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U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

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Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#791

Post by hackerlight »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #652
hackerlight wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably agree. Allowing the rival to surveil you to an extent is not a bad thing. You want to reduce informational asymmetries because rival leadership often fills in the fog of war with assumptions of malevolence which then leads to escalation risk. It's a tale as old as time in the history of geopolitics and cold war rivalries. The fact they shot down the balloon after it left airspace rather than just as it ent…

Shooting a balloon down over land risks having it come down on someone. Though there really isn’t a lot in Kansas/Nebraska/South Dakota, they would probably not have gotten unlucky, but if they did the Republicans would have pounced also.

Why couldn't they shoot it down before it flew over land but after if flew into airspace? What is the national security benefit of waiting for it to fly over the country first?

My guess is they hoped it would pass over mostly unnoticed but then they saw people picking up on it and decided they had to get in front of the news story so as to not look incompetent. Then once the news story picked up steam their hand was forced by the jingoistic media circus and domestic political reality to take action.

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#792

Post by jhugo »

tomp wrote: post #756
nnx wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asymmetric encryption. The private key does not have to be stored in the balloon at all (only the public key that can encrypt but NOT decrypt), it can stay safely in a PLA datacenter in China.

Does anyone actually use asymmetric encryption to encrypt data? I thought asymmetric encryption was just used to encrypt the symmetric key used to encrypt the data…

This is basically an optimisation — asymmetric encryption is more resource-intensive. But for relatively short, fire-and-forget type messages (e.g. GPG-encrypted email), encrypting directly with the public key is fairly common.

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#794

Post by WalterBright »

cesis wrote: post #773
WalterBright wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they could have been 'sails' to help steer it Sails are useless in a balloon. The only way to steer a balloon without a propeller is to raise and lower its altitude seeking a wind blowing in the right direction.

Why not? Add a fin to a baloon and you can steer it. And once the baloon can hold direction in the wind with the help of the fin, you can add sail to actually get some propulsion in direction other than wind.

The balloon moves with the wind. You cannot steer it because from the point of view of the balloon it is not moving.

There is no keel on a balloon. Without a keel, one is only going downwind.

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#795

Post by boredhedgehog »

cdot2 wrote: post #91
xracy wrote: post #86

This seems like a worse idea than just collecting the thing and putting it in a faraday cage.

How do you go about collect it from 65,000 feet?

With another balloon? You'd just want to cut off and grab the payload, right?

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#796

Post by boomboomsubban »

jasmer wrote: post #332
unity1001 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know, that time we rushed headlong into two useless forever wars Don't say it like that. Say it like as it is: "... rushed headlong into murdering 1 million people to rob their oil". Because that's what it was. And until people start calling it as it is, this kind of thing will keep repeating. ... And yeah, recently the US Congress arranged $500 million to anti-China propaganda, so you will see a LOT more of su…

The US didn't get any of the Iraqi Oil. Ironically, it was Europe and China who benefitted in that regard. Also notably, the US 5th fleet defends freedom of navigation in the Gulf, which is mostly about Oil, and China is the #1 recipient of Oil! Funny, that.

Exxon got the most profitable oil deal in Iraq, with BP getting the second. And though China does get the most oil, it's also far closer to Iraq and presumably got even more oil from them before the war. I believe India also receives more oil from Iraq than the US, despite seemingly not having any oil companies there.

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#797

Post by geysersam »

ttul wrote: post #478
remarkEon wrote: post #466

Sidestepping the geopolitical issues with this for a moment ... What advantage is there to using a high altitude balloon for surveillance? I have to imagine there are some - like longer loiter time over a specific point, maybe better optics because you are still in atmosphere, it's obviously cheaper than launching a satellite - but I don't really know enough about this kind of hardware to say. Or maybe the point wasn…

One of the most technically challenging things about reconnaissance satellites is dealing with the high speed at which the satellite moves over the target. A balloon flies much lower and vastly more slowly. It can loiter over an area, sucking in electronic signals and taking photographs with extremely high fidelity. I don’t think the Chinese meant for this balloon to cross the United States. I believe they were testi…

But according to some comment in this thread, it has happened several times before.

If true, that's unlikely to be a mistake.

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#798

Post by mlindner »

njharman wrote: post #775
za3faran wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what the CCP is thinking. Are they simply trying to instigate a response with such a brazen display?

Its not like USA have never violated other nations air space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aerial_reconnais... but I guess we quit doing it to China https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/29/archives/us-spy-flights-o...

Indeed, this kind of thing used to happen half a century ago before the invention of spy satellites and before Gary Powers got shot down over the Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident

Even the types of arguments made for this kind of thing are the same.

> Initially, American authorities acknowledged the incident as the loss of a civilian weather research aircraft operated by NASA, but were forced to admit the mission's true purpose a few days later after the Soviet government produced the captured pilot and parts of the U-2's surveillance equipment, including photographs of Soviet military bases.

Claiming "weather research" is basically one of the oldest lies on the books you can make which kind of concretes the fact that it wasn't for weather research.

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#799

Post by random314 »

SantalBlush wrote: post #387
rayiner wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the idea that america props up dictators or topples regimes because “it wants their oil” is a bedtime story for jaded American teenagers who don’t know any better. If that was true American foreign policy would look a lot different (and wouldn’t be such a money sink). Where’s all that Iraqi oil money again? U.S. foreign policy is aimed at maintaining stability and facilitating liberal capitalist democracy. We don…

>And the idea that america props up dictators or topples regimes because “it wants their oil” It would be more productive if you addressed my comment, and not some comment you just made up. As for this: >U.S. foreign policy is aimed at maintaining stability and facilitating liberal capitalist democracy I believe that you believe this. But I'm not treating it as an axiom, so you'll have to give evidence for it.

Stability is a euphemism for a government supporting economic arrangements favoring western corporations.

https://chomsky.info/fateful02/

"Liberal capitalist democracy" - this is obvious nonsense when you list out all of the regime changes forced on the countries by the United States.

Re: U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

#800

Post by moomoo11 »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #742
moomoo11 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really believe the USAF and rest of the military and 3 letter agencies had not already intercepted/jammed/hacked the comms link? By letting it saunter all the way across they also probably got a lot of good info on its capabilities.

I think you're being overly generous in attributing competency/capability. Just thinking about the physics of it, robustly jamming an unknown signal of a transmitter 60KM high seems like a rather impossible task. If the air force were somehow broadcasting several megawatts of broad spectrum noise over a populated area, somebody would have noticed. The authorities in charge have no real idea what's going on or what th…

I mean TikTok / bytedance is just some irresponsible private organization.

That is controlled by the CCP.

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