Difficult to jam what hasn't be observed before. If it used something spread spectrum you would have to have a very powerful noise jammer to saturate the satell

Difficult to jam what hasn't be observed before. If it used something spread spectrum you would have to have a very powerful noise jammer to saturate the satellite receiver, which would have to be precisely located. The short timeline from "we're not going to shoot this down" to "we shot it down" leads me to believe no in depth analysis occurred. But of course previous balloons may have been observed and even interdicted and we wouldn't necessarily know.