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President Joe Biden has directed the US Intelligence community to do a « broad assessment » of China’s intelligence capabilities after assuming office, the White House said following the detection of a spy balloon and high-altitude flying objects over American airspace.
In recent days, there have been three incidences of balloon sightings in the US. A US F-22 fighter jet on Saturday shot down an unidentified cylindrical object over Canada, a day after another similar object was downed near Alaskan waters, and a week after the American military brought down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon off the South Carolina coast.
When President Biden came into office (in 2021), he directed the US Intelligence community to do a broad assessment of Chinese intelligence capabilities and assure — and to ensure that we were working to detect and to protect against them, John Kirby, Coordinator for Strategic Communications at the National Security Council in the White House, told reporters on Monday at a news conference.
I think for reasons that you will all understand, we cannot publicly go into many details about how we discover and counteract foreign intelligence collection efforts, because much of what we have done and are doing is, of course, sensitive. But we were able to determine that China has a high altitude balloon programme for intelligence collection that’s connected to the People’s Liberation Army, he said.
It was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect it. We detected it. We tracked it. We have been carefully studying it to learn as much as we can. We know that these PRC (People’s Republic of China) surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners, Kirby said.
