The Chinese “spy” balloon, shot down in the sky of the United States on February 4, 2023, would have succeeded in collecting sensitive information on several American military sites. This was affirmed on Monday by three senior American officials in CNN And NBC News. The device would also have succeeded in transmitting this data in real time to Beijing.
According to these three officials, the famous balloon was controlled directly from China, which would have allowed it to make several passes over military bases. The information captured would partly come from electrical signals. It would therefore be communications from site staff and not images, according to the three experts relayed by the HuffPost.
About forty countries spied on?
These captures would have been made to the detriment of the Biden administration. Senior officials say, however, that without the intervention of the US government, which sought to prevent the balloon from picking up signals from military sites by temporarily banning them from transmitting, the information stolen could have been much greater.
Is this collection of information worrying? Not really, according to the US Department of Defense, which told NBC News that the Chinese balloon has only “limited added value” compared to the means available to China, such as its “low Earth orbit satellites”. . According to him, this balloon was part of a fleet sent by Beijing to spy on around forty countries.
As a reminder, this balloon had a self-destruct mechanism, which did not trigger. The Chinese government, for its part, assured that the machine was only a “civilian device used for research purposes, mainly meteorological”. Beijing denies any surveillance and accuses Washington of having sent balloons into Chinese airspace, which the Americans in turn deny.