Mysterious low-flying plane over Twin Cities...Similar flights in other cities; FBI declines comment...
Mysterious low-flying plane over Twin Cities raises
questions of surveillance
Small aircraft circled downtown Minneapolis, 2 malls for
hours.
By Matt McKinney
and John Reinan Star Tribune
staff writers
May 29, 2015 — 10:18am
Aviation buff John Zimmerman was at a weekly gathering of
neighbors Friday night when he noticed something peculiar: a small plane
circling a route overhead that didn’t make sense to him.
It was dark, so a sightseeing flight didn’t make sense,
and when Zimmerman pulled up more information on an aviation phone app he
routinely checks, he had immediate concerns.
The plane’s flight path, recorded by the website
flightradar24.com, would eventually show that it circled downtown Minneapolis,
the Mall of America and Southdale Center at low altitude for hours starting at
10:30 p.m., slipping off radar just after 3 a.m.
“I thought, ‘Holy crap,’ ” said Zimmerman.
Bearing the call sign N361DB, the plane is one of three
Cessna 182T Skylanes registered to LCB Leasing of Bristow, Va., according to
FAA records. The Virginia secretary of state has no record of an LCB Leasing.
Virtually no other information could be learned about the company.
Zimmerman’s curiosity might have ended there if it
weren’t for something he heard from his aviation network recently: A plane
registered to NG Research — also located in Bristow — that circled Baltimore
for hours after recent violent protests there was in fact an FBI plane that’s
part of a widespread but little known surveillance program, according to a
report by the Washington Post.
Similar flights have since been spotted near Chicago,
Boston and in California, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The
ACLU has filed several Freedom of Information Act requests for more
information.
It believes the planes use cameras and infrared imaging
technology to photograph people and vehicles in a broad swath of the city;
technology to sweep up cellphone data from a plane also exists, but it’s not
clear if the FBI flights use it.
A spokesman for the Twin Cities FBI office had no comment
on the recent flight, saying he couldn’t speak to an “operational matter.” He
declined to say if the plane belongs to the FBI or if it was acting at the
request of a local law enforcement agency.
However, the FBI acknowledged its role in the earlier
Baltimore flights. The agency issued a statement saying the flights “were not
there to monitor lawfully protected first amendment activity, and any FBI
aviation support to a local law enforcement agency must receive high-level
approvals.”
The Minneapolis Police Department, the Bloomington Police
Department and the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office said they had no knowledge
of the flight. Flying Cloud Airport in Eden Prairie couldn’t confirm past
flights, but the same plane was confirmed over the Twin Cities on Thursday.
A similar flight — nighttime, circling at low altitude —
in a suburb of Boston after the 2013 marathon bombing generated media coverage
and concern among ordinary citizens about the “Quincy mystery plane.” That
Cessna 182 Skylane also was traced to Bristow, Va., and registered to a company
called RKT Productions, according to news reports and witnesses. It was later
reported by the Quincy Patriot Ledger that the plane was tracking Khairullozhon
Matanov, a Quincy resident who earlier this year pleaded guilty to obstructing
the bombing investigation.
Bristow, just outside Washington, D.C.’s Beltway, has 65
planes registered there, the bulk of them small Cessna 182s registered to a
handful of companies with two- or three-letter acronyms in their names, like
LCB Leasing.
Zimmerman, who spotted the plane over Bloomington, said
he pored through FAA records to find the call letters for each plane and then
searched for images of them. He found photographs that show the planes
outfitted with “external pods” that could house imagery equipment. He also
found some of the planes modified with noise-muffling capability. That’s not
common for a small plane, he said.
“The fact is there are several very powerful surveillance
technologies that are deployed by fixed-wing aircraft circling over cities,”
said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU. “These are powerful
surveillance technologies that we think the public ought to have a role in
discussing and debating.”
The planes use “persistent wide-area surveillance” to
photograph large areas for hours at a time, Stanley said. The captured images
allow authorities to go back in time, if necessary, to trace pedestrians and
vehicles who come to their attention.
Other devices known as “dirtboxes,” “Stingrays” or “IMSI
catchers” can capture cellphone data. Stanley said it’s still unclear what
technologies have been used in the surveillance flights.
Zimmerman said he’s in favor of using technology to fight
crime but criticized the government’s secretive approach, the same criticism
that was leveled in Boston when a city made skittish by the marathon bombing
had to wonder why planes were flying low overhead at night.
“Why don’t we just say these are official things, rather than
clouding them in three-letter contract companies?” Zimmerman asked. “I would
feel better if these guys just flew the colors. I think we would all be better
off.”
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