posted on Feb, 3 2014 @ 12:14 PM
Imagine if you could analyze any police chase video or audio posted on ATS, YouTube, LiveLeak, or mainstream media and isolate embedded GPS
coordinates to see if it really originated from the geographic location claimed.
At least in one case, someone just succeeded in doing this. I first saw it this morning on
Gizmodo:
Watching cockpit footage of a police helicopter chase in Kansas City, Oona Räisänen noticed some odd interference in the audio. She assumed it
was just being caused by the aircraft's engine, but after isolating and filtering the audio she discovered it was actually a digital signal.
And it wasn't just some random digital signal, either. It turns out the equipment used to transmit the live video feed to the ground also passes
along the helicopter's GPS coordinates. And in a manner that anyone with access to the footage—like say the millions of people using YouTube every
minute—and a little know-how can actually decode that data.
The Gizmodo article doesn't give a whole lot of details on how she isolated and got the actual GPS coordinates out of the audio/video data. You can
find those missing details on
Oona Räisänen's blog, absorptions.
She gives the details on what she found and how she decoded it.
It's not clear if such GPS data is commonly embedded or it just happened that the particular equipment used in this case did it. Nor is it clear
whether this is a standardized protocol that is the same across manufacturers if it is common.
But I figure there is probably someone on ATS with the expertise and curiosity to check this out further. If it is common, it might be very
interesting to analyze such data from a number of past controversial events.