According to a source familiar with the situation, the Chinese spy balloon that transited the US early this year was able to capture photos and gather signals intelligence from American military locations.
According to the source, the balloon was able to relay data back to Beijing in real time, and the US administration is still unsure whether the Chinese government was able to delete the data as it was received. This begs the question of whether the balloon was able to gather intelligence that the US is currently unaware of.
But, the intelligence community has not been very concerned about the information gathered by the balloon, according to the individual, because it is not much more sophisticated than what Chinese satellites can capture as they orbit over similar places.
The US also knew the balloon’s path and was able to safeguard important facilities and block some communications before the balloon could pick them up, according to authorities.
According to AWN, the US intelligence community last year established a technique of detecting what it claims is a fleet of Chinese military-controlled balloons moving throughout the world.
The FBI is still investigating the balloon, but agents have learned more about how it functioned thus far, including the algorithms used for the balloon’s software and how it is powered and created.
AWN has reached out to the White House’s National Security Council and the Pentagon for comment. NBC was the first to report on the new information.
The balloon first entered US airspace over Alaska in late January, then passed through Canada and down into Montana, where it hovered for several days, prompting the US to suspect it was spying on important military facilities such as Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. It was eventually shot down by the US off the East Coast on February 4, further escalating tensions between Washington and Beijing, including the postponing of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s official visit to China.
According to a senior State Department official, the balloon “was capable of conducting signals intelligence gathering activities” as it soared across the United States in February.
The US Northern Command and NORAD commander, Gen. Glen VanHerck, stated at the time that the US “did not judge” that the balloon “posed a significant collecting threat beyond what currently exists in actionable technical methods from the Chinese.”
According to officials, the surveillance operation, which involves a number of similar balloons, is run in part from the small Chinese province of Hainan. The US does not know the exact size of the Chinese surveillance balloon fleet, but sources told AWN that in recent years, the programme has flown at least two dozen trips across at least five continents.
According to one individual familiar with the intelligence, almost half of those aircraft were within American airspace but not necessarily over US territory.
According to AWN, China has claimed that the balloon was simply a weather balloon that was thrown off course, and the US has been assessing the probability that it was not purposely steered into the continental US by the Chinese government.
Officials believe China did retain some power to manipulate the balloon. After the balloon was over Montana, China appeared to use its position to hover over key places and gather intelligence.