Ballooning Balloons!

Balloon spying is emerging as a watershed movement between the US and China. Its immediate political fallout was the canceled visit of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing.

 Many countries have utilized balloons earlier in spying over other countries. A spying balloon is effective as it acts as a link between the land below and a satellite above.

Surprisingly, the Chinese balloon, which was shot down by the US, was not spotted by the US forces but by civilians. It was big in size, nearly three school buses.

It was a brazen act considering its size and chances of getting caught. Also, it didn’t take long for them to admit its ownership. Cbsneews.com reported that though Beijing insists that it was just a meteorological research balloon, US officials said that the balloon had equipment that was “clearly for intelligence surveillance”, including “multiple antennas”, that were likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications.

The Chinese trick surely succeeded in confusing many political pundit and defense analysts. The act is too obvious. And, of course, the Chinese must have pondered over its consequences before acting.

The Chinese way of testing the competitor is of creating many diversions hiding real aim and carrying out seemingly inconsequential operations to test the opponent. The response from the opponent must have been studied carefully on multiple levels there before moving decisively.

How the entire nation responds to the incident, if all political parties are unanimously protesting it and is the government is quick enough to act diplomatically and strategically, what is the international response from friendly and other nations; how they are preparing to tackle, with what kind of weapons and what they do with the seized remnants. How bold and courageous is the leadership in handling the incursion, and what would be the next level are some of the many aspects that would be analyzed.

And, most importantly, whether its aim is succeeding before the act is banned or become too risky to conduct further.

The Chinese have also accused the US of flying balloons over its territory. There might be truth in that. In the past, there were many incidents of US spying. Recently, the balloons, if remembered correctly, were utilized by Google some years back to facilitate internet access to inaccessible areas. And, of course, commercial companies’, scientific institutes’ balloons and promotional balloons are always there.

The Chinese balloon incident needed to scrutinize more comprehensively.

 The Chinese are carefully testing the waters. Perhaps the data they are trying to collect or as some US experts are accusing eavesdropping on the communications between the defense establishments is already obtained.

But as pointed out by many experts in the past, the Chinese already have data of the US population. Then what were the other objectives for the balloon program? The Chinese have data of many countries with them. Hardly any part of the earth has escaped Chinese surveillance. Even the recent Munich conference also couldn’t escape its impact as many have raised security concerns over Germany’s use of Huwei 5G technology.

An article in Financial Express, dated Dec. 6, 2022, informs that it is often reported that the Chinese mobile phones that are freely available in India pose a threat to national security. The article is contributed by Lt. Gen P R Shankar ( R )  says that it is an established fact that China uses civil military fusion to develop intelligence. AI algorithms are designed to process large amounts of data and learn from that in order to make predictions, recommendations, or decisions.

In the year 2020, thewire.in, in a post dated Sep. 14, 2020 says that Zhenhua Data Information Technology Co Limited reportedly scrapes digital data from various public sources to carry out “person information and relationship mining”. As reported by Buzzfeed. News under ‘TECH’ heading “Leaked Audio from 80 internal TikTok meetings”, shows that US user data has been repeatedly accessed from China”.

 In a cynical way, many parts of the world were weary of increasing American style of living and weary of its increasing impact on youth. Now, the US has parents  lamenting over teenagers, spending hours and hours over ‘TicToc’, and worrying that they are oblivious to practical reality and real-world problems.

Frankly, the world is not much aware of the astonishing technological strides China has made in the information technology. The internet world is a closely guarded world in China.

There is excessive internet censorship and harsh governmental regulations in China. According to nordvpn.com, the whole set of laws and actions form the Great Firewall of China – one of the most excessive mechanisms ever created for censoring the World Wide Web.

The Great Firewall is a part of the Golden Shield Project, which covers various areas of China’s national network security. The purpose of the Great Firewall is to control the internet within China; leaving access only to content that complies with strict governmental policies.

This is achieved by blocking specific websites, keyword filtering, and monitoring the activity of internet users. It is all made possible by a sophisticated surveillance system.

The majority of Western websites and search engines are banned in China. According to nbcnews.com, the Chinese tech giant Baidu is joining the global race to develop artificial intelligence chatbots like chatGPT.

The chatbot, called “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese and “ERNIE” Bot in English, is being tested internally and set to be publicly released in March. ERNIE stands for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration.

The balloon alarm was so shrill that countries like the UK, France, and Germany immediately declared their readiness to tackle the balloon incursion in their space. The Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau says there is a pattern over the findings of these unidentified flying objects after the Chinese acknowledged the first one belongs to them.

On Friday, 4, 2023, the US military downed a Chinese balloon off the Carolina Coast. It must have traversed over the military establishments in North America.

On Friday 10, 2023, US shot down another flying car sized object near Deadhorse, Alaska

On Saturday, 11, 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered to shoot down unidentified objects flying over Yukon – The Northern Canadian territory. The Canadian defense minister Anita Anand described its shape as an octagonal and smaller than the Chinese balloon, which was shot down. This balloon was as big as two school buses.

Another balloon was spotted hovering over Latin America.

THE│DIPLOMAT in its article written by Guest Author Joseph Bouchard says there are double standards seen in Colombia while dealing with balloon entered into their space. There was a muted response from the government of Colombia. On February 3, a large unidentified balloon floated at an altitude of 55000 ft. was detected in Colombia’s airspace through Colombia’s National Air Defense System. The Colombian defense establishment insisted that the balloon represented ‘no threat to the sovereignty of the country, or to the air security of the region’. The balloon was spotted near the cities of Valledupar and Cartagena, heading further toward the Southeast into Brazil.

In Bogota, President Gustavo Petro has not yet made any statement on the matter and he will soon travel to China to obtain financing for the Bogota metro, which is being built by APCA Transmimetro, a Chinese consortium. Dr. Evan Ellis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington observes that even under recent conservative and centrist governments, Colombia and China have gotten much closer in both the economic and security realms. He noted that bilateral trade between China and Colombia grew by 35 times from 2001 until 2014

 The material seized from the shot down balloon off the coast of South Carolina is sent to the FBI’s lab in Virginia for testing while the joint effort of Canada and US to collect the debris of other three UFOs shot down failed to retrieve any material in the icy Sea and has to be called off. US President Biden has said these balloons or balloon like objects most likely belonged to private companies or research institutions.

The US President said, “We seek competition, not conflict with China. We’re not lining for a new cold war. I hope we’re going to get to the bottom of this. But I make no apologies for taking down that balloon”.

The US President also said that his administration is developing new parameters to guide how to respond to unidentified aerial objects to improve measures to detect them. He also said that there is no evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky. Instead, he said US authorities have been more attuned to detecting them after radar changes instituted after the Chinese balloon was spotted. About the three aerial objects, he said that they were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather, or conducting other scientific research. He also mapped out four measures to detect, monitor, and establish rules and regulations around unmanned objects.

The issue was again picked up by US representatives at the Munich Security Conference, where Chinese delegates were also present.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met his Chinese counterpart PRC State Councilor and Director of the CCP Central Foreign Affairs Office Wang Yi on the sidelines of Munich Security Conference to remind the unacceptable violation of American sovereignty and warned that Beijing’s material support to Moscow over Ukrainian war would attract sanctions. The US is using the Balloon incident to deter China from supporting Russia. The US state Department Spokesperson Ned Price reiterated that the US Secretary made China aware of the unacceptable violation of US territorial space, and such an irresponsible act must never reoccur.

He said that the Chinese balloon act not only made incursion in the US Space but has also intruded into the airspace of more than 40 countries. He also repeated President Biden’s statement of the US not looking for a new cold war.

China insisted that the Balloon had deviated off the course and not a military surveillance balloon but a civilian non-military instrument. Wang yi, Director, Central Foreign Affairs said the US is overreacting and its reaction is absurd and hysterical. He also said that the shooting down the balloon was an act used to divert attention from the domestic affairs and reveals the weaker side of the US.

He also said that there are many balloons in the sky. “Do you want to down each and every one of them?”

These controversies, spying episodes, and WW3 threat were almost unimaginable a year back. Our survival was at stake. All of us were thinking nothing but somehow saving our lives. But we hardly wasted any time thereafter. Once out of the threatening shadows of death, we savagely tore into fellow human beings in our own country, another country, another continent.

With African and Latin American countries fast becoming new dumping and experimental lands, the arm race is renewed with a frenzy never seen before. This was accompanied by a changing world order, increasing economic woes due to negligence in welfare, despotic regimes, religious intolerance, widening rift between have and have not, chaotic cities, rising pollution, drastic and frightening climatic changes, new colonist, autocratic avatars in democratic or quasi socialist communist garb, failed capitalism and communism and their intermittent hybrid forms nothing is really changed No?

All is as it was a hundred years back. We progressed where? Perhaps in GDP, per person capita, collective wealth, individual countries reserves (but is it evenly distributed?), scientific development, and materialistic bliss. But have we really evolved?

In the last say 500 plus years, the world has seen the colonial expansion and exploitation from West and middle Asiatic empires, European powers, the US, Japan and Russia and many others; now, names of new aspirants like China, India are in the race. China, with its not long ago guarded systems and economy, made astonishing developments on all fronts. The world welcomed it and perhaps expected China to give a new light to the suffering world.

But China mixed controlled capitalism with principled communism and followed the age-old ways of following the past superpowers in establishing her own stardom in the same imperial ways. India lags far behind and impresses its weight pumped up by the US and other nations; preparing India to stand up to China. Old games, new rules with changed players, perhaps!!!

The balloon saga will stay afloat until involved players suck out its air as per their convenience. Until then, these are ballooned balloons and nothing else.