Law enforcement.
They are usually the only ones with the resources to engage in such operations. The blitz included infra red aircraft and door to door.
That was sort of my point. I don't find it fair to blame private citizens for not conducting larger-than-life operations. Even that search in Iowa you mention didn't put everybody in a 1000 square km area under constant tracking and surveillance. 110 houses is a far cry from a 1000 sq km area unless they're really big houses. I have never heard of any search operation for any missing person conducted by anyone anywhere that minutely tracked everything and everyone in a 1000 sq km area but I am ready to be enlightened if it actually goes on somewhere.
Most private investigators work outside the law. Their goal is information and they will take risks to get it. Profit is their reward, ie, they get paid well. In the case of the McCann, the legality of listening devices and going through garbage bins would be neither here nor there. They had plenty of money and more than enough access to top class investigators well used to skirting the "law". The idea is to get the child, or get information that leads to the child, at all costs.
Well, I don't know. A lot of people seem to think that doing things legally is either here or there. It might be somewhat difficult for the fund to pay for an illegal operation if they have to keep accounts and report to someone.
I don't know about you, but if a private investigator came knocking on my door asking about the guy next door and waving a $50, I'd tell him whatever he wanted to know.
So would most "innocent people"...in my world, anyway.
Yeah, quite possibly. But most innocent people, if they knew that the guy next door had hidden Madeleine in his closet would already have called LE many moons ago.
Knocking on every door asking about every guy next door within a 1000 square km area would take so much manpower and generate so much irrelevant information that it would take an army of apes with typewriters to even write it all down let alone find what if anything is useful amid all that random gossip.
I live in a world where politicians lie, money can buy most things, doctors are not necessarily saints, and only abusers go out drinking while leaving their babies alone at home.
:dunno:
These things may seem outrageous to you, but they shape my opinion, inevitably.
:cow:
I am not in disagreement about any of that but I did not realize that we live in a world where private citizens are at fault if they fail to conduct such impossibly large scale KGB operations that are beyond the capabilities of most if not all law enforcement agencies.
MOO and all that.
Let's blame the McCanns for leaving their children in a hotel room alone and for killing and disposing of Madeleine if that's what they did but not for not achieving the impossible.
While the Madeleine fund is a sizable chunk of money it's not an infinite supply.
According to Wikipedia it had collected £1,095,000 by 30 October 2007. I don't know about the later figures but the rate of donations has probably dwindled down a lot. A few million pounds at most. I wonder how many nanoseconds of constant surveillance of everyone in a 1000 sq km area it would pay for.
It's quite possible that the Fund could have done more in order to try to search for Madeleine with the resources they had but I think the scale of the operation that you call for would be totally unrealistic.
The average population density in Portugal is 115 per square kilometer. That would make it 115 000 people within 1000 sq kilometers. The Fund had about one million pounds back at the beginning when the surveillance would have been the most effective. 1 million pounds per 115 000 inhabitants means 8,7 pounds per person. I don't think that 8,7 pounds will buy you a whole lot of effective, constant, high-tech surveillance. Infrared cameras don't know which warm dot could be Madeleine, you need lots of analysis and putting data together to figure out which dots belong to which persons that are accounted for and which dots are tourists, visitors and transients that aren't in your list of residents and which dots may possibly represent abducted children hidden in the closet, and it's going to cost a lot. And this is all assuming that Madeleine was still alive and still in the area by the time they had got that one million pounds together which may or may not be true. If private investigators went around handing 50 dollar bills for everyone so that they'd spill the dirt on their neighbors it would be widely talked about, the abductor would have to get wind of the operation and might decide to leave asap.