https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/02/pentagon-balloons-surveillance-midwest

Exclusive: the high-altitude balloons promise a cheap monitoring
platform that could follow multiple cars and boats for extended
periods

The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six
midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents
filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal.

Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are 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.

Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the
balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to
locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”,
according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation,
an aerospace and defence company. [...]

rthur Holland Michel, the co-director of the Center for the Study of
the Drone 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
surveilled 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.

Neither Sierra Nevada nor US Southcom responded to requests for
comment on this story. However, the rival balloon operator World View
recently announced that it had carried out multi-week test missions in
which its own stratospheric balloons were able to hover over a
five-mile-diameter area for six and a half hours, and larger areas for
days at a time.
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