we talked how interesting the timing was with what was going on with the corn mill here and that coming to an end. and now the balloon, which is only adding to already-tense relations between the u.s. and china. just, again, speaks volumes to the situation with respect to china. they are our greatest geopolitical threat. they are a threat economically and militarily, and we need to take it serious. we want to get some perspective now from intelligence analyst, john miller. a balloon is not the most high-tech thing. where does this balloon rank in terms of the range of ways that china is spying on the u.s.? not that high. both literally and if anfigurat. it s a collection platform. the chinese spokesman called it
but the main indicator is its ability to steer itself and to loiter. generally a weather balloon will ride the jet stream only and go according to that court. it doesn t have the ability to loiter. and then of course given the sensitivities that we ve heard around the potential visit by secretary blinken to beijing, it is very unlikely in my mind that the u.s. defense officials would have come out and said with high confidence that it is an intelligence collection platform unless they were sure. and presumably how they became sure of that is the balloon perhaps transmitted signals back to china which would then confirm its nefarious attempt. what kind of intel do you think it is collecting? well, china has a low orbit satellite constellation which they with use to collect over the united states every day. so it is not like they have not been doing this for a considerable period of time.
to put it on the schedule. they aren t saying that very clearly right now. that s all while this is still moving over the united states, this balloon headed east. reporters asked the pentagon if they would shoot it down if it was over a body of water or if they would shoot it down if it was headed towards the capitol in washington, d.c. they didn t answer that question. the president at this point has decided not to shoot this down because they re worried about what could happen on the ground, civilians being hurt or infrastructure being hurt. john, the decision not to bring it down when it was over sparsely populated area, what do you make of it? when you re at 66,000 feet and you shoot something down, you don t know where it s going to land. it s height is the thing that makes it good as a collection platform. that that altitude you can see over so many miles. it s collecting it on video as it moves.
these situations or about the american taxpayers which he seems to have no regard for. if it is a satellite image or some sort of technical collection platform, that may cost hundreds of millions, billion dollars that could be lost in an instant with some of the documents that could have been viewed. so it is broad recklessness and not thinking about what is go for the country, what is good for the safety of american sources, agents, that are out there trying to gather this information, what is good in terms of our technical ability to prevent other attacks and know what our adversaries are doing, that is thrown out the window and that is out of the wend for four years and it is a flagrant right to doo whatever you want with this information. and that sets a norm, by the way, for every prosecution and investigation after this. they could point to it and said
as i typically stands stands for signals intelligence. another department, decades ago, when i was at the agency, referred to imagery collection platform. what did i do now but let s suffice to say, it is a collection platform, the parts fruits of which have no reason to be in the private home of a former government employee. the top secure sci, which is the other one, the highs, highest, we also saw that. there are those in the background. is that top secret sci. this is a dumb question but i will ask anyway. there are three levels of classification the sci special compartmented information is that a level above those rankings or does it run parallel to that? i m a little confused. it is not, literally to get nerdy with you an actual level of classification. it is a compartment or control assigned to documents that are classified typically at least a secret or top secret signify that they are exceptionally sensitive collection of sources