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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

It would have been hilarious if those turned out to be ADS-B receivers launched by plane tracking enthusiasts but AFAIK it's confirmed that those are with Chinese origin and I find it unlikely being benign because in that case the Chinese would have informed the US about these unlike they seek escalation.

I also find it fascinating that these balloons were not discovered sooner, reminds me of the stray soviet era military drone that flew half of the EU without detection to crash far away from Ukraine.

Maybe the world is not under complete surveillance just yet.

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It is common for countries to not reveal that they have noticed something.

Revealing that you've noticed tells the enemy about your surveillance abilities.

I don't know about that, those were spotted by the civilians using not exactly high tech gears.

That doesn't meam that the military didn't spot it first but just didn't tell anyone.

Congrats to the military then for letting the Chinese conduct surveillance in order to conceal the fact that they have employees with eyes.

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.

I don't think we need to go off-topic and discuss theology here.

Regarding Occam's Razor, it's pretty simple that the military keeps secrets.

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.

Signals intelligence

Like what? The radio waves traveling over the US are not a secret.

Think metadata, if you will. Where signals originated, how often and what times of day, etc.

It would be pretty absurd to believe the US military is not tracking every inch of its own air space.

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.

There are wide swaths of the US airspace that do not have strong radar coverage, certainly not at 80,000 feet.

Most of the ocean is unmonitored, too. Remember MH370? We lost it in the air and we couldn't find it in the ocean. :-)

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.

Umm, NORAD is able to track Santa - this balloon is much easier.

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.

Is there any proof that it wasn't discovered earlier? It's difficult to prove a negative. It could have been discovered earlier but monitored differently and then when it became news, monitored overtly for different reasons.

If it isn't an immediate threat that you have to stop, why let an adversary know your capabilities (that you can detect them).

Well, these were reported by civilians over landlocked states and there's no indication that the balloons were spotted earlier.

The military is unlikely to report their surveillance activities to the media.

There was no overt indication that the balloons were spotted earlier.

Except the statements from Canada that are very suggestive.

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/news/20...

>there's no indication that the balloons were spotted earlier

No, the balloon was tracked when it entered Alaska on Jan 28 https://abc7news.com/where-the-chinese-surveillance-balloon-...

Thanks!

There was a thread on Twitter - which I didn't bookmark - which suggested there was a DoD statement that they'd tracked a number of these back at least as far as Trump's term.

And there were suggestions they might also have been used elsewhere, not just in the US/Canada.

As for what intel they could collect - a payload of that size would be equivalent to an airliner full of ELINT systems, rather like the US Rivet series. So that would include possible decryption of comms, and potentially precision mapping, analysis of traffic patterns, tests of local backdoor access, and so on.

Not all of that is easily done by satellite.

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