The US intelligence community has developed a method to track China’s fleet of surveillance balloons that was only discovered within the last year, six people familiar with the matter tell CNN.
After President Joe Biden took office in 2021, a Chinese spy balloon briefly transited the continental United States, as administration officials have acknowledged. Afterwards, the intelligence community ran some of the balloon’s signals through the US’ intelligence holdings and other data to see where and when they may have popped up in the past.
The findings have allowed the US to develop a consistent technical method for the first time that they have used to track the balloons in near-real time across the globe, the sources said. The existence of this method could further inflame criticism from Republican lawmakers that the administration didn’t act quickly enough to prevent the balloon from entering US airspace last week.
Officials were also able to use the information collected from the earlier balloon alongside other sources to discover that similar surveillance balloons had transited US territory undetected at least three times under the Trump administration. Officials declined to say how the signals were collected, and it is not clear how long it took the intelligence community to develop the new method, which was first used in 2022.
But the new method is important because the balloons are extremely difficult to track without it – they are slow-moving and can fly extremely high, in some cases as high as much as 60 miles up, and can evade the more traditional radars that are oriented toward detecting fast-moving missiles and counterterrorism threats, a lawmaker familiar with the intelligence told CNN.
Officials emphasized that the balloon’s signals were an important key to discovering a tracking method, but not the only piece of the puzzle. One…
Read the full article here
