A free Swedish flight tracking site is revealing crucial military movements along the Kashmir border

• As India and Pakistan ramp up air strikes against each other in the vicinity of the Line of Control (Loc) along the Kashmir border, it seems that the movement of India’s aircraft is common knowledge.
• Due to open-source tracking sites like Flight Radar 24, anyone with an internet connection can identify and upload the positions of Indian Air Force jets.
  
• While this poses a huge risk to India’s fighter pilots and military plans, Twitter users are defending their actions by saying that the positions of IAF jets are not secret.
  

As India and Pakistan ramp up air strikes against each other in the vicinity of the Line of Control (Loc) along the Kashmir border, it seems that the movement of India’s aircraft is common knowledge.

Due to open-source tracking sites like Flight Radar 24, A Swedish site which maps real-time flight movements, anyone with an internet connection can track and identify the positions of Indian Air Force jets.

Moreover, people are even tweeting live positions of flights on social media.


As I write this, Flight Radar 24 is showing the location of an Indian military plane, VUBCI.



What you see above is the movement of an Antonov AN-32 aircraft which is used for air-dropping cargo, carrying passengers, medevac, firefighting, skydiving or paratrooping roles.

This is a risk to India’s fighter pilots as it exposes their movement. However, the users are defending their actions by saying that the positions of IAF jets are not secret. According to the one of the people tweeting out positions, Manu Gomez, Indian Air Force officials have overlooked an important security measure.

Gomez told the Lede, “Military planes can use an encrypted mode and we will not be able to see it, they just have to change the mode of the transponder”. The fix seems obvious but may not have been carried out yet.

At the moment, there is the only plane flying in Pakistan's air space at the moment, according to Flight Radar, however its identity seems to be encrypted.



This isn’t the first time that open-source flight tracking websites have made sensitive flight data public. In December 2018, a secret flight by US President Donald Trump to Iraq was flagged by @CivMilAir, a Twitter handle.

Wikileaks soon got a hold of the news.



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