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Comment by cirgue | Hacker News Reader

Where did it mention that they were unable to get imagery of the drones or recover one? If the thesis is that this may be a foreign incursion, I very much doubt that they’d broadcast that they’d captured one.

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Bragging about it is a good PR and inspires confidence in your citizens -- even if you didn't actually capture anything. It's rather mystifying that they didn't try to present a strong face after this incident.

That’s how you lose trust, if it later is revealed that they didn’t.

I wish this effect would be lasting long enough for the next round of finding weapons of mass destruction or defending nation building overseas.

Any information given would reveal what they can do, and by extension also what they can't, so to me it's perfectly understandable if they keep everything under wraps.

It escalates tensions for no readily identifiable reason. Like we’re not looking to pick a fight with China or Russia right now, and saying “hey y’all we captured a Chinese drone” sounds like a great way to push public opinion over a precipice and create a crisis that serves the interests of quite literally no one.

Back during the cold war, Daily Mail wrote a completely made up article about communist spies infiltrating sleepy English countryside villages, and people started calling up to report the spies they have seen on the streets. It became such a big deal that the government pressured MI5 to go and do something about it, so they "captured" and kicked out of the country a dozen or so communist spies found across the landscape of Britain, to a huge fanfare and celebration in the newspapers. Only years later it came out that that operation was entirely made up too, no one was actually ever found, captured and extradited anywhere, it was entirely just to satify the government and the public(who were riled up by a completely made up story in a trash newspaper).

This doesn't make sense to me. The government is more than thrilled to stir negative sentiment against every geopolitical competitor we have via the media, if this is one of said competitors drones then they obviously would know if it had been captured, and if you're concerned about public 'panic' - you already released the information anyhow.

You also have government planes doing loopity-loos around Langley with their public transponders turned on which shows a desire to make such actions publicly visible and available to literally anybody and everybody on the planet.

Sure, after the public circus with the spy balloon, the government is eager to have a round two, this time with off-the-shelf consumer drones. Be honest, a picture of a $1000 drone would leave you totally unfazed.

There's one country they've not been so thrilled to publicize when they've acted against us in the past.

See: The USS Liberty Incident.

Not saying that's what's going on here. But it is the exception to the rule you posit.

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