Lets get something straight…..
The righteous resignation over the China ballon caper is POLITICAL…..
Little else….
Well maybe leakage in Foreign Policy?
The ballons have been hanging out over America it turns for some time…..
(Ballons allow their owners to stay in one place to look and listen vs satellites more distance working)
So much so that the Intel people are actually used to it….
This time?
The media got a hold of it…..
China, Russia and other countries have satellites listening and looking down at things…..
I’m sure that if you drove past the embassies around the world you’d see tons of antenna’s sticking up , and they ain’t cell towers….It’s the way th4e game is played…
Upsetting things could leak into political problems that actually hurt intel collect for countries)
Sooooo?
We now have media saturation and lawmakers posturing …..
An American Sec of State trip cancelled and a response from China that seem driven by embarrassment.
But?
WTF is going on in China’s government that the military and leaders seem to doing ‘their own thing’?
With the advent of the first spy satellites, the balloons appeared to become obsolete.
Now they are making a comeback, because while spy satellites can see almost everything, balloons equipped with high-tech sensors hover over a site far longer and can pick up radio, cellular and other transmissions that cannot be detected from space. That is why the Montana sighting of the balloon was critical; in recent years, the National Security Agency and United States Strategic Command, which oversees the American nuclear arsenal, have been remaking communications with nuclear weapons sites. That would be one, but only one, of the natural targets for China’s Ministry of State Security, which oversees many of its national security hacks.
The N.S.A. also targets China, of course. From the revelations of Edward Snowden, the former contractor who revealed many of the agency’s operations a decade ago, the world learned that the United States broke into the networks of Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications firm, and also tracked the movements of Chinese leaders and soldiers responsible for moving Chinese nuclear weapons. That is only a small sliver of American surveillance in China.
Such activities add to China’s argument that everyone does it. Because they are largely hidden — save for the occasional revelation of a big hack — they have rarely become wrapped in national politics. That is changing.
The balloon incident came at a moment when Democrats and Republicans are competing to demonstrate who can be stronger on China. And that showed: The new chairman of the House intelligence committee, Representative Michael R. Turner, an Ohio Republican, echoed the many Republicans who argued the balloon needed to come down sooner.
He called the shoot-down “sort of like tackling the quarterback after the game is over. The satellite had completed its mission. It should never have been allowed to enter the United States, and it never should have been allowed to complete its mission.”….
…
Few experts doubt that had the situation been reversed, China would have used force — it has threatened to do that when it believed outsiders were entering disputed waters, much less established Chinese territory.
“It makes you wonder who was talking to whom in China,” Ms. Zegart said. “This is clearly the greatest unforced error the Chinese have made in some time.”….
Yes they do.
Indeed during saga of the Chinese balloons flight ,there is no doubt that the United States was simultaneously conducting intelligence operations against China.
This whole thing had certain comedic overtones .I mean a “balloon?” That was so Twentieth Centuryish!
Almost Nineteenthish; the Union and Confederate armies used hot-air balloons for reconnaissance.
They were also used in the Franco-Prussian War and the concomitant Siege of Paris of 1870=71.
By World War I (long before Gary Powers’ U-2 was shot down in Soviet airspace), most observation balloons had been supplanted by that high-tech invention, the aeroplane, although Zeppelins were used to bomb and frighten London.