Chinese Spy Balloon

[jon-nyc]

[Mik]

I think they handled it ok, if in fact it was jammed. They were probably looking more for our reaction.

[Mik]

Pic of the takedown.

[George K]

[George K]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/05/china-spy-balloon-gop/?location=alert

Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said in an interview that defense officials identified the locations in a discussion with lawmakers and staff on Saturday, disclosing for the first time that similar surveillance balloons had been spotted in U.S. airspace near the continental United States before. The existence of such balloons near Hawaii and Guam has been reported previously.

Two such incidents were reported near Florida, while there was at least one each in the other three locations, Waltz said.

The defense officials said that several of those events occurred during the Trump administration, Waltz said. Officials had also said that during a news briefing with reporters on Saturday.

[George K]

Chinese spy balloons under Trump not discovered until after Biden took office

The transiting of three suspected Chinese spy balloons over the continental US during the Trump administration was only discovered after President Joe Biden took office, a senior administration official told CNN on Sunday.

The official did not say how or when those incidents were discovered.

The official said that the intelligence community is prepared to offer briefings to key Trump administration officials about the Chinese surveillance program, which the Biden administration believes has been deployed in countries across five continents over the last several years.

How does that happen?

"We know it happened, but we didn't know it happened at the time."

[taiwan_girl]

@George-K said in Chinese Spy Balloon:

Chinese spy balloons under Trump not discovered until after Biden took office

The transiting of three suspected Chinese spy balloons over the continental US during the Trump administration was only discovered after President Joe Biden took office, a senior administration official told CNN on Sunday.

The official did not say how or when those incidents were discovered.

The official said that the intelligence community is prepared to offer briefings to key Trump administration officials about the Chinese surveillance program, which the Biden administration believes has been deployed in countries across five continents over the last several years.

How does that happen?

"We know it happened, but we didn't know it happened at the time."

Maybe President Trump was closer to President Xi than we thought. 555

[George K]

[Mik]

Hahahaaahaha

[Jolly]

1. The statement we couldn't detect these things is an outright lie and a stupid one, at that.
2. The Pentagon did not tell Trump about the balloons. They did not tell his staff.
3. Why use an AIM-20 on a balloon? The F-22 has a ceiling of 65,000 feet and has a 20mm gatling gun.
4. Why shoot it down in the Atlantic? We followed this thing from the Aleutians. Lots of open ground in Alaska and Montana.

[jon-nyc]

[Copper]

@Jolly said in Chinese Spy Balloon:

We can detect them
Why not tell Mr. Trump?
Maybe because it is cleaner, there might have been a lower probability of hitting the electronics.
The Chinese told Mr. Biden they wanted spy data right up to the coastline, so he earned his pay. Also, they wanted to retrieve the data via submarine.

[jon-nyc]

@George-K said in Chinese Spy Balloon:

How does that happen?

"We know it happened, but we didn't know it happened at the time."

One could image seeing a balloon, seeing signs in certain radar (or similar) data correlating with its path, then going back and seeing similar patterns in past data, thus concluding that there were previous balloon visits in the past that went unrecognized.

[George K]

Nice to know that we're not alone:

American intelligence agencies have assessed that China’s spy balloon program is part of a global surveillance effort that is designed to collect information on the military capabilities of countries around the world, according to three American officials.

The balloon flights, some officials believe, are part of an effort by China to hone its ability to gather data about American military bases — in which it is most interested — as well as those of other nations in the event of a conflict or rising tensions. U.S. officials said this week that the balloon program has operated out of multiple locations in China.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Brig Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, said that over the past several years Chinese balloons have been spotted operating over Latin America, South America, Southeast Asia, East Asia and Europe.

“This is what we assess as part of a larger Chinese surveillance balloon program,” General Ryder said.
Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, said at another news conference in Washington that the State Department has shared information on the spy balloon program with dozens of countries, both in meetings in Washington and through U.S. embassies abroad.

“We’re doing so because the United States was not the only target of this broader program, which has violated the sovereignty of countries across five continents,” he said.

The balloons have some advantages over the satellites that orbit the earth in regular patterns, U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, say. They fly closer to earth and drift with wind patterns, which are not as predictable to militaries and intelligence agencies as the fixed orbits of satellites, and they can evade radar. They can also hover over areas while satellites are generally in constant motion. Simple cameras on balloons can produce clearer images than those on orbital satellites, and other surveillance equipment can pick up signals that do not reach the altitude of satellites.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported details about the surveillance program, including that it had operated partly out of the main island of Hainan Province off China’s south coast.

China’s military modernization has been driven by the conviction that the People’s Liberation Army had to catch up with advanced rivals like the United States, as well as develop weapons and strategies that could give it a surprise edge. And balloons became a small but active part of that strategy.
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China’s National University of Defense Technology has a team of researchers who study advances in balloons. And as early as 2020, People’s Liberation Army Daily, the main newspaper of the Chinese military, published an article describing how near space “has become a new battleground in modern warfare.” In recent years, the paper has been telling its officer readers in sometimes hyperbolic language to take balloons seriously.

Balloons are “a powerful eye in the sky for covering low-altitude and surface targets,” an article in the newspaper said in 2021. “In the future balloon platforms maybe become, like submarines in the depths of the ocean, a chilling hidden killer.”

The balloons may help fill gaps in China’s network of satellites dedicated to intelligence and surveillance. Balloon collection may include data on atmospheric conditions and also communications that could not be gleaned from outer space, said John K. Culver, a former senior intelligence officer at the Central Intelligence Agency who is now a senior fellow at the Global China Hub of the Atlantic Council.

In the United States, at least five spy balloons have been observed — three during the Trump administration and two during the Biden administration. The spy balloons observed during the Trump administration were initially classified as unidentified aerial phenomena, U.S. officials said. It was not until after 2020 that officials closely examined the balloon incidents under a broader review of aerial phenomena and determined that the incidents were part of the Chinese global balloon surveillance effort.

So, this has been going on for a long time, and we're learning about it now because someone one Montana happened to get a photo of it?

And...no one expressed any concern?

Dafuq?

[89th]

To be fair-ish, the US is doing the same thing, and quite likely far better at it too. Satellites, high altitude flights, drones, maybe even a snoopy balloon or two.

[jon-nyc]

[Mik]

[George K]

@89th said in Chinese Spy Balloon:

high altitude flights

[George K]

US-China hotline goes unanswered

Within hours of an Air Force F-22 downing a giant Chinese balloon that had crossed the United States, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reached out to his Chinese counterpart via a special crisis line, aiming for a quick general-to-general talk that could explain things and ease tensions.

But Austin’s effort Saturday fell flat, when Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe declined to get on the line, the Pentagon says.

China’s Defense Ministry says it refused the call from Austin after the balloon was shot down because the U.S. had “not created the proper atmosphere” for dialogue and exchange. The U.S. action had “seriously violated international norms and set a pernicious precedent,” a ministry spokesperson was quoted as saying in a statement issued late Thursday.

[George K]