Jack Sweeney: the plane spotting student who angers Taylor Swift and Elon Musk

A college student from Florida has gotten used to getting under the skin of some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. As? Telling the rest of us where their private planes are and how much carbon they emit.

Jack Sweeney would like to clarify some details. On the one hand, he thinks Taylor Swift has good songs.

However, he believes, despite the threat of legal action, that anyone should be able to see where his private plane is going and how often it flies.

“I like to be fair,” he told the BBC in an email. “I try to share everyone’s information, no matter who it is.”

But it is precisely the information about the location of the private planes of the rich and powerful, published on his social media accounts, that has repeatedly made the 21-year-old the subject of news and legal threats.

Sweeney is the son of an airline maintenance operations controller and a teacher, and grew up in the Orlando suburbs. He says he has always had an interest in aviation and technology, and particularly in Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla companies.

Those interests gradually led him to develop an aircraft tracking website, TheAirTraffic.com, and social media accounts that track the planes of Russian celebrities, politicians, tycoons and oligarchs.

The system is based on publicly available data collected by amateurs. Planes in the sky periodically send information about their location, and these signals can be picked up by people using inexpensive receivers on the ground.

This thriving cohort of online aircraft trackers is part of the larger Osint (open source intelligence) community, populated by people who delve into masses of freely available online data in search of incriminating, insightful, or just plain interesting information. It’s a motley crew that includes a variety of people, from the curious to dedicated researchers and committed investigative journalists.

“At first I did it as a hobby because I found it interesting,” said Sweeney, who is currently in the third year of an information technology degree at the University of Central Florida.

As time has passed it has found a more defined purpose. He says he believes “in the importance of transparency and public information.”

And there’s an environmental angle: “Flyers are trying to hide the bad PR of (carbon) emissions.”

Its data has been used in studies showing the enormous carbon footprint of Swift and its environment. The singer says she has purchased enough carbon offsets to cancel out the emissions from her latest tour twice.

But privacy issues are also at play. Swift, through her attorneys, maintains that revealing the location of her private plane puts her at risk of harassment.

In a letter first revealed by the Washington Post, the singer’s lawyers wrote that tracking the plane was a “matter of life and death” and that “there was no legitimate interest or public need for this information, other than stalking, harass, and exercise dominance and control.”

Sweeney rejects those claims and says there is a fundamental public interest in locating the pop star’s plane. Your proof? The Swifties themselves.

“Their fans, who have grown the TaylorSwiftJets accounts and subreddit, are the ones who are really interested,” he says. “These following accounts consistently have more followers and followers (than detractors).”

And given her world tours and numerous public appearances, including recent ones at high-profile NFL games, it’s usually pretty easy to determine where Swift will be at some point in the future.

Over the past fortnight, for example, numerous stories have been published describing how he might travel between two urgent commitments: his Saturday night show in Tokyo and Sunday’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas.

Much of this public information is more granular than the location of a plane. Flight data can show who owns a plane and where it is in the sky, but not who is on it or where those people are traveling after the plane lands.

But Swift’s representatives say the plane information gives exact times and locations of her movements, and note that an alleged stalker was recently arrested outside her New York home. Her publicist Tree Paine said in a statement: “Her posts of her tell you exactly when and where she would be.”

Sweeney also had some advice for the star: He gently suggested that if privacy is your primary concern, you could register your private jet through an anonymous corporate entity and perhaps choose an identification code that doesn’t include your date of birth or phone numbers. initials.

James Slater, Sweeney’s lawyer, says he doesn’t expect Swift to take further legal action.

“The letter was an attempt to intimidate Jack into doing something he legally doesn’t have to do,” he said. “Unfortunately, people with power and money do this often.

“He’s not doing anything illegal.”

Swift’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.

One question is whether the Swift fandom will follow Sweeney’s accounts after the latest news.

After the story about the legal letter broke, there was a flurry of online conversations about the case. It included support for Mr. Sweeney but also sentiments like: “Jack Sweeney wants Taylor Swift to die like Princess Diana. I’m not going to let this go. I’m so angry.”

But this isn’t the first time Sweeney has come under pressure from the rich and famous.

Notably, when he bought Twitter (now

However, within weeks, Musk changed course, banning the account and threatening to sue, alleging that @elonjet caused a stalker to track him and climb to the top of his ship when his young son was inside.

Police later identified a member of Musk’s security team as a suspect and said Sweeney’s account had nothing to do with the incident.

Sweeney now has an account that tracks Musk’s plane with a 24-hour delay, to comply with a site rule that prohibits real-time location tracking.

He also manages accounts on several social media sites that track planes owned by Kim Kardashian, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump and others.

But he expressed frustration at the vagaries of social media rules, noting that Meta has suspended the Facebook and Instagram accounts that track Swift’s plane, but has left several other plane-tracking accounts, including those that track the plane. from Zuckerberg.

The BBC has contacted Meta for comment.

Meanwhile, plane spotters chatting on Mr. Sweeney’s Discord server have defended their stance, along with their enthusiasm for their hobby. And some admitted that they are Swift fans too.

“I have no doubt that some crazy people have sent her crazy threats,” said one commenter, “but the airport is not the place where she is vulnerable.”

With information from Gareth Evans