...South Dakota...Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois...the balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”,...The balloons are carrying hi-tech radars designed to simultaneously track many individual vehicles day or night, through any kind of weather...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.”