On Monday, President Joe Biden’s administration shared more information on the ongoing threat of foreign surveillance of the U.S. via aerial objects.
While speaking during a press briefing on Monday, John Kirby, the coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, shared that the issue of China using spy balloons as a means of surveillance is not new to the incident last week.
Kirby said that the balloon program operated during former President Donald Trump’s time in office, but his administration failed to detect it.
“We were able to determine that China has a high-altitude balloon program for intelligence collection that’s connected to the People’s Liberation Army. It was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect it. We detected it. We tracked it. And, we have been carefully studying it to learn as much as we can,” Kirby said.
Kirby explained that the situation involving the spy balloons is much larger than the one shot down last week, as the administration confirmed they have been used to spy on “dozens of countries.”
“We know that these [Chinese] surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners,” Kirby shared.
White House officials shared during the press conference that when President Biden entered office, he “directed the U.S. intelligence community to do a broad assessment of Chinese intelligence capabilities.”
Now, the country is consulting with allies and partners to help identify aerial phenomena, according to Kirby. Going further, Kirby says the president has directed an interagency team to study the broader policy implications for the detection, analysis, and disposition of potential safety and security risks caused by the objects.
“Every element of the government will redouble their efforts to understand and mitigate these events,” Kirby added.
In the last week, the U.S. has engaged three other unidentified objects flying over Alaska, Canada, and, most recently, Lake Huron on Sunday.
However, the Pentagon has not confirmed what the three objects were, and officials shared they aren’t ruling anything out.
“We have been more closely scrutinizing our airspace at these altitudes, including enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase,” Melissa Dalton, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said.
Kirby noted in his press briefing that the operations to take down the objects have been conducted in a “safe and successful manner.”
However, retrieving the objects in Alaska and Canada has been difficult, with remote and wintry terrain throwing a wrench into plans, leaving what the objects were up in the air. As for what was flying over Lake Huron, officials believe it to be somewhere deep in the lake.
When it comes to the detection of future aerial objects, Kirby declined to discuss the steps the U.S. is taking to stop intelligence-seeking operations, noting that it is sensitive information.
“I think for reasons that you will all understand, we can not publicly go into many details about how we discover and counteract foreign intelligence collection efforts,” Kirby said. “Because much of what we have done and are doing is sensitive.”
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