I mean, it doesn’t mean we couldn’t, just that it was not worth revealing our ability to do so over one airliner crash where no one was likely to survive. They didn’t directly act on intelligence in enigma for the same reason either if memory serves.
Tin foil hats are itchy…
If your argument is "MH370", it's a weak one. No one has radar coverage in the southern Indian Ocean because no one needs it.
There was an article about that very topic on HN just recently. It was not even remotely over US airspace, and the pilot had evidently threaded the needle through the radar coverage of several nations.
What if its not actually feasible to do that? We have lot's of sensors and cameras everywhere, those would have been redundant if total surveillance was possible.
While being watched by the US military, thus giving it potentially valuable information on how China conducts its surveillance. It's turtles all the way down.
For some reason a lot of people really want to believe that the military was all over it without any indication whatsoever. I guess it feeds from the need of knowing that someone(the correct one I guess?) is watching.
> For some reason a lot of people really want to believe that the military was all over it without any indication whatsoever
Not for me at least. I never claimed the military did anything (discovered it, surveilled it), just that it's possible that they could have done something without others knowing.
I just think it's extremely bad form to assume things that there's no evidence for - both about the balloon and the military, and about why people are commenting.
A lot of things are possible, like maybe the God really put the fossils in the soil and the world is just a few thousand years old. That said, I usually like to have at least a clue about that being the case. Also, Occam's Razor.
How did all the conspiracy theorists collectively forget how many spy satellites are in orbit? Were they flashy-thingied by the spy balloon, or do chem-trails (or the belief therein) cause amnesia?
Unless it flew over a secret research base I don't know what a balloon could gather that I can't already get from google maps or public USGIS datasets.
It’s most likely that this was observed and tracked by NORAD from the very beginning. The Pentagon had to publicly address it only when there were multiple reports by the public. There was little to be gained by publicizing it.
Revealing that you've noticed tells the enemy about your surveillance abilities.