Posted on 08/29/2022 9:23:47 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Elon Musk drew wrath this week for a nine-minute, 35-mile flight from San Jose to San Francisco — but it didn’t have to be this way.
The trip was tracked and exposed by @ElonJet, a Twitter account run by Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old IT major at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. “If he let me fly with him on his jet, record it and talk about it — and maybe not even pay me the $50,000 [previously asked for] — I would take it down,” Sweeney said of Musk. “That is still up for discussion.”
Sweeney’s high-profile hobby uses public information snagged from the internet to track the movements of private planes flying the likes of Tom Cruise and assorted Kardashians, a brace of Russian oligarchs and tech titans such as Bill Gates and Musk. He regularly posts their high-flying whereabouts to a series of Twitter accounts. In July, his @CelebJets account busted Kylie Jenner for a 17-minute flight, which led to her being called a “climate criminal.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
If nothing else, this kid’s got a lot of chutzpah.
ping
I can understand why Elon and others aren’t willing to pay this kid to go away. If they did, wouldn’t copycat(s) simply spring up in the kid’s place? I understand that the kid seems to have pioneered the concept of the celebrity-jet-tracking bot using public data, but if he can do it, it won’t be impossible for someone else to figure out how to pull off this same trick it too. And if Elon and other start paying big bucks to him to back off, the copycats will ask for the same money or more.
Isn’t this the very definition of cyberstalking?
Extortion is never a good look...
Nope. Publicly available data.
It is a method of surveillance. Not illegal.
PI’s do this and so can government, and they can get far better data than the average Joe.
Send out decoy flights and blame the kid for wasting the excess fuel if he’s a climate nazi.
Yes, but this is still a shake down.
$50K extortion.
Musk and others are not committing crimes by flying.
Ignore the punk and eventually he will get bored and go look for another racket.
hard to feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t have to fly commercial. these people seek the public spotlight and then complain when it is on them. boo hoo.
Well now you’re just changing your own question.
You asked if this was cyberstalking, not if it was extortion.
They are not the same thing.
If you had asked if it was extortion, I’d say yeah.
Musk should sue the punk for extortion.
That information should be made private for personal security reasons. No stranger needs to know who is on a particular flight, unless there is an emergency need for the information.
I did not ask a question, I stated that it is a shake-down, AKA Extortion.
I think you may have meant to reply to another poster.
Jack Sweeney extortion,
fK him !
I think its great this kids does this (the tracking and publicizing part), if for no other reason than to shame the Global Warming fear mongering celebs who want everyone else to save the planet while they live their high carbon-output lifestyles - if he stopped there, then I would have no problem with him - but letting those same celebs avoid publicity by paying him off makes him kind of a scum bag imo.
>>No stranger needs to know who is on a particular flight
No stranger does know ‘who’ is on the flight, just who’s plane it is - who is on it is inferred by who owns it.
“Extortion: the practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats”
Yes, this is extortion, and quite possibly a crime.
There’s nothing wrong with tracking and exposing oligarchs and celebrities for their hypocrisy, and it’s laudable in my opinion. And this is true regardless of whether this person is a climate activist or not. And yes, what he uses is public information. If by doing this he causes the targets to modify their behavior, that’s OK with me.
But demanding money or at least a free plane ride and interview is the problem.
Wrath is one of the seven deadly sins ... Some people need to seriously re-evaluate their lives.
The kid is querying adsbexchange.com for Musk’s plane’s N-number (N628TS) and publishing the results. If he gets money to stop and stops, anyone else can start right back up.
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