Originally published at: That Chinese spy balloon used a U.S. internet provider to transmit its data - Boing Boing
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“Bring your own device” 
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And now for a word from today’s sponsor: Nord VPN. How many times have you been flying a covert spy balloon over foreign territory and wondered “Is my data safe?” Worry no longer…
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Pretty sure that plan isn’t even available anymore. Though would have been during the period the balloon was flying… I wonder if they were using their Disney+
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While I realize signal jamming is technically illegal, it seems like that should be straight forward for the military to do. It’s a balloon, not a high speed drone, tracking should have been fairly easy.
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It’s not Starlink? That would be my first guess
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In many cases, it would not be illegal for the military. I once saw a chart showing all the common radio frequencies and what they were used for. Virtually every frequency was, in addition to TV and garage remotes and baby monitors, also noted to be in use by the military somewhere at some time for something that they reserved the right to do again if the need or whim hits them.
WiFi, for example, has frequencies that overlap with frequencies that military radar uses, and due to various regulations and laws the WiFi device must shut down for a period of time to prevent interference. I found this out when an office I worked in, not too far from an airport, suddenly lost it’s wifi and, being curious, I dug into the error logs, and pulled out an actual error code that specified this. Better that BoingBoing becomes unreachable for a minute or so than an airplane crash, I can see the logic.
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I kind of think signal jamming is something that’s been exaggerated by the hollywood usages of it. If you can be close enough to jam it, you’re close enough to intercept what it’s sending and listen in. It’s likely got much more intelligence that way than just jamming it.
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Totally, Elon would say he was championing the rights of Chinese spies rights to freely communicate with other Chinese spies.
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The Chinese government has been super nice to him.
Unique among foreign automakers in China, the plant is wholly owned by Tesla and not operated as a joint venture with a Chinese company, the first time the government had allowed such an arrangement.
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Is it Xi-Mobile?
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If it was a weather balloon then what’s the issue?
Posting link relevant to the admission that it was just a regular ol’ weather balloon
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the cbs news article it summarizes says something slightly different:
After the Navy raised the wreckage from the bottom of the Atlantic, technical experts discovered the balloon’s sensors had never been activated while over the Continental United States
Milley replied, "I would say it was a spy balloon that we know with high degree of certainty got no intelligence, and didn’t transmit any intelligence back to China
link:
eta: which actually is a bit weird if now it’s said to have communicated via us infrastructure… 
it collected nothing and reported… something?
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in the immortal words of Commander Buck Murdock, “Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes!”
Milo Minderbinder has entered the chat.
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