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by sdeyerle 1089 days ago
From what I've been able to find, there were never any actual pictures/sonar scans of the debris field released. Does anyone know any particular reason to not be releasing that to the public?
4 comments

1. Generally photos from active investigations aren't released until the investigation is completed. These are active records, and could potentially become part of civil or criminal hearings, so the agencies in charge of them tend to keep them close until they've finished the report.

2. The US Coast Guard is a part of the Department of Homeland Security; the sonar and pictures they take could reveal capabilities they deem important to US national security (ie how good the sonar is, resolution of photos, etc.).

3. It's generally considered poor taste to post disaster photos before the families have had funerals. Naval institutions tend to be more tradition focused than other entities.

What would be the reason _to_ release that to the public?
So the next "adventurers" can learn from the mistakes made, have a think about it and stay on dry land or wear seatbelts if they insist on a recovery of their bodily remains...
Morbid curiosity. Like rubberneckers driving by a crash scene.
Or people risking their safety to see the wreck of Titanic for no particular reason.
Because it would be morbid and inappropriate for tourists to gawk at a shipwreck.
Which was OceanGate's business model.
to the other commenters: there’s a difference between a week old wreck still being investigated and one a hundred years old.

same way there is a difference between photos of dead bodies undergoing forensic investigation, and those undergoing archaeological investigation.

I wonder how much time has to pass before it is socially acceptable to gawk at a shipwreck?

I'm not really joking here, there has to be some sort of threshold and I'm not sure how it can be defined.

The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a protected site due to this very topic of discussion. Diving it can get you in quite a bit of trouble: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/titanic-edmund-fitzgerald-1.68...
That had the added benefit, something which feels very strange to type, of not sinking in international waters. It's significantly easier to restrict access in that case.

It is somewhat surreal that a historically short amount of time must pass before people can visit these areas without it being taboo. Some of them, in my opinion, are extremely important to humanity such as Auschwitz and Choeung Ek, and the latter happened during my lifetime.

Surprisingly little time needs to pass from what I heard.
There's pictures or even footage of sinking migrant ships all over the internet.
Wouldn't "people smuggling ships" be a more apt term, if we are to choosing to make the distinction at all?
There are literally thousands of people on wreck dives as I write this...
because of a false flag conspiracy reason of some sort of course. probably aliens involved.
> probably aliens involved.

Sigh. Shea and Wilson conclusively documented [0] the primacy of Leviathan, a direct continuation of the Ugaritic sea monster Lôtān, one of the servants of the sea god Yammu defeated by Hadad in the Baal Cycle.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy