Dictator Alert is a project that tracks the aircrafts of authoritarian regimes all over the world and runs several Twitter bots that announce when these aircrafts land in Paris, London, Geneva or the EuroAirport in Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg.

You can track dictators aircrafts here: data.dictatoralert.org

More about us:

This initiative is run by two freelance investigative journalists: Emmanuel Freudenthal (@EmmanFre), based in East Africa, and François Pilet (@FrancoisPilet), based in Switzerland.

At the moment, we’re looking for people to host antennas to track planes and long-term funding to sustain the project.

Do you have informations about dictators and their planes? Want to host an antenna? Got funds? Contact us! You can also make a quick donation to support the project.

How it works

Nearly all planes around the world transmit unencrypted information about their location as well as other details which can be captured by ADS-B antennas. Dictator Alert uses data from ADSB-Exchange, including several antennas we’ve installed ourselves.

The details of each plane captured by the antennas are compared with a list of aircrafts registered to, or regularly used, by authoritarian regimes. When a match is found, a message is published on the website.

We need our own antennas because flight tracking websites like www.flightradar24.com or www.flightaware.com, censor the information of many of planes. This is especially the case for dictators who prefer to stay discreet.

This project has expanded to the world in June 2019 with support from OCCRP. The data is acquired from www.adsbexchange.com, the only website that does not filter data, and will soon be included in new Twitter bots.

Who’s a dictator?

Dictator Alert is tracking over 200 planes registered to, or used, by governments described as “authoritarian regimes” according to the Democracy Index (2019) compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The registration details of tracked planes is based on public sources and official registers. You view the current list here as a GSheet file (please contact us for the latest version).

If want to add new aircrafts or if you think that there is an error in the list, please contact us.

Citations & reactions

On November 3, 2016, Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, chief of the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) Criminal Division, mentioned Dictator Alert during a conference about international corruption at The George Washington University (YouTube). Leslie Caldwell indicated that the tool was monitored by the Justice Department’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative.

During the summer 2016, relying in part on information provided by Dictator Alert, Geneva public prosecutors opened a formal investigation on Equatorial Guinea Vice President Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, aka Teodorin Obiang, for suspected money laundering of corruption proceeds. On November 31, 2016, the Geneva prosecutors seized 11 luxury cars owned by Teodorin Obiang at Geneva airport.

The project has already gained a worldwide media coverage, with articles published by The Verge, Le Monde, Wired, Tages Anzeiger, Newsweek, and many others.

Our bot’s latest tweets