New Balloon a Load of Hot Air, or is There More to the Story?

Yet another balloon entered U.S. airspace last week. Apparently it has now left U.S. airspace and everyone can breathe a sigh of relief that the embarrassing spectacle of a Billion dollar fighter and a hundred thousand dollar missile being sent to dispatch a spy balloon costing thousands of dollars to build are not repeated.

Notice I didn't say thousands to operate. Such a spy balloon, if it was relaying data back to China in real-time that would require satellite communications: something that costs as much as the F-22 fighter to achieve.

Anyhoo, the new balloon has drifted off I assume over Canada so it's now someone else's problem. Someone with less capability in high-altitude interception: Sorry, no capability in high altitude interception or interdiction.

Strangely, the U.S. government are downplaying this latest balloon incursion into U.S. airspace. Why exactly would they do that, given the balloon that was shot down previously was confirmed to be a data-gathering device. i.e. a spy balloon. The only thing the U.S. could verify was if it had the ability to relay that data back to Beijing in real time. 

Which, given the strength and number of Chinese space assets is probably a foregone conclusion. I assume that the U.S. authorities know it was transmitting real time data, it's just that they couldn't verify the satellite network the Chinese were using to intercept the signals and transmit them back to Beijing.

Even if the new balloon didn't fly over the U.S. it still could gather intelligence on radar signals used to pick up the balloon, the readiness of assets used to identify the balloon and the type of assets used, etc. Intelligence gathering doesn't have to be blatant and obvious. 

I think I've said previously that the Huwawei affair is tied up with the spy balloons being launched by China. It sort of confirms that the Chinese did have software within Chinese-made routers that were syphoning off data to China. The raid on the Solar Observatory near White Sands Missile Range also reinforces the issue of Chinese espionage.

Now it's come to light the Chinese are buying up Farmland close to strategic military assets such as testing grounds for new tech. Also airbases operating the latest tech like the B-2 stealth bomber.

It wouldn't be an issue if the Chinese were buying land all over the U.S. but they are not. The majority of the land is clustered close to U.S. military assets. 

Again, what the Chinese are doing with that land has not yet been verified. They may just be being good landlords for American farmers. They could be installing intelligence-gathering assets. Currently there is no confirmation by U.S. intelligence regarding this issue. 

It seems that without the spy routers, the Chinese are finding other ways to try and spy in the signals around the U.S. in order to gather intelligence. And don't think that land that is not close to military bases has not intelligence value. There may be communications between bases that has value if intercepted.

It sort of reminds me of the U.K. intelligence services tapping into telephone conversations between England and Northern Ireland during the "troubles".

M.I.5 built a tower at Capenhurst when they found out the government nuclear facility there was in between two microwave towers that transmitted all the telephone conversations between England and Northern Ireland. Unwilling to arouse suspicion by applying for a formal tap of the telephone calls, they built a tower at capenhurst that intercepted the microwave beams and listened in to the conversations.  No need for a formal request to tap individual channels, they had the whole lot. Thousands of telephone conversations could be listened into by that tower.

The tower could be explained as something to to with the Nuclear facility. It was a secret for years.

It has long since been decommissioned and demolished, but it shows you have to be aware of signal security and also the attempts by bad actors to intercept those signals. Signals intelligence should work both ways.

It would be interesting if the grain silos on these Chinese Farms all started to look the same and come from the same supplier in China...

Up, Up and Away in My Chinese Spy Balloon... And Crashing Down to Earth Way to Late.

 Ah, the saga of the spy balloon, that China say isn't a spy balloon, but most definitely is a spy balloon.

Apparently, the balloon is not a configuration that is a weather balloon. It has solar panels, which means it's designed to be in flight a lot longer than a weather balloon. It also has motors and propellers fitted, which means it has some station-keeping and manoeuvring capability, not a capability required by your average weather balloon. The give-away was China calling it a "Civilian Airship" 

The fact that another balloon is also over South America means that the releases were pretty deliberate.

The US said they had taken steps to mitigate any surveillance the Chinese could do. I take it that amounts to spreading out big white sheets over the snow-covered Montana silo sites. 

The real question is why are the Chinese using balloons, a relatively old and primitive technology to do surveillance? The answer may be in their past military space projects. They've already successfully trialled satellite-killing capability. If they went to war with America by Invading Taiwan, the Chinese would immediately deny space to the Americans (and the rest of the world) by killing a few Satellites and enveloping the Earth with debris. If it ever came to China invading Taiwan, if I were a Russian Cosmonaut on the ISS I'd be very worried as I don't really have a lifeboat at the moment.

A cascade of failures would occur and global surveillance from space would be stopped in it's tracks. 

Ah, you say... wouldn't satellites be needed to receive the signals from the balloon and send them back to China? Not necessarily: China could have a setup that used secure comms over the cellular network. Unless you're going to switch off the cellular network across North America including Canada, China could just do that. But then the U.S. could shoot the thing down immediately, rather than let it fly over some of the most sensitive sites in the country.

At which point, using the prevailing winds and balloons would give China an advantage. America would be using high altitude drones for their surveillance. The cost of losing and replacing a drone is a lot higher than a balloon with some scaffolding, solar panels and some clever tech attached.

Even killing the balloon isn't cheap. The US this weekend used an F-22 Raptor and an AIM-9X missile to shoot the balloon down. The AIM-9X on it's own accounted for close to half a million dollar's worth of exploding technology used to down something that probably cost a fraction of that.

You can begin to see why a balloon might not be technology of the past. 

Anyway, hopefully the U.S. fish the bits of Chinese kit out of the waters off Carolina and confirm what tech was actually fitted to the spy/not spy/spy balloon.

It's a shame they didn't go all James Bond-sy and have a group of jumpers ready to jump out of a high altitude aircraft and rendezvous with the falling lump of metal, attach a parachute to it and then pull the cord so it drifted down rather than slammed into the sea. 

Maybe next time. And no, I won't be doing it, I'm way too old for that shit.