After the Chinese balloon incident, tensions with the United States escalate

It could be months before US intelligence agencies can compare the daring flight of a Chinese surveillance balloon across the country to other intrusions into US national security systems to determine its classification.

After all, there’s a lot of competition.

About 15 years ago, the theft of the F-35 blueprints took place, which allowed the Chinese Air Force to develop its own similar stealth fighter, with Chinese characteristics. In 2015, the best Chinese team of hackers hijacked the poorly protected computers of the Office of Personnel Management the security clearance files of 22 million Americans. This, combined with stolen Anthem medical records and travel records from Marriott hotels, allegedly helped the Chinese create a detailed blueprint of America’s national security infrastructure.

But for sheer chutzpah, there was something different about the balloon. It became the subject of public fascination when it floated above nuclear silos in Montana, was later spotted near Kansas City, and met its cinematic demise when a Sidewinder missile shot it down over shallow water off the coast of South Carolina No wonder it’s now coveted by military and intelligence officials who are desperate to decode any wreckage the Coast Guard and Navy can salvage.

However, beyond the TV show, This whole incident also speaks to how little Washington and Beijing communicatenearly 22 years after the collision between a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet about 70 miles off the coast of Hainan Island has prompted both sides to pledge to improve crisis management.

“We don’t know what the intelligence performance has been for the Chinese,” said Evan Medeiros, a Georgetown professor who has advised President Barack Obama on China and Asia at the National Security Council. “But there is no doubt that it was a flagrant violation of sovereignty,” something the Chinese are vocally objecting to as the United States flies over and sails past islands China has built from shallows in the South China Sea.

“And that made the China challenge visceral,” Medeiros said, “Looking up while walking your dog, you see a Chinese spy balloon in the sky.”

It turns out it wasn’t the first time. Hours before the giant balloon met its deflated end, the Pentagon said there was another one in the air, over South America. And he pointed to a long history of Chinese balloons flying over the United States (which the Pentagon somehow never wanted to talk about before, until this incident forced it to).

“Instances of this type of ballooning activity have been observed in recent years,” Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Patrick S. Ryder said in a statement released Thursday. A senior official said many of them were in the Pacific, some near Hawaii, where the Indo-Pacific Command is based, along with much of the Pacific Fleet’s naval capabilities and surveillance equipment.

Ryder’s confession raises the question of whether the United States set a red line on balloon surveillance years ago, essentially encouraging China to be bolder. “The fact that they’ve already entered airspace is not comforting,” said Amy B. Zegart, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of “Spies, Lies and Algorithms,” a study of ubiquitous new surveillance technologies. “We should have had a strategy sooner,” she said, and “we should have drawn our limits much sooner.”

Of course, there’s nothing new about superpowers spying on each other, even from balloons. President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized surveillance of the Soviet Union through the use of balloon cameras in the mid-1950s, flying over “Soviet bloc countries under the guise of conducting meteorological research,” according to an article published by the National Archives in 2009. The author, David Haight, archivist at the Eisenhower Library, reported that ” this resulted in more protests from the Kremlin than useful information.”

The balloon incident occurred at a time when Democrats and Republicans compete to prove who can be stronger against China. And it shows: The new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Michael R. Turner, R-Ohio, echoed the many Republicans who argued that the balloon should have been shot down sooner.

He called the tackle “kind of like tackling the quarterback after the game is over.” The satellite had completed its mission. He should never have been admitted to the United States and he should never have been allowed to complete his mission.”

It is still unclear what that “mission” was, or whether the risk of letting it go ahead was actually greater than the risk of dropping the balloon to the ground, as Turner seemed to imply. It’s just a small part of the increasingly aggressive maneuvers of “espionage against espionage”. of competing superpowers. This has only intensified as the takeover of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, artificial intelligence tools, 5G telecommunications, quantum computing, and life sciences have become the source of new arms races. And both sides play.

Yet it was the obviousness of the balloon that had many in Washington wondering whether the intelligence community and Beijing’s civilian leadership were talking to each other.

“Whatever the value of what the Chinese may have gotten,” said General Michael Rogers, former director of the National Security Agency during the Obama and Trump administrations, “what was different here was the visibility. it has a different feel when it comes to physical intrusion into the country.” And once that was discovered, China “handled it badly,” he said.

The balloon flew over the continental United States just days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken paid the first visit by a senior US diplomat to Beijing in many years. Chinese authorities claimed it was a weather balloon that entered US airspace by mistake.

Blinken canceled his tripa public slap in the face that many US officials believe President Xi Jinping cannot rejoice at, at a time when the Chinese leader appears to be trying to stabilize rapidly declining relations with Washington.

This was not a life-threatening crisis. But the fact that Chinese officials, realizing the balloon had been sighted, did not call to find a way to repair it was telling.

When the balloon was shot down, China issued a statement saying “for the United States to insist on using the military is clearly an overreaction.”

Few experts doubt that if the situation were reversed, China allegedly resorted to force: Threatened to do so when believed to be outsiders were entering disputed waters, not to mention established Chinese territory.

“It makes you wonder who was talking to who in China,” Zegart said. “This is clearly the biggest unforced mistake the Chinese have made in a long time.”

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