As top US lawmakers remain persistent in urging Joe Biden's administration to brief Congress on the surveillance station China is supposedly building in Cuba, some American analysts say that Beijing's plan goes far beyond just intelligence gathering, Voice of America (VOA) reported.
It would not be the first time China has attempted to spy on US electronic communications, known as signals intelligence. A suspected Chinese spy balloon that transited the US in February was capable of gathering signals intelligence and is believed to have transmitted back to Beijing in
The United States is still assessing the parts that were recovered from the balloon and precautionary steps were taken in time to limit the intelligence value that it would be able to collect, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said in a press briefing on Monday.
While the balloon on its own did not constitute a clear and present danger to US national security, its trajectory over sensitive American military installations, such as Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, betrays the non-benign nature of the overflight. Indeed, it could even be seen as a
Yet the same lawmakers are not batting an eye at the thought of millions of credit card users' personal financial information being sent to a Chinese government-owned payment processing firm under orders from the US government, reported The Washington Times.
Taking to Twitter, the White House said, "President Biden has directed his national security team to establish a better inventory of unmanned airborne objects in US airspace, implement further measures to improve our capacity to detect these objects, and update rules for launching and mainta
The Pentagon said the balloon over the US is being used for surveillance, rejecting China's claim that the aircraft was a "civilian airship" for research that deviated from its course. Meanwhile, on Friday evening the Pentagon said that a second Chinese spy balloon had been spotted floati
Moments before the decision to scrap the visit - aimed at easing tensions between the two countries - China issued a rare statement of regret and blamed winds for pushing what it called a civilian airship into US airspace.
The modules collect data and then transmit it via 5G networks, giving China the opportunity to monitor the movements of intelligence targets including people, weapons and supplies, and to use the devices for industrial espionage.