According to foreign media reports, Jack Sweeney, a 19-year-old American college student, developed software specifically for tracking the flight route of Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, and released real-time updates on his twitter account. This was regarded as a security threat by musk, so he didn't hesitate to write a check for $5000 in the hope that Sweeney could delete the account < p > < / P > < p > Sweeney created a twitter account called @ elonjet to track Musk's private aircraft around the world. This account is very popular, with more than 83000 fans. The communication between musk and Sweeney began in the autumn of 2021. One night at 12:13, Sweeney received a private letter from musk, which said: "can you delete this account? It will bring security risks!" But it was not until the next morning that Sweeney woke up that he replied, "yes, I can, but it may cost a model 3. It's just a joke!" < p > @ elonjet is just one of 15 flight tracking accounts created by Sweeney. These accounts are run by programs he writes to parse data and send tweets every time a selected aircraft takes off or lands. Each account focuses on only one well-known person. They are almost all technology tycoons, including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos < p > @ elonjet's popularity seems to have frightened musk himself. "I don't like the idea of being shot by a madman," he said in a recent interview < p > the communication between Sweeney and musk did not stop. Musk asked Sweeney how much money he made from @ elonjet account, which said it was no more than $20 a month. Then musk put forward his own proposal, that is, to invest $5000 to delete the account to help prevent the "madman" from tracking his location. But Sweeney told musk to add another 0. "Is it possible to raise the price to $50000? It's very helpful for my life in college. It may also allow me to buy a car, or even model 3," he wrote < p > musk said he would consider it. But so far, he hasn't given Sweeney a penny, and the @ elonjet account is still running. Sweeney said he didn't mind being ignored. He said he benefited a lot from @ elonjet and other accounts: he got social media fans, learned how to program, and even got a part-time job in application development at uberjets. Even better, the big boy who claimed to be Musk's "fan" also had a personal dialogue with his idols he had admired for many years < p > although these twitter accounts have not caused any dangerous events so far, musk makes sense at least based on Sweeney's knowledge and information available online. It's normal for many celebrities to be surrounded at the airport by fans, people who want to sell their signatures, paparazzi, stalkers and so on. In recent years, the CEOs of musk and other technology companies have become real celebrities < p > but twitter robots are not adored by fans. They just continue to analyze the data Sweeney told them. When available, the 15 robots use FAA information, including tracking the time and location of aircraft take-off and landing, as well as their scheduled path. However, Musk's private aircraft and many other aircraft are on the list, which means that identifiable information is deleted from the data < p > in this case, Sweeney uses data from ADS-B transponders on most aircraft, which displays the aircraft's position in the air in real time through ADS-B switches. Parsing this information is like solving a logical puzzle: Sweeney's robot can use the altitude of the aircraft and the time to receive data to determine when the aircraft takes off or lands. They can then cross reference latitude and longitude with the airport database to determine where the plane leaves or flies < p > although Sweeney's robots cannot find the flight destination of the aircraft from the shielded FAA data, they can cross reference the real-time ADS-B data with another website that publishes the anonymous FAA flight plan. This enables the robot to track the aircraft in real time, match the anonymous FAA flight plan, and determine the predetermined destination of each aircraft. This information is completely public and can be used to track most private aircraft < p > this is a security vulnerability that has attracted much attention, but it has not attracted people's attention, because people need a lot of industry-specific knowledge to understand all these data and how to parse them. Sweeney has such a background: his father works in the aviation industry. Sweeney has known how to track aircraft since childhood. He said that like many little boys, he would try to identify the type of aircraft as it flew across the sky, often comparing his guess with the information he found in the online flight tracking app < p > when Sweeney explained to musk where he found the data, the latter was surprised to find that the data were so easy to obtain. "The air traffic control system has really begun in Taiyuan," he said < p > Musk's most recent exchange with Sweeney was last Wednesday, when Sweeney said he would prefer to get an internship rather than pay for deleting his account. Sweeney said musk had not replied to the message, but he did not feel ignored. In fact, he thought he knew why musk was silent: "if you check elonjet, I think he might be on vacation in Hawaii." (small) < / P > < p >