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US military spying on people using balloons

by on05 August 2019

 
Never mind the chemtrails these are real

The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons.

According to documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), more than 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons were being launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois.

The balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter drug trafficking and homeland security threats”, according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation, an aerospace and defence company.

The balloons have hi-tech radars designed to simultaneously track many individual vehicles day or night, through any kind of weather.

Arthur Holland Michel, the co-director of the Centre for Drone Studies at Bard College in New York, said: “What this new technology proposes is to watch everything at once. Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘combat TiVo’ because when an event happens somewhere in the surveyed area, you can potentially rewind the tape to see exactly what occurred, and rewind even further to see who was involved and where they came from.”

The new balloons promise a cheap surveillance platform that could follow multiple cars and boats for extended periods. And because winds often travel in different directions at different altitudes, the balloons can usually hover over a given area simply by ascending or descending.

The balloons have advanced mesh networking technologies that allow them to communicate with one another, share data and pass it to receivers on the ground below.

The FCC filing notes that this networking includes video information. That suggests that the balloons might also carry a Sierra Nevada video capture system called Gorgon Stare, which is usually deployed on drones. This wide-area surveillance system comprises nine cameras capable of recording panoramic images across an entire city simultaneously.

Last modified on 05 August 2019
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