Report: Chinese Spy Balloon Used U.S. Internet Provider
“Officials familiar with the assessment said it found that the connection allowed the balloon to send burst transmissions, or high-bandwidth collections of data over short periods of time.”
Sources told NBC News that the Chinese spy balloon used a U.S. internet provider to communicate and navigate:
The balloon connected to a U.S.-based company, according to the assessment, to send and receive communications from China, primarily related to its navigation. Officials familiar with the assessment said it found that the connection allowed the balloon to send burst transmissions, or high-bandwidth collections of data over short periods of time.
The Biden administration sought a highly secretive court order from the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect intelligence about it while it was over the U.S., according to multiple current and former U.S. officials. How the court ruled has not been disclosed.
Such a court order would have allowed U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance on the balloon as it flew over the U.S. and as it sent and received messages to and from China, the officials said, including communications sent via the American internet service provider.
Lovely.
We already know that the Biden administration tried to conceal the balloon’s existence from Congress.
The balloon appeared over the northern states in late January and early February over the span of several days.
It took days for the U.S. to finally shoot down the balloon.
Chinese Spy Balloon shot down once it completes its mission. pic.twitter.com/qaNy73uCyO
— Michael P Pregent (@MPPregent) February 4, 2023
Literally allowed the balloon to fly across the country.
But officials insisted they did all they could to protect information:
After the balloon was shot down on Feb. 4, Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, told reporters that the U.S. military and intelligence community had taken exhaustive steps to protect against the balloon’s ability to collect intelligence.
“We took maximum precaution to prevent any intel collection,” VanHerck said at a briefing. “So that we could take maximum protective measures while the balloon transited across the United States.”
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Comments
Presumably this would have been one of the satellite-based providers. HughesNet? Starlink? Viasat?
I bet the Chicomms simply bought the dish and service online.
It is possible that normal cellular data could have also been used.
That balloon was at 50-60,000 ft which is too high for cell service
So you’re saying chy-nese internet is no good? 🙂
Bad or good, it’s not HERE.
Are we sure that China has not built networks here, after all China created a secret police force here.
China’s great at filtering/censoring connectivity.
Improving it, not so much.
No. What they are saying is the Chinese have no military communications satellite above America, a rather startling discovery.
Or, it was cheaper to just use the enemy’s own communications network instead of something pointed up?
Or, it was cleverer to use a public carrier on a frequency Americans use themselves, rather than a jammable Chinese military frequency.
I should add, I’d be very surprised if the balloon used a service other than a consumer satellite service, which still requires signal to be pointed up.
Notice the flight path is a direct line through our northern icbm installations.
The gubmint says they did all they did to protect Information. Do you believe them?
Not even a little.
What exactly could they do? Move all the missiles somewhere else (thus exposing them to surveillance)? Change the wind to keep it from going over installations? Throw netting over the important stuff, hiding it from aerial view (but clearly revealing its position)?
This is just BS. They botched this thing from the word go and are now doing what they do best: Covering their hindquarters.
Trump would have shot it down hours after discovery. No doubt about it. And then he would have raised Chinese tarrifs as a penalty.
Very entertaining watching Trump want a be characters dropping like flies.
Wind drift test, to see how well the next contagion will spread, and where to drop more (red states).
China has an upcoming election here.
“Such a court order would have allowed U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance on the balloon”? Seems rather the other way around. The CCP was conducting surveillance on us. With the connivance of the Biden regime.
CCP probably paid the Biden Crime Syndicate to allow those balloons.
I am unsure why a court order was necessary. In spite of the FISA court apparently having allowed the surveillance of 300,000 Americans with no justification whatsoever other than they were conservatives, making it about as secret as FBI corruption, ie, an open book, a warrant is not needed to spy on a foreign entity. Further, the failure of a warrant would merely mean any evidence of a crime gathered against a legal resident of the USA would be inadmissible in a court of law. Hardly a likely outcome here, although there is the remote possibility that authorities suspected onshore contrivance.
I suspect that all of this chatter about the Biden administration running a counter-op is a complete fabrication to hide their cringing fear of upsetting the Chinese and the sheer incompetence of the DHS.
They just put lipstick on a pig and called it pretty.
Not quite.
The warrant would have been to spy on the American service provider. To attach any sort of surveillance to those “lines” they have to get a FISA warrant – because there will be Americans possibly involved. That was the point of FISA. Of course, it’s been corrupted wholesale. But that’s why they actually need a warrant – assuming it is going through an American service provider.
AOL?
This made me laugh out loud. Then I thought how many years it has been since AOL was a thing, and I felt old(er).
Hey, I have a close friend who is wedded to AOL. I told him it’s the internet with training wheels, but he just shrugs. Some are happy living in a digital cave.
That would explain the whirring noise from the balloon.
Two possibilities:
1) Our highly effective counter-espionage departments blocked or spoofed every transmission from the balloon, gathering info on what targets the Chinese were interested in, and shooting down the balloon at the end of the trip after blocking the self-destruct so the hardware could be analyzed and compared to the blocks of decrypted data captured before it could be transmitted back to China.
2) The balloon was over the US for days before being detected, wandered around with great impunity, spying on US military sites and transmitting encrypted packets that we can’t decrypt, was allowed to continue its mission while higher-ups in the US debated what gender it was assigned, and shot it down over the ocean in a last-ditch effort to regain some sort of credibility, only to wind up with a pile of commercial hardware fried by the self-destruct system, which of course got stored in a basement somewhere since it was useless and burned out.
I know which one I lean towards.
And the one most thinking Americans lean towards, too.
Regarding #1, see my comment below.
Regarding #2, I think the balloon’s payload was likely of little value. The Chinese, knowing that floating this device over the CONUS could easily result in the package being recovered by the US, would not have sent over anything they would consider sensitive or classified. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the instrumentation was built entirely with off-the-shelf parts. (If I were a Chinese technician working on the payload, I would have used as many US-made parts as possible, just to troll.) Commercial electronics are probably more than adequate for such a device’s mission and self-destruct attempts don’t always go as planned.
Did the balloon get free tv and phone for 6 months?
Joe Biden had plausible deniability. He didn’t know what the deuce was going on.
There are many ways to have a downlink and then change next to the internet. Lots of small dishes (DirectTV, Dish, etc) that can be modified to accept a different signal Buy a house with a dish and make the mods and there ya go. Doesn’t anybody read popular mechanics anymore. LOL Apparently the chicoms do.
All it was designed and launched to do was accurately map wind patterns for a more effective path of contagion spread.
China has an election to steal.
Some of this may not be as nefarious as it is being made out to be. Allowing Chinese surveillance, while said surveillance is being surveilled itself, is an opportunity to snoop on an enemy’s technology, to learn his interests, and to study his practices. It’s called “counter intelligence.”
Had the administration been able to keep the affair quiet, China may have thought the US missed an opportunity for acquiring counter intelligence, and might therefor not change its practices in the future, making those practices all the more vulnerable to additional counter intelligence efforts due familiarity with earlier missions.