An American intelligence assessment found that the balloon used a commercially available U.S. network to communicate, primarily for navigation, U.S. officials say.
This was probably the biggest intelligence coup of this century. Our intelligence agencies have extremely capable hacking capabilities. I’m sure they not only know the provider, they know the exact building down to the individual IP addresses of the PCs that data was transmitted to. If they get that, they will be able to trace all of the other activities that originated from that Chinese agency.
On top of that when the US was done it still shot it down and now has the hardware to analyze.
I was having a hard time imagining which company this could be. Not that I'm a fan of Verizon or Comcast, but I think they know what side their bread is buttered on. Which one wouldn't?
Don't think they were colluding with the provider. They probably just put a burner sim card into a 4g module and sent data over a VPN to China whenever it had signal.
It’s a satellite provider. Cell networks don’t work at that altitude. Starlink was my first guess too but, after some more thought, it could be Hughesnet. They probably have wider coverage.
Actually there is only one. The rest buy their services and say they are nationwide but are regional centric. Long lines weren't really deregulated either.
I'll have a good laugh if it turns out the baloon was not chinese after all, it has just contained some iot device with previously unknown call home function to collect diagnostic data.
Officials familiar with 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.
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 communication sent via the American internet service provider.
"As we had made it clear before, the airship, used for meteorological research, unintentionally drifted into U.S. because of the westerlies and its limited self-steering capability," Liu said in a statement to NBC News.
The previously unreported U.S. effort to monitor the balloon's communications could be one reason Biden administration officials have insisted that they got more intelligence out of the device than it got as it flew over the U.S.
In an exclusive interview with NBC News this month, VanHerck explained that he worked together with the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees U.S. nuclear weapons, to reduce the release of emergency action messages to ensure the Chinese balloon could not collect them.
“Protecting EAM and nuclear command and control communications is of critical importance to the United States,” a senior defense official told NBC News.
The original article contains 821 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Wow really they used infustructure in the United States to communicate with something in The United States instead of putting a super expensive and moving satellite dish on the thing???
Can't wait for the final report in 10 years that confirms it was a weather balloon and some dumbass CO was too excited and wanted to see an AIM-9x get used on a static 10mph moving target.
Pentagon really running out of fun ideas to waste tax dollars.
Could have at least used the 20mm guns included in the F22 instead of $500,000
The Canadians tried with an F-18. They shot the absolute shit out of a balloon with its Vulcan, but because they aren't under pressure like your typical party balloon, it didn't really do much.