest, whether you're actually marching all day or you're just there for a little bit to see what's going on, you're probably aware that you're being watched more than normal.

For some people, maybe that's comforting.

For others that feels like a risk that would make them uncomfortable.

Surveillance is no longer theoretical.

It's over your head, it's in your pocket, and especially at a protest, it's all around you.

So this brings me to another set of questions.

Which is I've been here physically out documenting protests as best as I can on one person, and as I'm out here reporting on the protests, actually physically going to the protests.

And I've covered protests before where people are increasingly concerned about their security.

Right, especially in twenty twenty, people were already wearing masks because of COVID, which you didn't see too much of before that it would really sort of a select group of people who would wear masks to a protest.

You saw that more than twenty twenty, and you certainly see that now.

But if there are drones in the sky, realistically, how anonymous can one be at a protest?

And I'll preface this with I'm not necessarily giving advice to one side or activists, law enforcement, to any It's more just like a cold analysis of the technology itself.

I wouldn't say it's impossible, but I would say it has got exponentially harder, just based on the sort of technology that's going to be at one of these protests.

So, as we've said, you'll have prejudice drones with very high powered cameras.

I don't know whether footage from that would be used in a criminal prosecution or anything like that.

But regardless, it's there and it's collecting data on the ground or even sometimes in the drone.

Maybe you will have technologies such as imsy catchers, which are basically these fake cell phone towers which broadcast a signal they trick phones into connecting to them, and that can give up unique identifiers associated with your phone.

That can be sort of a springboard for law enforcement to then go get more information about people.

They can also in some cases intercept text messages and phone calls as well, although with upgrades to four G and five G like that may not necessarily be the case.

And then the big one for me is that I don't think we've seen it deployed by will be very interested if state or local do use This is, of course, facial recognition technology, where so many agencies across the United States by this tool called CLEARVIEWAI that's built on a massive database of billions of images of people's faces.

They point a camera at somebody on their phone.

It's an app you installed on the phone.

A police officer does that, scans the face and brings up their vembo or whatever it is, so they can identify the person quite easily.

Apparently it works in some cases even when people are wearing masks, and it's sort of to hammer on that just cold analysis of the tech.

I think that might also be why a lot of ice officers and well primarily ice officers masking their faces right, may be concerned about there, because there's actually tools that anybody can use in the same sort of way anybody can access flight data.

There are facial recognition tools that anybody can access and you can put faces through there.

Officers also being concerned about being identified themselves using the same sort of technology.

But potentially, yeah, it's a dual use technology.

It can be used by anybody.

Because the access to this tech has filtered down.

It's not just a tool for law enforcements anymore.

It's a tool for anybody with an Internet connection and the smartphone.

There's really two things that we can be thinking about when we're thinking about ones.

I suppose the right to privacy even just walking around on the street, and this is something that you cover a lot just in general.

Do you have the right to privacy when you go and buy chicken at the store or buy apples at the store.

And increasingly I think people are paying a bit more attention to this they maybe haven't been in the past.

But there's of course, when somebody hears there are drones in the sky, I think immediately some people might be immediately concerned, Hey, why is somebody spying on me?

Right immediately might think about that.

There's also the fact that there's so many cameras.

There's so many cameras at a protest, you basically can't avoid being on cameras somewhere.

While I was looking at the flight data over the weekend, I was pairing it with this sort of compilation of live streams on tiktoks.

Some YouTube channel had very handily taken all of these people who are on TikTok or over platforms and put it all on one screen.

So I could watch like the LA protests from all of these different angles at once, and I say, wow, this is pretty useful actually, and it would switch audio of them.

But like I was only able to do that because ordinary people are filming at live streaming.

If you're able to watch it and other people are able to watch it, of course law enforcement is able to watch this.

Yeah, and they will then be able to archive that footage potentially, and if they feel the need to for whatever reason.

You can also do facial recognition tech after the fact.

It's not just a live thing.

You can take a video that was uploaded or streamed to TikTok or whatever and then run the technology on that after the fact.

This is why Laura enforcement are so attracted to this and why clear View and other products have been so popular across the US is that you can take something as singular as someone's face and then use that as a springboard for a criminal investigation.

I think one of the really fascinating things about protests right now, if I can say that, is that, on the one hand, you do have people, I think rightfully so, who are concerned about surveillance of any type.

Right there's actual official, purposeful surveillance, say by a drone, and there would be law enforce on watching somebody's TikTok of them.

On the flip side, there is a desire for documentation.

We've seen time and time again how difficult is it to get police to release body cam footage and how many things would have gone unreported, George Floyd's murder being one of them if somebody were not there to document it.

And I've seen and filmed plenty of things that probably a lot of people would not have known about had somebody not been there with a camera.

Yeah, and there's this kind of the dual concerns.

I suppose the desire for really everybody should be able to film something, the public should know about things.

But then everybody is filming things and everyone, if we allow for the police to be part of the public, can see it also.

Yeah, ubiquitous surveillance is absolutely a double edged sword.

With everything you've said, and I agree with all of it, I guess I would lean towards Ultimately, I think it's probably a good thing that more people are able to film more and more events over time.

The idea that anybody can see some sort of injustice happening, police brutality or whatever and go and film it, I think, on average hands out to be a good and powerful thing.

And I think you can see that where in some of the ice raids or the ice activity you can overhear or people have reported that they will say, go for the one with the camera.

This is a very powerful tool for the public and for everybody.

Just people may want to be careful about what they film, just in the same way I'm careful about.

I'm not going to go on Facebook and upload a bunch of photos of myself and tag where they all were or something like that, just from a purely personal privacy perspective as well.

So what are you going to be watching for.

I don't see these protests stopping.

I don't see the momentum go anywhere.

What are you looking for?

Yeah, I'm going to keep looking at flight data if necessary, dive into atc audio.

I'll be looking above what happens.

If protests move to another city, and I believe some are planned, I'll probably look at those as well.

And it's not that, oh my god, surveillance planes are always bad.

It's no.

They can have very legitimate use cases.

But I think journalistically it's worth looking and analyzing and understanding, Okay, is it proportionate to be flying a Predator drone above this area of a protest or whatever the aircraft turns out to be.

And again, we can only have that conversation if people are looking at the data and figuring out what's going on.

Yeah, in the same way, we can only figure out what's going on with people like yourselves when you're actually on the ground filming, talking to protests, talking to law enforcement, and figuring out what's going on there.

It's the same thing.

You said you were surprised when you saw this in twenty twenty.

You were surprised when you saw a drone or reprodrone specifically or Minneapolis.

You said you're less surprised now in LA.

Would it be reasonable to assume that if there's a large protest, there might be one of these things in the sky in the future here in the United States?

Yeah, I think it's maybe not a given.

Customs and Border Protection only has a fleet of I think ten drones.

I think they only have five land mission presents drones.

They can't be everywhere all at once, obviously, And I guess what made it almost obvious that we're going to fly a drone here is that there is a connection and a nexus of course to DHS and ICE.

These are anti ice protests.

Customs and Border Protection is also a part of DHS.

It would make absolute sense that one arm of DHS is going to support the mission of another one.

So will we see them in other protests?

Broadly, yes, will we see these drones and other anti ice protests.

I think it's pretty likely, Yeah, depending on the size and the response.

Thank you so much for making time for this.

Thank you so much for real.

Yeah, absolutely, there.

Is a lot more we could say about the protests that are happening right now, but again, this episode isn't really about these protests in particular.

But I do want to mention one thing in the show notes, We've put a link to a guide on how you can be safe for the protest.

This applies to you whether you're a journalist, whether you're a protest to yourself, or just someone who doesn't trust the news and you want to turn off the TV, get off your phone and just see for yourself what's happening outside.

Again, that's in the show notes.

That's from Wired dot com and I've read through it and I definitely recommend it for everyone.

Thanks once again so much for listening to kill Switch.

Let us know what you think, and if there's something else you'd like us to cover, let us know.

You can hit us up at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC, or you can hit me up personally at dex digi that's d e x d I g I on Instagram or on Blue Sky if that's your thing, and while you're at it on Apple podcast or Spotify, before you close that app, leave us a review.

It helps other people find the show, which in turn helps us keep doing our thing.

Kill Switch is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas.

It's produced by Sena Ozaki, Darluk Potts, and Kate Osbourne.

Our theme song is by me and Kyle Murdoch and Kyle also mixed the show.

From Kaleidoscope, Our executive producers are oz Lashin, Bungesh Hajigadur and Kate Osbourne.

From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norvil and Nikki Etur