I thought the spy sats could see stuff like this?
Primarily because of a lot of bad movies people actually have a greatly exagerrated idea of the capabilities of spy satellites.
You can't actually get a continuous movie down to showing people and license plates of the entire surface of the globe with them.
You can get very high resolution pics of a VERY narrow swath, but any given spot on earth can really only be photographed a couple times a day. You can't use spy satellites as some sort of generic camera watching widely scattered areas for suspicious activity.