FBI via AP
FBI special agents assigned to the evidence response team process material recovered from the high-altitude balloon recovered off the coast of South Carolina, February 9, 2023, at the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia.
Conservatives are flipping out about the Chinese balloon menace. After the U.S. Air Force shot down a huge spy balloon that traversed the United States, and subsequently started finding other mysterious balloons all over the country, Republicans began baying for blood. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that President Biden had committed an “enormous mistake” inducing “global shame” for not shooting down the balloon earlier. “The president owes the American people an explanation,” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) demanded to know why her state’s “Arctic warriors” weren’t mobilized to counter the inflatable menace.
But Republicans need to get a grip. Chinese spy balloons are far from the biggest threat to American security—on the contrary, they might conceivably increase it. Spying is a normal fact of life for any country, and none more so than the world’s two greatest powers. When it happens, it’s important not to fly off the handle, as it were.
First, a spy balloon is quite limited in terms of what it can access. So far, the military has been unsurprisingly tight-lipped about what was found in the debris after the balloon was shot down (amusingly, it was the very first time an F-22 fighter jet has been involved in air-to-air combat), but experts speculate it was probably a package of surveillance equipment—cameras, sensors, and so on. It’s hard to imagine that it could have, say, hacked into Pentagon computer systems.
If we’re worried about Chinese surveillance or espionage, its most obvious target by far would be the needlessly huge numbers of people who work for the intelligence community or the military-industrial complex. The Soviets, for instance, largely got nuclear secrets and other goodies by turning, bribing, or blackmailing individuals into passing them classified information. Convincing, tricking, or otherwise manipulating people is and always has been the bread-and-butter technique for a spy service—indeed, even today it’s still how a great deal of “hacking” happens. Russian intelligence stole John Podesta’s emails in 2016 by fooling him into clicking on a link.
According to a Washington Post investigation, a decade ago there were perhaps 854,000 people with top secret clearances working in the sprawling, illogical tangle of overlapping intelligence and defense agencies, including the associated private contractors, who apparently spend much of their time writing reports that nobody ever reads. (Recall that Edward Snowden worked for private-sector consultant Booz Allen Hamilton, not the National Security Agency itself.) No doubt the number has grown since then. Every one of those people is a potential target for foreign spies to blackmail, bribe, and so on—indeed, I would be shocked if the Chinese government did not currently have at least a few compromised people inside the intelligence community.
Second—and relatedly—if we’re worried about surveillance, there is a giant pile of highly sensitive private information available for sale online. As Drew Harwell reports at the Post, a recent study found that some data brokers “offered personally identifiable data featuring names, addresses and incomes, with one data-broker sales representative pointing to lists named ‘Anxiety Sufferers’ and ‘Consumers With Clinical Depression in the United States.’”
When an adversary is totally ignorant about your military status, its leaders’ imagination can run wild.
The surveillance economy of online platforms is a godsend to any intelligence service (another reason why, as my colleague David Dayen argues, the whole industry should be banned). The kind of dossier it would have taken teams of spies years to build up can be assembled in minutes or simply purchased for a couple of bucks. And while intelligence officers aren’t supposed to use unsecured devices, I’d bet a lot of money that among the million-odd people with top secret clearances, there are more than a few not strictly following the rules.
On the other hand, even if we were able to end all foreign intelligence gathering, it would come at a cost. When an adversary is totally ignorant about your military status, its leaders’ imagination can run wild. They might speculate that an attack is imminent, and so order a big arms buildup that would increase tensions—or even a preemptive attack. As Alex Kingsbury wrote about Stalin-era spying: “If anything, scholars at a recent Smithsonian conference on Vassiliev’s notebooks suggested, KGB reports to Stalin probably reassured the paranoid Soviet leader of the true intent of U.S. foreign policy. Much as mutually assured destruction with nuclear arsenals perversely calmed Cold War nuclear tensions, mutual spying may have reassured policymakers that they truly understood the other side.”
This is even more important when it comes to nuclear arsenals, which seem to be one of the things the balloon was trying to observe. Mutual misunderstanding was a major factor behind the Cuban Missile Crisis, and in turn why the famous “hotline” was installed between the White House and the Kremlin. Indeed, according to the logic of mutually assured destruction, it is actually important for the enemy to know about your nuclear arsenal so it can be constrained by knowing that you have an effective deterrent.
I understand why the government wants to keep advanced technical research away from prying foreign eyes, and I don’t blame the Biden administration for shooting down the balloon. But the constant give-and-take of the spy game will always be with us, and we shouldn’t even want to win it completely.
