"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."
I suspect it's the second part -- and the very powerful, rich people who fly their private jets to global climate conferences -- who had more to do with this legislation than the blond cover-girl with which it's being associated.
Wake me up when the FCC is required to anonymize personally identifying information in the amateur radio registration database as well... I never give out my callsign because it would be too easy for people to figure out where I live. But then I'm just a private, normal, tax payer and not a celebrity or billionaire who is already a public figure.
Wealthy people have enough sway to get the laws written they want. It's nothing new. Our politicians are legally bought and paid servants.
Ppl repeat this like a truism. Hundreds of millions of dollars of donations by a certain crypto exchange CEO did nothing to keep him from seeing a 25 year sentence.
Currently, with the latest SCOTUS decisions, only explicit quip pro quo (i.e., I give you money, you vote for a law) is illegal. If I give you money, and then complain publicly that we need a law about something and you vote for it, that's not illegal.
Flight plans still have to be filed, right? And are any of those details public, as in would a flight tracker show the destination of a plane in flight?
If so, time for some traditional intelligence work: someone at the airport with a telephoto lens to document just who disembarked from the plane.
The flight plan might include the registration number of a plane but if the ownership database is anonymized then it would require a fleet of "aviation enthusiasts" to determine on their own who owns which planes and then cross-reference filed flight plans with such a private database in order to dox the movements of celebrities. Would probably be an interesting business opportunity if it wasn't a giant "sue me!" target for people who have lots of money and are willing to drop $100k in lawfare on someone to make them go away.
> I suspect it's the second part -- and the very powerful, rich people who fly their private jets to global climate conferences -- who had more to do with this legislation than the blond cover-girl with which it's being associated.
Yeah, I mean I doubt this would do a damn bit of good for a celebrity like Swift, because some fan is probably paying attention enough to figure out the tail numbers of the jets she's flying in.
It's the billionaires who aren't celebrities who will benefit from this.
Right. Or the celebrities who are photographed landing with a date which isn't their spouse? There have been some high-profile divorces that started from evidence like that. The larger point is that this is for the benefit of "The League of the Very Special" and not out of an actual interest in privacy of PII.
I suspect it's the second part -- and the very powerful, rich people who fly their private jets to global climate conferences -- who had more to do with this legislation than the blond cover-girl with which it's being associated.
Wake me up when the FCC is required to anonymize personally identifying information in the amateur radio registration database as well... I never give out my callsign because it would be too easy for people to figure out where I live. But then I'm just a private, normal, tax payer and not a celebrity or billionaire who is already a public figure.