Feds Flew Predator Drones Over The LA Protests

0:06Hello and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to the best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole. Hi. And Jason Kebler. Hello, good to be here. so tiny bit of housekeeping on wednesday 18th of june at 1 p.m eastern we will have our latest foyer forum this is a live streamed event where paid 404 media subscribers can join and we will tell them how to pry records from the government we've done a few of these sometimes it's pretty hard to find time to schedule them but really looking forward to this one And Jason, just briefly, what is the story we're going to be explaining to subscribers, like how we got these government records?

1:18Yeah, we're going to primarily be talking about this article that Emmanuel and I did called about Massive Blue, which was where cops were deploying AI avatars to social media in order to gather evidence. the reason that we're doing this one is because the actual FOIA process was really interesting, I think, and it was pretty complicated. So we're going to be talking about exactly how we did that and how you can do it as well. Are we going to talk at all about Flock? If there's time, maybe we'll talk briefly about Flock stuff as well, because we've been doing a lot of FOIA reporting there. But I assume that there'll be some time to talk a little bit about that reporting as well yeah if we don't do it on this one we should absolutely do a dedicated one like we've spoken about flock and fusis before which is sort of another surveillance platform that we've done a lot of public records work around uh the stuff jason's referring to to is to um public records that found immigration related lookups into flock license plate readers and abortion related ones as well.

2:28We'll see if we have time. But regardless, please become a paid subscriber if you're not already. And I will send a link out to the live stream probably the day before. Again, that's Wednesday, 18th of June at 1 p.m. EST. All right, Jason, do you want to take the headline of this story and ask me some questions because I wrote it? Yeah, so this week we are going to be talking during the normal podcast all about the anti-ice protests in Los Angeles. This first story is DHS Blackhawks and military aircraft surveil the LA protests. I guess to preface this a little bit, many of you know that I live in Los Angeles.

3:12I have actually been traveling this last week, though. I'm not in Los Angeles right now, so I haven't been able to go to any of the protests, which I was hoping to do to do some reporting and talk to people about what they're protesting, sort of like get a vibe check. But I guess to set the stage here, I am only able to follow this the same way that everyone else has been following it, like over social media, talking to friends who are there, and also sort of like watching some of the news coverage there. I mean, I have a lot of the sort of geographical knowledge and neighborhood knowledge about what is happening.

3:53But ideally, I would be there sort of like on the ground reporting. I just haven't been there. But basically, on Friday, in a city called Paramount, which is in Los Angeles County, but is outside of sort of the actual city, ICE did some raids at a Home Depot. And this spurred spontaneous protests in Paramount. And these protests have continued throughout the weekend and into early this week in downtown Los Angeles. And Joseph, you have sort of been tracking the airplanes and aircraft that are in the sky above these protests, because in previous years, like during the George Floyd protests, for example, we knew that sort of like state, local and also federal surveillance aircraft fly around to sort of, I don't know, they fly around for all sorts of reasons.

4:52So let's talk about it. So what did you find in the flight data Saturday and Sunday? Yeah. So, I mean, basically whenever there is a significant event or protest or something like that, I will log on to adsbexchange.com, which is a website which collects flight data and makes it very easy for anybody to access and search. It's all donated or collected by volunteers. So you will get a little bit of gear, costs about 400 bucks, or you'll make your own, I believe for a lot cheaper. That scans for aircraft traffic, And then adds it to this database. It's similar to, you know, Flightradar or one of these other websites as well.

5:41I just kind of prefer the UI and the data of ADS-B. So I spent Saturday and Sunday looking at Paramount, where you said the protests started, and then later at downtown LA. And immediately there was like some interesting things. things. There was the California Highway Patrol, right, which is a state law enforcement agency, and they were flying a small aircraft over the area. That's not unusual, like at all, really, but that's sort of where it starts. Then it goes up to, I saw DHS flying multiple Blackhawk helicopters and we actually saw videos of some of those Black Hawks landing and delivering, I don't know, items, boxes.

6:34Some people speculated it was ammunition. I don't know if we actually saw reporting that verified that, but they were landing and then moving items into the area. Then there were some more unusual flights as well. Yeah. So you saw these flights from the march air reserve base which is in southern california i believe and then also these hexagon shaped flight patterns so basically like you you're able to look at the map and you saw uh i mean they're hexagons they fly basically like you know six sides but they're circling directly above the protest correct yeah so there's two things there was i saw these circular flights which I think were at about 9 ,000 to 10 ,000 feet, something like that.

7:26And the UI of ADS-B is really good in that it color codes the craft depending on their altitude. So you can very quickly see, oh, it's orange or yellow. That means it's low altitude. That's going to be like an LAPD chopper or something like that. And then sort of in the mid-range, you have green, and that's sort of more than 9 ,000 to 10 ,000. And I kept seeing these repeating circles above Paramount and then above downtown LA. And I followed back, huh, well, where did these aircraft come from? And they actually came from, as you say, the March Air Reserve Base, which is to the east of Los Angeles.

8:03I mean, that's very, very interesting when even though the craft didn't have a call sign, which is ordinarily how you determine, oh, well, that's that type of aircraft. I can Google the call sign. I can look up FAA registration information like you would with the California Highway Patrol or anything like that. And then you can then go, oh, that's owned by that agency. And that's that type of aircraft. That was kind of a mystery that I left. And I got battered around between so many agencies. I pinged the National Guard because, of course, Trump has deployed thousands of National Guard troops into Los Angeles and now the Marines at the time we're recording this as well, or at at least their plans do.

8:44I pinned the National Guard. I got, I think, battered over to the main Pentagon inbox. The main Pentagon said, go to Air Force. I went to Air Force. They said, go to DHS. And basically, nobody was taking responsibility for flying those craft that took off from an air reserve base. And I've actually got some tips and photos of the craft that I'll have a look at probably after we record this. That was sort of the first very interesting thing. The second is what you mentioned with the hexagons. And I mean, you're kind of looking for two things when you dig through flight data. I think you're looking for planes without a call sign because it's like, huh, why don't they have a call sign?

9:28That's pretty weird. And then if there's very distinctive flight patterns, and sometimes that's just, you know, a plane, maybe a small aircraft going round and round and round in a circle above a particular area, well, that's probably surveilling that particular location, right? That's a very obvious one to point out. But as you say, there were some really distinctive flight patterns which were in a hexagon. And maybe that's the way they're flying. Maybe that's just the way that the data is being translated or collected. but as soon as i saw that it made me think oh i've seen these hexagons before during the 2020 george floyd protests when right and you did a big story then that sort of showed that these were customs and border patrol uh predator drones that were flying over minneapolis and in this same pattern correct yeah so um other people who were looking at flight data saw that at the time in 2020 they posted it to twitter i think that's the site we were using in 2020 i then verified that i think got confirmation from customs and border protection um and cpp has a fleet of drones you know and they look i mean they are predator drones they are literally the same drones that are flown in war zones it's just these aren't carrying hellfire missiles you know as far as i know i'm pretty sure no they're not they're not so back uh at motherboard a long time ago i actually went to grand forks air force base in north dakota north dakota i believe um because there was sort of like this opportunity this press junket to see how drones were being flown internationally.

11:20They were flying Global Hawk drones, which are surveillance drones, really big ones that were piloted out of Grand Forks Air Force Base. But while I was there, I also learned that Customs and Border Patrol was starting to fly Predator drones along the Canada-US border. And these are DHS drones, which are not armed. but they are the same drones. It's like the company that makes it is called General Atomics. And for the CIA and the Air Force, they have Hellfire missiles on them. Don't quote me on what the name of the missiles are, but they have missiles on them. But then when they're flown in the United States, they don't.

12:04But they are like incredibly sophisticated surveillance technology on it. And this has been like quite controversial over the years because they've only been flown within the United States, like not that often. More than people would expect though? More than you'd expect, but they're primarily flown along the borders. They're primarily flown along the Mexico-US border and the Canada-US border. And then only in these moments of protests have they been flown over other things. And then there was one story, one of my first stories that I ever did as a journalist. There was this guy named Rodney Brossard, also in North Dakota, and he was a cattle farmer.

12:50And the local police, he was like a sovereign citizen type. And he holed up in this ranch and the Department of Homeland Security flew a predator drone over his house and or over the ranch that he was like barricaded up in. I think that this was in like 2010 maybe it was a long time ago and he was arrested like they raided him using the surveillance footage from that drone to basically determine like oh it's safe to go in now um and they arrested him and it became this like huge huge deal it was the first like real big tech story that I actually followed ever in my career um but still like to this day it is pretty controversial that predator drones fly in the United States.

13:39So I know that was the aggression, but we're going to hop into your second story, which is DHS flew predator drones over LA protests, audio shows. So basically, this is a story about how you took those hexagons and attributed them to DHS predator drones. So this starts out with someone else analyzing and seeing the exact same thing that you saw and i believe they reached out to you or maybe you saw saw it but who is this person and sort of what happened next yeah i think the friend pinged me on blue sky and um i got in touch with them um just to wrap up the previous story so i see these hexagons and what i do see is the aircraft whatever it is without a call sign the shore looks like a predator drone but we're not exactly sure yet it flies to the u.s mexico border so like i'm pretty damn sure this is a DHS drone, but it's not enough to publish at this point.

14:38So this aviation tracking enthusiast called AeroScout, they also saw these hexagons and they decided to dig into this a little bit deeper. And what they noticed was that the flight path of this drone, or this potential drone, and actually another one coming towards LA, they sort of cross paths. One's heading east one is heading west they're crossing paths in this particular sector of airspace below los angeles called sector nine um and this is just i'm gonna get straight upset this is like really smart investigation work and i'm really kind of impressed by what they did and the work they involved but they then went to live atc.com which is a website again where the data is contributed by volunteers but allows you to listen to air traffic control audio right um jason correct me if i'm wrong but i feel like you did a story on atc i've done a couple stories about live atc uh i did one many years ago in new york city where um basically the nypd claimed that a hobby drone had flown at one of their helicopters and like not attacked them but but kind of was like flying menacingly at them but the air traffic control audio which was captured on live atc uh caught the nypd basically like fabricating that because they were like joking about it they were like oh let's fly at this drone like they were the aggressor more or less and that was captured by this air traffic control.

16:23And then I did one more recently about the drones in New Jersey. The UFOs, yeah. The like quote unquote UFOs. And basically what was happening was because there were so many drone sightings, people took their hobby drones, their like DJI phantoms and stuff like that. They're small drones and started flying them at blinking lights in the sky, which were passenger aircraft. And so it was air traffic control. Like pilots basically being like, Oh, my God, these idiots are flying at us. It's very dangerous. But like long story short, this is an incredible resource, live ATC. It's a it's basically a forum that has, as you said, it captures live air traffic control tower audio from all over the country.

17:19Yeah, I really need to look into it more. It's absolutely a haystack. And what Aeroscout found here was a needle in a haystack, but it's definitely an area that we and others should look more into. But anyway, so the flight path goes through Sector 9, and then it goes into another area to the east. Aeroscout goes to the relevant audio on liveatc.com, and here's people talking with this call sign called Troy, T-R-O-Y. And that's very interesting because Troy is a call sign used by DHS, one of the Black Hawk helicopters I tracked over the weekend. That was a DHS helicopter publicly registered, you can look it up, and that used the call sign Troy something, something, something.

18:11So that's already very interesting. Clearly, these are linked to DHS in some capacity. Then what happens when one of the craft goes east into another section? Aeroscout pulls up that audio, and here's an absolutely key vital part which sort of solves the puzzle. I'm just going to play a tiny bit of that now. 01 traffic 12 o 'clock, 1-0 miles, opposite direction, another Troy, Q9, double 220. So at the end, the air traffic controller says Troy Q9. Troy again being DHS, but Q9 is what seals this as very, very likely being Predator drones because the sort of official name or title of these drones is MQ9.

18:59Q9 is sort of ATC shorthand for these drones, it seems. So, I mean, that kind of seals a deal for me, right? What did you think of that, Jason? yeah i mean to be real with you i think that just the hexagon patterns at oh yeah like like we sort of knew from the get-go but it's like we can't be wrong about this um and so you you want some additional uh level of confirmation and air traffic control saying like hey watch out for the q9 you know brackets because they didn't say it but like watch out for the predator drone is like basically what they're saying um that's very very good confirmation yeah and there was another piece of audio um that they found where an alaska airlines flight was told to watch out for drone traffic as well so that again confirms it's some sort of unmanned aircraft rather than you know an ordinary uh plane in the sky yeah yeah uh so has cbp said anything about this yet not really i contacted customs and border protection either on saturday or sunday certainly over the weekend for initial comment when i found the hexagons um they appear to be very very busy at the moment which i maybe this is too behind the scenes for most people but like i used to and i still do occasionally get pretty quick reliable information from customs and border protection that has changed in this administration especially over the last few months as well it can be quite difficult uh i get the impression they're swamped that's not them saying that that's just my interpretation um i then followed up with the audio that aeroscout found as well and they still haven't commented they haven't denied that this is their predator drone but we're we're waiting to see you know and of course we'll update or we'll do another article uh if they do provide a statement but the audio and the flight data is amazing in my opinion yeah and i mean i guess it's an extremely volatile time right now in los angeles we're going to keep talking about in the second half of this show but there's a lot of stuff in the sky right now and i imagine that you're going to uh continue looking at adsb and just sort of trying to figure out like what is in the sky like what is it equipped with uh i know that you are trying to learn more information about like what types of surveillance technologies some of these planes have i would imagine um but yeah what do you think happens next yeah i mean there are plenty more events coming up on saturday there is the military parade in washington dc um where it would be insane if there weren't surveillance craft flying in the air at that time president Trump has already said that any people protesting this parade, even those doing so peacefully, will be met with force, essentially.

22:16I would be surprised if surveillance craft aren't in the air as well. So I guess I'm going to be spending my weekend looking at that as well again. And then, of course, you know, I'll be very curious how Customs and Border Protection continues to use its drones is that something i don't know maybe they use it in conjunction with ice or raids i don't really know how that would work because the key thing is cpp sometimes deploys these drones at the request of other agencies i believe the eff found that several years ago where it's not just cpp going oh let's go fly a drone there'll be a request from local cops or another agency or something like that so um yeah we'll keep an eye on that as it should be noted that uh i think of the three of us sam is the only one who has spoken to air traffic control not me not personally i've been in in the the cockpit of a small plane and heard atc they talk really fast they talk so fast it's incredibly hard to yeah how do they do this i don't know i don't know it's it's a real I don't know it takes a real strong mind to do ATC work I think so yeah let alone maybe we'll do more reporting yeah about that at some point because there's an ATC crisis in this country so if you know more about that please please let us know yeah Joseph you look surprised did you not hear about Newark no no no I'm just really enthusiastic about it because like I've been reading all the coverage about ATC being a shit show out of that airport and I feel I feel like there's way more to tell there you know yeah um all right let's leave that there when we come back after the break more on the la protests but this time on the ground and uh on fire we'll be right back after this when we started 404 media we knew we'd need to wear a lot of hats being able to control our own destiny and being able to make our own business decisions is crucial, but we're not experts at everything.

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29:53And yeah, for people who are like unaware, Waymo's are driverless taxis. They're essentially driverless Ubers that are owned by Google or rather like Waymo is a Google company. And they're operating in San Francisco, where notoriously they a few of them have been vandalized and attacked. And then they've been operating in Los Angeles for maybe the last like six or eight months something like that and that's a little longer than that because they were definitely here last year um but they become really popular like i see them all the time and so is it is it not just the tech people taking them like what's your reading no i mean a lot of my friends take them for like you know all sorts of reasons it's become a truly like a competitor to Uber.

30:47And, you know, frankly, it's like it's cheaper than Uber, because there's no driver. And it's just like every day, it seems like there's more and more and more of them. You know, at first, they were just kind of like testing on my neighborhood. Then it was like, okay, it's open it, but it was invite only like you'd be invited to the app. Now it's open to everyone. and I took one to a basketball game. Like I've taken them a few times now. Like to watch the basketball game? Sorry, that's just the way you said it. I took them to an LA Clippers game. So I took them to an arena and there was a line of like 15 of them, which is to say like they're everywhere.

31:36They're absolutely everywhere in the city now and they're normalized, um which is just to say that i don't know like you hear i don't know if you're if you don't live in los angeles and you hear like robo taxis are set on fire you're like there's robo taxis okay right um so they get set on fire um our friend uh brian merchant at blood in the machine went and spoke to people on the ground i think the day after and according to his reporting people deliberately ordered the vehicles there to then set on fire and especially because they're in a nice little neat row but i guess that's how waymos move anyway anyway they get set on fire basically destroyed as you say very visual imagery how does waymo respond to these vehicles being torched yeah i mean i i guess i'll highlight uh brian's reporting because it wasn't clear why the Waymo's were there like at first as in it could have been protesters taking a Waymo to the protest it could have been people at the protest ordering Waymo's in order to just like like frankly Waymo's are sort of known for uh like having infinite patience in a way that uh a person in a like a driver would not so you know just as like an obstruction uh it's also you could imagine them trying to just like traverse the area because someone ordered one and and the protest was in the way and so they were like oh we're stuck now because way most very much like they're they're pretty good at driving but when there's like construction or weird stuff happening they don't always know what to do there's like lots of stories of way most getting stuck and so it was like unclear kind of like why they were there and brian's reporting shows that like some of the protesters called them in, which is pretty interesting.

33:34But yeah, basically, I had written a story about Waymo recently that we'll get into in a second. So I hit up their press person and was like, what are you doing about these Waymos that are on fire? And they were like, well, we're continuing to operate in the city of Los Angeles, but we're not going to go downtown anymore. and then they also said that they were coordinating with the cops which i felt was not great language to use at this moment but they said they were working with the cops to learn when it would be safe to remove the charred waymos from downtown um notably they did not say that they're working with the cops to like share video footage and stuff with them i mean whether that's happening we don't know but they didn't i asked them and they didn't answer that question and they didn't yeah, they didn't answer that question, basically.

34:29Yeah, we'll get to the data stuff in a second. I think Waymo didn't give information on this, but did they specify how they were suspending service in downtown LA or not? Like, is there like a geofence where they draw it on the map and like, no Waymo go here? I guess they didn't get that grant. Yeah, that's how Waymo works already, is that they're not everywhere in Los Angeles. They can only go to certain neighborhoods. And that geographic area is expanding all the time. But there are certain places where, for whatever reason, you can't order a Waymo 2 at this moment. So I assume that they just took that, they probably geofenced it, just removed it off of the map.

35:13And interestingly, they kind of only recently expanded to downtown LA in the first place. So it's entirely possible that they just reverted to an older map or something like that. um yeah yeah and i think they also suspended service briefly in san francisco as well just according to something that brian mentioned uh in his report um as well so that happens as you say waymo didn't say we're working with the cops to identify the people who burned the vehicles but at least potentially they could because waymo has been used by the police as basically an extension of surveillance or I guess is a criminal investigative tool.

36:00What was this story you covered a few months ago at this point around that? Yeah, I mean, I think this is really the biggest concern with driverless vehicles at the moment is they work with cameras like Waymo uses LiDAR detectors as well. But there's a bunch of cameras on them as well, because they need to see to, you know, not run things over. And so they are necessarily recording all the time. And cops have learned that that this is happening. And so like, I don't think I really don't think that Waymo itself sees itself as a surveillance company in the same way that like ring the doorbell camera sort of does see itself as a we're here to prevent crime sort of company by having cameras and they certainly don't see themselves as like a flock which is a specific surveillance technology but because of the way that the product works they are filming all the time and cops have realized that that's the case And so in April, there was a hit and run in Koreatown, which is not that far from downtown LA.

37:21But it wasn't the Waymo that hit a pedestrian. It was another driver that hit a pedestrian. But it happened in front of a Waymo. And the Los Angeles Police Department requested footage from that Waymo, obtained it, and then published it on its own YouTube and said, like, does anyone in the public know whose car this is? Like and subscribe. Yeah. And we knew it was Waymo footage because the footage said Waymo proprietary and confidential, like more or less like on it. And so that that just means that the cops have have realized that these are a potential source of surveillance footage. And I honestly think that like once the cops understand that, it's like it's going to become routine because we actually have seen in the past like these potential like technologies that could be used for surveillance that like the cops just weren't creative enough to think of to request footage from or request data from.

38:30and then it's like one cop will do it and then it becomes a really popular surveillance tool and and i guess like an example of that would be like google maps geofencing or like youtube search histories and things like that like these are um things that you have written about before joseph where this data has existed for a really long time but only recently cops realized that it could be used like it as a tool of surveillance yeah or as we wrote about recently push notification data which was only really sort of revealed in 2023 by senator ron wyden's office and then we found court documents mentioning it um but yeah there's there's ring there's reverse location data warrants there's dna companies there's push notifications and i think the the broader thing is if law enforcement have a legal mechanism to access data and in many cases they will have a completely legitimate use case for accessing that data and it will be legal if they can get a legal mechanism to request that data they will absolutely do that um if they can they want or they need the thing that stops that sort of thing is technical solutions such as end-to-end encryption you know like law enforcement literally cannot get the content of end-to-end encrypted messages because it's just technically impossible.

39:55Technically, they have the legal right to signal messages if they get a search warrant and there's probable cause and it's searched by a judge, but they literally can't get that, obviously. And this is just an extension of that. And as you say, it's not just as police learn about Waymo and you can get data from it. It's, of course, Waymo becoming way more popular across the US and, I mean, potentially other countries as well, right? Yeah, so there's a few things I want to highlight here, because I published this article. And then a few people said, well, don't Tesla's have cameras on them? And the answer is yes.

40:35And cops have cops subpoena that as well. So so that's also bad. They also say like, a lot of people have dash cams. So can't they, you know, get footage from dash cams? And the answer to that also is yes. But the difference here is that Waymo is a centralized company. And so as you say, Joseph, as these become more popular, a cop will probably be able to think, well, surely a Waymo was nearby. And because of the way that Waymo works, the company knows where all of its vehicles are at any given moment. And so theoretically, the cops can say, well, did you have any vehicles at this intersection at this time?