![]() ![]() However, China’s formidable cyber espionage capabilities are no secret. Invisible cyberattacks are less evocative than a visible spy balloon. "Arms Race" by Khahn Tran is licensed under CC BY 4.0 Espionage Tactics-In Plain Sight And, unlike a spy balloon, those challenges don’t vanish after a missile shot from an F-22. But ironically, some of the voices who most loudly argued for shooting down the balloon spend relatively little time worrying about the broader digital espionage challenges emanating from China. This one, famously, did-closing down civilian airspace and throwing a wrench in a painstakingly scheduled diplomatic meeting between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Chinese counterpart. And so they didn’t balloon into an international incident. The difference? American citizens didn’t see those. airspace before: at least three times during the Trump administration. Yet as it turned out, Chinese spy balloons have passed through U.S. This highly-visible balloon captured not only the Pentagon’s attention but the nation’s. Finally, after the balloon reached the ocean on Saturday morning, the Pentagon shot it out of the sky (and is scrambling to pick up the pieces). What’s more, they explained, the intelligence community hoped to collect more information on the balloon itself and its capabilities. Uncontrolled debris from the balloon could harm people or damage property. ![]() The administration, in turn, pushed back: arguing that shooting the balloon down over land was risky. As it coasted toward the Atlantic Ocean, some people took to Twitter and burnished their anti-China bona fides by offering increasingly aggressive-and sometimes, increasingly ridiculous-critiques of the Biden administration. The story of China’s balloon shows us why. Balloon-gate aside, America needs to learn how to distinguish what we can see from what we should be worried about. China’s remarkable capacity to conduct cyber espionage operations and to deploy commercial technologies and spyware against American citizens is a much greater risk. But they overlook a deeper problem: When it comes to Chinese espionage, what Americans can see in the sky is often not as dangerous as what we can’t. ![]() Why was it allowed to float leisurely from Montana through the American heartland and out over the Carolinas, collecting data along its way and beaming it back to Beijing: a wandering breach of sovereign airspace? military shoot the Chinese spy balloon down sooner? Over the past week, as balloon-watching became the national hobby and geopolitical tensions between the United States and China ratcheted ever higher, the same question kept popping up in online debates and in DC happy hours alike: Why didn’t the U.S.
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