FBI Director Kash Patel enjoys access to a litany of professional perks, among them use of a Gulfstream G550 jet, a 15-passenger luxury aircraft owned by the Department of Justice that he has reportedly taken to visit his aspiring country musician girlfriend. Responding to growing outrage about his personal use of the government jet, Patel has insisted those who track his flights are dangerous and cowardly.

Unfortunately for Patel, tracking flights is legal, easy, and an important tool of government transparency.

The location of aircraft within and around the United States is public because the law requires it to be: The Federal Aviation Administration mandates that aircraft must be trackable for safety reasons, namely, to prevent them from crashing into each other all the time. Aircraft, whether privately owned or operating for a major carrier, from a small prop plane to a jumbo jet, are generally required by law to carry a radio transmitter, called a transponder, that continuously broadcasts its GPS coordinates and other information, such as altitude and ground speed. Thanks to what’s known as the Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast, or ADS-B, unencrypted transponder signals are received by other planes in the sky and anyone with a compatible antenna on the ground. According to the FAA, “ADS-B improves safety and efficiency in the air and on runways, reduces costs, and lessens harmful effects on the environment.”

Accessing these broadcast coordinates from the ground is only slightly more complex than tuning in to a local radio station. Entire online communities of aircraft hobbyists, researchers, journalists, and others make use of this open source data to chart the travel of foreign dignitaries, military movements, corporate executive trips, and, now, the director of the FBI.

As vessels of the rich and powerful, the ability to track private flights provides undeniable value to the public: It’s been used to monitor Russian oligarchs, map the CIA’s foreign torture program, and calculate Taylor Swift’s carbon footprint. That this tracking is entirely legal hasn’t stopped the owners of private jets from objecting to the practice. Elon Musk notoriously threatened legal action and banned users from his “free speech” platform X for revealing the movements of his private jet, a practice he described as tantamount to sharing “assassination coordinates.” The use of luxury planes by public servants is a perennial political issue too. In January 2023, two years before he was named as his successor, Patel blasted FBI Director Christopher Wray’s use of the “tax payer funded private jet” based on exactly this same public tracking data.

Patel’s attitude has changed now that he enjoys free use of that jet. In October, Patel’s jet was monitored flying to to State College Regional Airport in Pennsylvania, a brief drive to an arena on the Penn State campus where he........

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