![]() ![]() government’s greatest concerns, across administrations, was the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Concrete evidence has emerged of the company’s misuse of data, and outright lying about who has access to it-yet attempts to regulate or control TikTok’s ownership have proven difficult.Īnd before TikTok, one of the U.S. With close to ninety million monthly users in the U.S., a treasure trove of bulk information is flowing overseas and back to Beijing. Look no further than the struggles of both the Trump and Biden administrations to handle a single Chinese-owned app: TikTok. A password that might take an ordinary computer years to break might be solved by a quantum computer within minutes.īut the biggest challenge has been Americans’ own use of Chinese-owned or controlled networks. And increasingly, security experts fear that advances in artificial intelligence and quantum computing will unleash an even more challenging digital environment. government and private sector have worked hard to secure networks and harden America’s digital defense-but intrusions still happen far too frequently. “There are two kinds of big companies in the United States,” FBI Director James Comey quipped in 2014, “There are those who've been hacked by the Chinese and those who don't know they've been hacked by the Chinese.” For years, government and private sector hackers based in China have ravaged U.S.-owned networks, retrieving blueprints for sensitive military technology ( like the F-35), stealing commercial secrets, and diving deep into government networks to spirit away sensitive information about military and intelligence personnel. However, China’s formidable cyber espionage capabilities are no secret. Invisible cyberattacks are less evocative than a visible spy balloon. And, unlike a spy balloon, those challenges don’t vanish after a missile shot from an F-22. But ironically, some of the voices who most loudly argued for shooting down the balloon spend relatively little time worrying about the broader digital espionage challenges emanating from China. This one, famously, did-closing down civilian airspace and throwing a wrench in a painstakingly scheduled diplomatic meeting between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Chinese counterpart. And so they didn’t balloon into an international incident. ![]() The difference? American citizens didn’t see those. airspace before: at least three times during the Trump administration. Yet as it turned out, Chinese spy balloons have passed through U.S. This highly-visible balloon captured not only the Pentagon’s attention but the nation’s. Finally, after the balloon reached the ocean on Saturday morning, the Pentagon shot it out of the sky (and is scrambling to pick up the pieces). What’s more, they explained, the intelligence community hoped to collect more information on the balloon itself and its capabilities. Uncontrolled debris from the balloon could harm people or damage property. The administration, in turn, pushed back: arguing that shooting the balloon down over land was risky. As it coasted toward the Atlantic Ocean, some people took to Twitter and burnished their anti-China bona fides by offering increasingly aggressive-and sometimes, increasingly ridiculous-critiques of the Biden administration. The story of China’s balloon shows us why. Balloon-gate aside, America needs to learn how to distinguish what we can see from what we should be worried about. China’s remarkable capacity to conduct cyber espionage operations and to deploy commercial technologies and spyware against American citizens is a much greater risk. But they overlook a deeper problem: When it comes to Chinese espionage, what Americans can see in the sky is often not as dangerous as what we can’t. Why was it allowed to float leisurely from Montana through the American heartland and out over the Carolinas, collecting data along its way and beaming it back to Beijing: a wandering breach of sovereign airspace? military shoot the Chinese spy balloon down sooner? Over the past week, as balloon-watching became the national hobby and geopolitical tensions between the United States and China ratcheted ever higher, the same question kept popping up in online debates and in DC happy hours alike: Why didn’t the U.S. Careers, Fellowships, and Internships Open/Close. ![]() Wahba Institute for Strategic Competition.Science and Technology Innovation Program.Refugee and Forced Displacement Initiative.The Middle East and North Africa Workforce Development Initiative.Kissinger Institute on China and the United States.Nuclear Proliferation International History Project.North Korea International Documentation Project.Environmental Change and Security Program.Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy. ![]()
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