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I'm not saying flight is even remotely the best option, just that depending on flight monitoring websites and assuming their contents are 100% reliable when governments with the ability to hack them are involved is just .. weird.
Nobody but conspiracy theorists would really care if a flight transponder service got hacked and for a day was giving wrong position for a whole bunch of aircraft.
No one except the Russians or the Chinese or any other interested polity or activist group, for whom hacking a transponder service would be an amazing amount of smoke that could support the claims that the Americans (or Brits, or whoever) blew up the pipeline. Especially since relevant parties might have their own regional air tracking picture- like, say, a anyone with an air defense network with over-the-horizon radars in the Baltic region- with which to identify the discrepancy.
The point here isn't that tracker sites are 100% accurate pictures of the sky. It's that air tracker sites offer ways to identify various attempts to circumvent air tracking, from turning off transponders during routine flights, comparing different transponder sites to identify discrepancies between sites, or comparing transponder sites with the nation's own air-defense networks to identify a discrepency, which could be noted in post-even analysis. The number of countries with overlapping interests in monitoring the baltic airspace includes NATO, non-NATO, and Russia itself.
It's thus notable that no one is alleging this sort of flight tracker tampering has occurred. Not the Russians- who have the most interest in supporting a claim against the US- but also not the author. The possiblity of website tampering has been raised to dismiss the noted time discrepancy which would undermine the story... but this is introducing a new level of unfalsifiable claims that put the onus on proving a negative (that the websites were not hacked, as opposed to that they were) on skeptics rather than apply occam's razor- that the author is just wrong, and the very flight they claimed supports their claims does not, in fact, support it, casting doubt on other parts of the story by consequence.
Do you really think that Russians, even for a moment, doubt it was the Americans ? It's not a court of law. It was Americans, or some US puppet/satellite did it with american approval.
If some American LNG terminal or pipeline doesn't blow up due to Russian sabotage within the next five years, I'd be surprised.
That's probably way beyond their competence and sophistication levels. E.g. wasn't NORAD recently caught with its pants down and spent next days flying expensive jets around and shooting down various small spy blimps ? Apparently, they tracked all these small blimps (there's even a NYT article now - the guy running the program also worked on Chinese stealth aircraft), but weren't paying attention to them because of overly aggressive filtering. Took a good look after civvies photographed the Montana balloon.
Kinda feels like that time Soviets had a Cessna land on the Red square..
But, I'm thinking this is the US - no one is going to resign or get canned. Nobody got canned for the OPM leak either, so..
Evidence needed, particularly for the framing.
Whether the Russians believe it was an American puppet/satellite is irrelevant to whether it was an American puppet/satellite. This presupposes that the framing of puppet/satellite is accurate, which is a model that rejects or diminishes the autonomy of other actors to act without American approval or foreknowledge.
I am not the sort of cultural chauvenist that presumes the Americans are the most important factor in the decision-making of American allies.
If air-monitoring is way beyond competence and sophistication, then much more difficult categories to monitor- such as surface-vessel and submarines- are even further beyond, thus furthering the incentive to using them rather than methods where a lower-level of competence would allow detection.
This is trying to have it both ways- that the actors involved are simultaneously incredibly capable but also incompetent.
This undermines the claim of the inability to track, as it shows that they were tracked, but not acted upon at the time, but upon revisiting the available data were able to identify the at-the-time overlooked data. As a model for the Baltic space, this would support the importance of not having aviation data available for re-looking if you were trying to do a secret operation.
This is the conspiratorial argument trying to have it both ways: the simultaneous claims of hypercompetence beyond realism but incompetence in in select areas as needed to sustain the conspiratorial claims.
So, the fact that US failed to act on what were likely spy blimps flying overhead for years undermines my claim that they'd be too incompetent to have a program that'd correlate flight radar data and actual radar data ?
Do I have it right ? The fact of demonstrated incompetence* undermines my claim of their incompetence?
*there's a statement by Mattis claiming they 'knew about the balloons' but didn't tell Trump because his reaction could've been 'too combative'. Honestly have no clue why airforce intercepting unmanned suspicious manmade objects would ever require presidential authorisation so it seems like bullshit.
Not like anyone's getting hurt, so why even ask ?
Yes. It's the difference between ability and willingness. The argument that no one would notice is based on inability, even as the pipeline provides a willingness.
Since you claimed a different sort of incomptence not implied by the first, yes.
If you have no clue it would probably not make sense, sure.
Allegedly, a risk of hurting people from falling debris was the basis for shooting down the balloon over the east coast, and not over the mid-west.
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