all right. very interesting. and as you were saying, a lot of things go down in myrtle beach, but this is going to be something we talk about for some time, i guess. absolutely. as a high school social studies teacher, shout out to my students. i can t wait to talk to them about it. that will be an exciting class. joey lopes, thanks so much. have a good day. you, too. we continue to follow the latest as the u.s. military, breaking news that we re following at this hour. the u.s. military has shot down that chinese spy balloon that has been crossing the country. up next we ll talk to congressman adam smith. the ranking member of the house armed services committee. later, this balloon is far from the first time china has tried to spy on the united states. we ll talk about some recent examples of its espionage efforts. that s coming up. all it takes is eight minutes to get started. then work with profefessionals to assist your business with its forms and submit the application.
tony blinken is supposed to go over to china for a high stakes, high level meeting with chinese officials china is flying a surveillance balloon over the united states. what kind of message do you think they re trying to send and what kind of message should the united states be sending back to them? perhaps it s the shooting down of this balloon, but this is pretty brazen stuff. yeah. well, look, i don t know what message they re trying to send but the message china s been sending for the last several years is they are a reckless bully in many different areas, not just in the way they treat the u.s. you know, they went after australia launching a trade war against australia when australia dared to suggest that china could be more open and transparent on covid. i was in indonesia last year. they re doing some exploration in the territorial waters. china moved back in and pushed
genuine employ to collect valuable intelligence. as we know and the pentagon could have said could have already collected by other means. that s what i was going to ask you about. the what do we think this balloon was doing? what kind of images do you think it was collecting? and how common is this? well, it might not have actually been images. there are other things that can be collected from the sky, one being electronic intelligence. so basically you re collecting the electronic emissions, they re called, that come off all sorts of things, radar, aircraft, military installations and that can provide a lot of information when you analyze it about the characteristics of those military assets. so to me that s actually potentially a more plausible explanation of what the balloon was doing because, as we know, you know, taking pictures from the sky is already pretty, you
if anything, it was more likely dispatched for the purpose of being seen. i mean, the entire country watched this, it seemed, for days now and we were just talking to an eye witness a few moments ago who was saying they re on myrtle beach. there they were all in the parking lot watching this go down. what did you mean by that? well, it s hard to believe that when chinese officials launched the balloon they thought it would go unseen. they knew there would be a very high probability that it would be detected. what we also know about balloons, in addition to all the other facts that have been revealed, is that they re really frightening. they have this ghost-like entity that floats through the sky. in that sense they re very effective for capturing the public s imagination, which is exactly what s happened. so in that sense it feels like more of a provocation than a
saw building up to it. as well as the ground stop on airports along the post there. working in coordination with the faa and be other agencies to make this happen. the culmination of the chinese balloon that was a spy balloon that tracked across the country until it was shot down. worth noting according to a senior defense official, they effectively mitigated the ability of the balloon to gather intel. crucially, that same official said the u.s. was able to do the reverse, to gather intel about the balloon itself, the technologies it has, surveillance capabilities, what intel it can pick up as it made its way across the u.s. the u.s. was gathering intel on the balloon itself. they couldn t go into all that much more detail. oren, one of the big questions at this hour is can they scoop it up out of the water and learn more about this balloon by retrieving it? what more do we know about the recovery efforts that are