It seems more than likely that this had little surveillance abilities that a satellite doesn't already have, so little intelligence risk. Maybe we went as far as to plant a false target for it.
Alternatively, if this had weapons on it, dropping it on land seems pretty dangerous compared to off the coast.
Additionally, out of diplomacy, we should communicate with the Chinese that we're about to blow their stuff up, especially when they politely pretend it's civilian. Civilized nations need to play political games before we can blow up "civilian" equipment.
Beyond all this, some other comments here have claimed that these balloons have been going on for a few presidencies now, without any being shot down. So why is it a concern now? I'd be worried about suddenly war-hawking something that hasn't been a problem. There's enough going on in the world without a degrading US-Chinese relationship. This is probably simply the case that it's a non-issue that got too much attention and needed to be addressed publicly.
They didn't shoot our balloons down.
By letting it saunter all the way across they also probably got a lot of good info on its capabilities.
> Is it possible to steer or otherwise control a typical high-altitude balloon? It can be controlled, but let me be careful about what I mean by that. Balloons go with the wind. And so the only control that a balloon has is: in some balloons, you can control the altitude—you can make it go higher or lower. To the extent that the wind speed and direction varies with altitude, you can change the altitude, within some limits. And that can give you some measure of control—but not anywhere near the level of control that you have [with an airplane]. You can’t turn around and go the other direction; you can never go upwind in the balloon. You’re always going to be moving with the atmosphere that surrounds it.
From https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinese-spy-ballo...
So does that really count as piloting?
I thought asymmetric encryption was just used to encrypt the symmetric key used to encrypt the data…
Is GPG not a subject to this limitation?
Direct use of asymmetric encryption is still feasible for short messages where performance is not as much of a concern, though.
As well as improving performance, it makes it possible for each recipient that a message was encrypted to, to be sure that the other recipients received the same message.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/74412/why-is-gp... has a demonstration:
echo 'foo' | gpg --recipient a4ff2279 --recipient d745722b --encrypt | LANG=C pgpdump
Old: Public-Key Encrypted Session Key Packet(tag 1)(524 bytes)
New version(3)
Key ID - 0xCC73B287A4388025
Pub alg - RSA Encrypt or Sign(pub 1)
RSA m^e mod n(4093 bits) - ...
-> m = sym alg(1 byte) + checksum(2 bytes) + PKCS-1 block type 02
Old: Public-Key Encrypted Session Key Packet(tag 1)(268 bytes)
New version(3)
Key ID - 0xDAA855623A5E68F7
Pub alg - RSA Encrypt or Sign(pub 1)
RSA m^e mod n(2046 bits) - ...
-> m = sym alg(1 byte) + checksum(2 bytes) + PKCS-1 block type 02
New: Symmetrically Encrypted and MDC Packet(tag 18)(63 bytes)
Ver 1
Encrypted data [sym alg is specified in pub-key encrypted session key]
(plain text + MDC SHA1(20 bytes))Using the keys to encrypt/decrypt is easy - no more computationally intensive than using RSA keys for sure. If you don't have the key and the scheme is vaguely sensible.... and the keys are generated in a secure way then I really really doubt that they are at all crackable. The encrypt/decrypt scheme is more or less arbitrary (just a sequence of transforms using the message and the key known to each side), the keys are vast random strings.
In civi life the challenge is distribution. Keys are literally carried from place to place in briefcases to enable high speed super secure exchanges of information, but the bag carriers can be paid off and threatened, the folks at each end of the exchange can be paid off and threatened. If the GRU, CIA, Mossad want to have these keys you will really have to spend big to stop them. If you are the Chinese military you have guns and the death penalty to prevent the CIA from getting your keys.
There is a lot of interest in Quantum Key Distribution where it's possible to tell if the "bag" (a sequence of photons) has been "opened" (read) due to quantum effects (you can tell if it's been measured I think - but my physics is shaky here). This has the advantage of being very very fast and cheap per message - but a special infrastructure is required to do the transmission, which is not cheap. I am out of touch with this now but I think that you need a dedicated loop of fiber and special repeaters at 50km intervals. Most problematic is that the compromise vulnerabilities are still there. If the GRU/MI6/Mossad can interfere with with the folks putting the keys onto the system, or reading them off the system then they still have your keys.
If asymmetric encryption is used, it doesn't matter much in this context if the USA gets the keys; they can only use them to encrypt new messages, not to decrypt old messages. This applies whether the keys are used directly to encrypt messages, or if the keys are used to encrypt ephemeral symmetric keys that are themselves used to encrypt messages and then discarded.
Although I think getting the keys and understanding the schemes would be interesting and damaging for China - I think they would (at the least) have to review their approaches to be sure that no useful insight had been leaked.
My guy. It’s the United States military. All the shit we use is a by product of their first move.
If it seems impossible today they’ve already figured it out. Not to mention they made a nuclear bomb and the Manhattan project was an insane achievement.
Crazy to think it's all a front and it's actually stemming from the US Military. Thank you for your service!
It's obviously a web of private R&D, public institutions like NASA, higher education, and yes, the military too.
But acting like scientific innovation and technical progress is all, or even a majority due to the military is boot-licking weirdness.
You have fun with that.
I just don't know how you can look at the heaps of Nobel Prize winners, Turing Award, etc. or groundbreaking papers in almost and field and think "Oh yeah, must be the American Military is behind this."
This is an overstatement.
> A large amount of the technology we find useful was investigated in some capacity by the single most well-funded R&D organization in the world to some extent before we knew about it.
This is more reasonable.
Worth noting the jump you made from G*P's "shit we use" to "Turing awards, Nobel prizes, and Papers" was quite questionable.
That means, there are competent people commenting, but they get drown in other comments.
People forget way too often, that you don't need to have an opinion on everything, or worse, share that opinion everywhere.
The authorities in charge have no real idea what's going on or what the payload is. This whole situation is just weird. Maybe it is just some irresponsible private organization. The Baidu equivalent of Project Loon?
Interesting that you think modern jamming works that way. It doesn't.
That is controlled by the CCP.
The US probably gained more from this than China gained.
Meanwhile the general public and US media got very invigorated about it so helped stock public opinion against China in general which helps prevent more stealing of secrets to China but increasing the cautiousness of the general populace.
One, that region is considered the countries airspace.
Two, we can distroy and keep spy gear.
Both are useful rules to bring up in the future.
The U-2 and SR-71 both stopped flying due to the risk of being downed and not moral consequences. Similarly the US (probably) stopped spying on allies due to the risk of another whistleblower and not moral reasons.
At the same time, similar events have happened to establish that space spy satillites are okay.
Finally, this is easy to forget esp. if you're a US citizen. Most of the world considers this incident a bit of a joke. Official responses are along standard narrative lines.
But no one really cares, the US reacted like this because it didn't know why China would want to use this balloon to spy and so wants to nip this activity in the bud.
Jokes aside, I think the analysis will be more angled to proving or disproving the purpose, and identifying intelligence it gathered through some forensic analysis. If it dips into salty water, all circuit boards are immediately shorted. Seems a bit counter productive to me.
Of course things can still get shorted and damaged at the connectors, but the whole thing wouldn't be destroyed by water.
SpaceX experimented with catching spent fairings above water precisely because they wanted to avoid any contact between seawater and internal electronics of the fairing. At the end of the day, they reinforced the fairings electronics against water intrusion (AFAIK?) and this proved to be more economical than catching the fairings with a net, but Chinese airborne spying devices are unlikely to be as hardened against seawater intrusion as SpaceX fairings.
If I was in charge there would be magnesium strips and bars laced all over it and all that anyone would get from it would be ashes. At a minimum there would be stuff rigged to burn it if it suffered a 10G shock or more - I mean why not? It's junk at that point anyway, why risk it being interesting junk?
They might not even care that much, if they've seen this model of ballooncraft before.
That is a different threat than saltwater and huge pressure (even in relatively shallow waters, the pressure at the bottom will be massively bigger than ambient atmospheric pressure).
If I had to bet, I would expect stratospheric devices to crack like eggs in such conditions, unless they were specially developed to be both stratospheric and underwater.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/biden-weak-response-chinese-su...
USA is being baited into war on multiple fronts.
(googles loon project)
"Neither side will actually do war so it makes sense not to fold"
And neither side wants war with each other, but if either side is pushed more and more into it from internal and external pressure, than I sadly would not rule out that possibility.
> The high-altitude balloon was initially spotted over Billings, Montana, on Wednesday.
> Biden gave authorization on Wednesday to take down the balloon as soon as it could be done “without undue risk to American lives under the balloon’s path,” Lloyd said.
I have no idea what's the real story here but it is obvious we are being bullshitted.
At that point they issued a national security no-fly zone, ground stops at three airports, and issued notices to marine traffic to clear the area.