Sounds like someone was using this technology
Gorgon Stare is a video capture technology developed by the United States military. It is a spherical array of nine cameras attached to an aerial drone. The US Air Force calls it “wide-area surveillance sensor system”.
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The system is capable of capturing motion imagery of an entire city, which can then be analyzed by people or an artificial intelligence, such as the Mind’s Eye project being developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This motion imagery is not considered video as it is collected at fewer frames per second than the standard definition of video; TV-like quality of video is 24–60 FPS. Gorgon Stare needs to utilize a system of tagging and metadata to be fully effective. The Air Force planned to deliver one system in 2011, another in 2012, and a third in 2014, though they would not enter service until accepted by the commander in the theatre of operations. Gorgon Stare was under development for more than two years and is designed to download 65 different images to a variety of military users for analysis; this is what is referred to as “wide-area persistent surveillance.”
During the Global War on Terror, using unmanned aerial vehicles for persistent surveillance dramatically changed the way the U.S. military pursued fleeting targets. However, their sensors provided very narrow fields of view, referred to by warfighters as looking at the battlefield through a “soda straw,” allowing insurgents to disappear from view and not giving information on what was happening in surrounding areas. In 2009, the U.S. Air Force began development of a wide-area surveillance system to enable the MQ-9 Reaper long-endurance UAV to survey an entire small city from 25,000 ft (7,600 m). Requiring fewer systems to recon a large area frees up more available assets to be able to perform other missions and enables operations to be more limited where a light “footprint” is desired.
Makes sense.
Now...who sanctioned the over-flight and who was “flying” it?
If I remember right, the National Guard had not been mobilized and the locals had not asked for FBI assistance.
Mark
Duh. If you don’t think every square inch of this earth is not observed, especially hot spots, you are sadly mistaken.