The White House is trying to put the best spin on the Chinese spy balloon events by claiming the U.S. military jammed the electronics attached rendering the ability of the surveillance equipment incapable of transmission to relays (satellites) or mainland China.
Additionally, according to the White House strategic communications spokesperson John Kirby, the main structure of the electronics, optics and surveillance system has been recovered by the U.S. military and the equipment is now being studied and reverse engineered. WATCH (05:18 Prompted):
(Via Reuters) – The United States said on Friday it had successfully concluded recovery efforts off South Carolina to collect sensors and other debris from a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon shot down by a U.S. fighter jet on Feb. 4, and investigators are now analyzing its “guts.”
The last of the debris fro the Chinese balloon, which was downed by a Sidewinder missile, is heading to an FBI laboratory in Virginia for analysis, the U.S. military’s Northern Command said in a statement.
Reuters was first to report the conclusion of the recovery efforts, which were halted on Thursday.
“It’s a significant amount (of recovered material), including the payload structure as well as some of the electronics and the optics, and all that’s now at the FBI laboratory in Quantico,” said National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby.
Kirby said the United States had already learned a lot about the balloon by observing it as it flew over the United States.
“We’re going to learn even more, we believe, by getting a look at the guts inside it and seeing how it worked and what it was capable of,” he told a White House news briefing.
The U.S. military said Navy and Coast Guard vessels that had been scouring the sea for nearly two weeks have departed the area.
“Air and maritime safety perimeters have been lifted,” Northern Command said in a statement.
The U.S. military has said it believes it has collected all of the Chinese balloon’s priority sensors and electronics as well as large sections of its structure, elements that could help counterintelligence officials determine how Beijing may have been collecting and transmitting surveillance information. (read more)
Whaaaat?
Wait- wasn’t it the Chinese who used to steal and reverse engineer OUR technology?
Laughable, Brandon.
Deadly laughable.
Weather. Balloon.
All of these fakers must go to the same “How to lie and believe they are buying it” training Peter Strzok and Co. attended. What a crock of BS.
Never forget: our fearless military leaders just spent millions of dollars to shoot down a $15 dollar school science project balloon with an $80 HAM transmitter after allowing a Chinese spy balloon, with a payload pod the size of a jetliner and filled with all kinds of sophisticated electronics equipment, to maneuver at will over military installations across the entire continental US, before spending a half million dollars to blast the payload pod into a million pieces with a missile! Then they wasted many more millions just to salvage and inspect the debris, rather than fire a few bullets into the balloon itself and bring it down in one piece for superior examination!!! EVERYTHING about this embarrassing and revealing incident was handled bass ackwards by ideological idiots in charge of America’s defense! God Help us all.
Where Federal Government elected officials, political appointees, and Senior Executive Service members are concerned my go-to position is I don’t believe anything they say about anything.
They lie, tell half-truths, and spread innuendo so frequently that none of them can be trusted.
John Kirby is the perfect spokesperson for our new woke military. Mealy-mouthed, apologetic, with a hang-dog demeanor, he says nothing in his briefings. We deserve better answers to simple questions about the balloon distractions and what is going on in our support for Ukraine.
Unbelievable stupidity.. Without the software (destroyed in the saltwater with power), all you have is a circuit board. You can imagine what the equipment COULD do but to know what it was doing you would have to not fire a 400k rocket at it.
There are special ops c-130 airplanes that recover balloons in flight. We could actually know what was running on those fried circuit boards if we wanted to..
And so we go to: “We can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.” Quickly pivot to the next outrage of the day.
The jamming is complete bunk – in my informed speculation.
“We have confirmed that the balloon was indeed released by the CCP. We can only attribute this egregious violation of international law to the effects of White Supremacy. In China.”