YouTuber locates footage via airplane sounds
The gist
YouTuber Colsto says faint aircraft noise and public flight data located a recording to within about 100 meters.
The method turns everyday background sound into a potential privacy risk for any video.
How it unfolded
- date unknownIn the source footage Colsto knew only the date (8 September) and that it was filmed somewhere in the continental US; he identified two propeller-plane Doppler curves 920 seconds apart.
- date unknownHe downloaded all ADS-B flight data over the continental US for that day via a Python script, adding a nationwide elevation model and 3D physics modeling, over months writing more than 5,000 lines of code and processing about 50GB of data.
- date unknownFiltering by the two flyovers 920 seconds apart and analyzing Doppler-curve speed and distance narrowed candidates from about 73,000 points across the US to roughly 15,000 after accounting for the silence between flyovers.
Key terms
- ADS-B
- Aviation surveillance technology in which aircraft broadcast their position and related data so they can be tracked.
- Doppler curves
- The change in a wave's frequency or pitch perceived by an observer moving relative to the wave's source.
- open-source intelligence
- The collection and analysis of data from publicly available sources to produce intelligence.
Source: Wikipedia