“It’s a way of testing how the other side reacts, not in a military sense. But politically, what do you do about it? Do you keep it quiet? If there’s really a lot of people and It’s not the first time, so it raises an interesting question. What happened to the last one? Did we shoot them down?” They said.
Mike Rounds, a Republican member of the US Senate’s Armed Services Committee, told Fox News that it would be good to recover the balloon to see “whether it was really designed to collect data or if it was a test of our response capabilities.” Was designed to test.”
Andrew Antonio, co-founder of high-altitude balloon startup Urban Sky, said the air currents high-altitude balloons rely on for steering on long-distance trips were least favorable in winter, suggesting that China’s intentions cannot be to target anyone. specific location in the United States.
“Targeting a certain military base with that balloon from a launch in China in January or February in particular in the Northern Hemisphere is very difficult, if not impossible, to do,” Antonio said. is the result of a failed experiment, or some failure in its self-termination mechanism.
Adding to the questions, a Pentagon statement Friday night said another Chinese balloon had been spotted over Latin America.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said in 2020 that the greatest long-term threat to American information and intellectual property was “the threat of counterintelligence and economic espionage from China.”
China’s alleged clamor for American trade secrets was so widespread that the FBI estimated last October that it was uncovering a new Chinese counter-intelligence operation every 12 hours.
Experts say a more common espionage tactic employed by China in recent decades has been research by graduate students and undergraduates with ties to China to gain access to sensitive material by studying at universities, working at technology companies or hacking into their computer networks. Has been using other people.