Prof. ST Hsieh
Director, US-China Energy Industry Forum
626-376-7460
February 20, 2023
Recently alleged Chinese spy balloon incident has caused major interruptions on managing/improving US-China relation. No one knows how long it will take the US and China to get over it. The best of hope now is that there is no additional flash point between the US and China.
Clearly there is a messaging problem for President Biden as the US keeps repeating that US does not want a cold war with China, yet the Chinese has serious doubts. The Chinese, according to the US, is not in the position to take on the US yet. Unfortunately, the US public is not at peace. Whether it is purely psychological paranoid or simply misinformed, it is up to President Biden to convince the US public about his strategy or policy toward China. May be after the US public back President Biden’s approach, then Chinese will take him seriously.
President Biden, please get down to earth with Americans about the threats up in the air
Ingrid Jacques, USA TODAY
Sat, February 18, 2023 at 12:15 PM PST
On a Sunday afternoon, I got a text from my mother-in-law.
She had just seen a news alert that the Federal Aviation Administration and North American Air Defense had temporarily closed the airspace over Lake Michigan. My husband’s parents live near the lake and were a bit concerned.
“Do I need to go to the basement??” she wrote.
She was largely kidding, but at the same time, I think my mother-in-law hit on the unease most of us have felt in recent days, as the United States keeps encountering these unidentified objects in the sky.
We need answers from Biden
President Joe Biden owes the country an explanation. This latest incident marks the third object that had to be shot down over North America in three days – and the fourth since the United States took out the Chinese spy balloon off the South Carolina coast Feb. 4 (after it was allowed to float across the country for a week, gathering intelligence as it flew over nuclear missile silos and military bases).
It’s unclear whether these latest “objects” are also Chinese, but that seems a fair guess. And it’s alarming what that country’s intentions could be.
Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, acknowledged his concerns about the infringement on U.S. airspace on CNN’s “State of the Union” this weekend: “We certainly now ascertain there is a threat.”
How worried should we be?
Now that there have been three other similar instances, Biden owes us answers.
Are we in any danger of war? Should we expect these unidentified flights to continue? Are there any risks to commercial air travel? What does the United States plan to do to ward off these threats?
It’s a little hard to take “balloons” as overly threatening. Yet when they are as big – 200 feet – as the one that the U.S. military downed over the Atlantic Ocean, that’s a very different situation, especially when combined with the obvious intent to spy. China is obviously gathering data about our country for a reason, but to what end?
No doubt, the federal government is still collecting information about these objects, but in the meantime, our president should address the country directly, with the seriousness the situation deserves.
The Chinese Spy Balloon Has Inflated America’s Paranoia
Jeffrey Kluger
Fri, February 17, 2023 at 4:59 PM PST
There’s no way of knowing—at least not yet—everything the Chinese spy balloon that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4 saw during its slow drift across the U.S. It flew over populated and unpopulated areas, cities and military sites. While it may not have caught a glimpse of you during its journeys, you have no idea what it did capture. If that makes you a little uneasy—even a little paranoid—well, you’ve got plenty of reason.
Privacy, at least as we once knew it, is becoming a thing of the past. The U.S. currently has more than 50 million security cameras operating in stores, workplaces, and outdoor public spaces, factoring out to some 15 cameras for every 100 people, according to Precise Security, a privacy advocacy group. That puts the U.S. first in the world, leading even China, which has about 14 cameras for every 100 people, according to the same source. Facial recognition software is becoming ubiquitous in the U.S., with systems installed in stores, airports, and casinos to detect known shoplifters, travel security risks, and suspected gambling cheats. In Dec. 2022, there was a public controversy when the company that owns Madison Square Garden in New York used facial recognition systems to ban members of law firms that were representing clients suing the company
“We’re suddenly seeing this ubiquitous surveillance,” says Tara Behrend, professor of psychology at Purdue University and president of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. “Technology has advanced very quickly—faster than our ability to think critically about what we should be measuring about people, under what circumstances, and what rights people have.”
And 63% of respondents in a poll last year by the advocacy group Trusted Future, said if they could choose one priority for Congress it would be providing greater online privacy protections.
And now comes the supposed Chinese eye in the sky—followed by the appearance and shooting down of three other unidentified objects over North America on Feb. 10, 11, and 12. Americans’ sense of paranoia about surveillance—whether by private companies, their own government, or foreign powers—was further stoked by conservative media and public figures. Fox News host Jesse Watters speculated that this or other Chinese balloons could be designed to carry bioweapons. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tweeted that China might be using balloon delivery systems to deploy electromagnetic pulse weapons that would knock out the U.S. power grid.
All of those sources of suspicion and paranoia were effectively invisible. The spy balloon isn’t—and while the public response has been more measured than that of some of the news media, people are still troubled.
“The spy balloon definitely felt to me like a violation, in that it was surveillance without consent, and an aggressive penetration of our nation’s skies,” says Neelam Patel, 47, a poet and dancer in Vorhees, N.J. “However, in the scheme of my daily life, I filed it away as [something] similar to my phone tracking where I’m going, or online businesses or credit card companies knowing precisely what I’m spending and where. Still, the more data about myself that is shared, the more at risk I am of being manipulated or controlled.”
Other Americans seem to be taking a pragmatic approach that echoes Patel’s. “We’ve been in such a dystopian fear state for such a prolonged period, I am personally unable to add an additional fear to my mental load,” says Sharon Feingold, an Atlanta-based voiceover artist. “Whether those balloons are aliens or signify an impending war with China, I’ve given up. I’m both highly sensitized and desensitized at once.”
“I try to stay focused on what’s in front of me, the things I can control,” says Dan Curry, 65, a retired addiction counselor in Petaluma, Calif. “Spy balloons, if that’s what they are, seem to be in the ‘things-I-can’t-control’ bucket.”
For a lot of people, however, things that can’t be personally controlled are precisely what cause the greatest anxiety. “To be paranoid, you have to have a good imagination,” says Behrend. “You have to be able to imagine scenarios other than what’s right in front of your face. From person to person, there are going to be individual differences in terms of whether they allow their imaginations to run wild or whether they use their critical-thinking skills. But it’s unfair to ask people to use critical-thinking skills to evaluate the balloon, because they don’t have any information about it.”
Harper agrees, seeing the fact that there’s really no clear information about exactly what the spy balloon was up to or what its capacities are as rocket fuel for paranoid thinking. “Ambiguity drives paranoia at both an individual and cultural level,” he says. “It all feeds on not having enough information.”
What’s more, the information we do have at the moment—specifically the growing tensions between the U.S. and China—only makes things worse. Paranoia, Harper explains, is driven partly by what’s known as coalitional threats. “It’s the idea that a group can covertly organize against you with malign intent,” he says. When that group is, like China, a nation of 1.4 billion people, the coalition is a formidable one.
The solution, both Behrend and Harper say, is transparency: the more Americans learn about the full scope of the Chinese surveillance program—and the more forensic analysts discern about the balloon itself from examining the wreckage—the lower the level of public anxiety may become.
chinese-spy-balloon
Attendants conduct retrieval and recovery works after Chinese spy balloon was shot down in Myrtle Beach SC on Feb. 4, 2023. Credit – Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency—Getty Images
There’s no way of knowing—at least not yet—everything the Chinese spy balloon that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4 saw during its slow drift across the U.S. It flew over populated and unpopulated areas, cities and military sites. While it may not have caught a glimpse of you during its journeys, you have no idea what it did capture. If that makes you a little uneasy—even a little paranoid—well, you’ve got plenty of reason.
Privacy, at least as we once knew it, is becoming a thing of the past. The U.S. currently has more than 50 million security cameras operating in stores, workplaces, and outdoor public spaces, factoring out to some 15 cameras for every 100 people, according to Precise Security, a privacy advocacy group. That puts the U.S. first in the world, leading even China, which has about 14 cameras for every 100 people, according to the same source. Facial recognition software is becoming ubiquitous in the U.S., with systems installed in stores, airports, and casinos to detect known shoplifters, travel security risks, and suspected gambling cheats. In Dec. 2022, there was a public controversy when the company that owns Madison Square Garden in New York used facial recognition systems to ban members of law firms that were representing clients suing the company
And all of that is only what happens when you leave your house. Simply turn on your computer, and marketers are routinely tracking what you’re surfing, searching, and buying, following you from site to site and serving up ads that are designed to appeal to your interests.
“We’re suddenly seeing this ubiquitous surveillance,” says Tara Behrend, professor of psychology at Purdue University and president of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. “Technology has advanced very quickly—faster than our ability to think critically about what we should be measuring about people, under what circumstances, and what rights people have.”
Read More: The AI Arms Race Is Changing Everything
None of this has sat well with Americans. In a 2022 Axios poll, for example, more than half of tech workers said they would quit their jobs if their employer began using surveillance technology to monitor employee productivity. A 2022 Ipsos poll found that a whopping 84% of Americans are concerned about the security of data they provide on the internet and 74% change their passwords at least once per year.
And 63% of respondents in a poll last year by the advocacy group Trusted Future, said if they could choose one priority for Congress it would be providing greater online privacy protections.
And now comes the supposed Chinese eye in the sky—followed by the appearance and shooting down of three other unidentified objects over North America on Feb. 10, 11, and 12. Americans’ sense of paranoia about surveillance—whether by private companies, their own government, or foreign powers—was further stoked by conservative media and public figures. Fox News host Jesse Watters speculated that this or other Chinese balloons could be designed to carry bioweapons. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tweeted that China might be using balloon delivery systems to deploy electromagnetic pulse weapons that would knock out the U.S. power grid.
That reaction is in keeping with a decades-long U.S. history of paranoia over government and commercial surveillance of private citizens, says David Harper, professor of clinical psychology at the University of East London. “In the 1970s and 1980s it was about intelligence agencies and government databases,” he says. “In the 1980s and 1990s it was about closed circuit TV in public places; and by the 2000s it became about Facebook and Google and those algorithms that nobody understands.” The 2020s, meantime, have brought the era of deep fakes and the danger that comes from putting invented words in the mouths of invented images of very real people.
All of those sources of suspicion and paranoia were effectively invisible. The spy balloon isn’t—and while the public response has been more measured than that of some of the news media, people are still troubled.
“The spy balloon definitely felt to me like a violation, in that it was surveillance without consent, and an aggressive penetration of our nation’s skies,” says Neelam Patel, 47, a poet and dancer in Vorhees, N.J. “However, in the scheme of my daily life, I filed it away as [something] similar to my phone tracking where I’m going, or online businesses or credit card companies knowing precisely what I’m spending and where. Still, the more data about myself that is shared, the more at risk I am of being manipulated or controlled.”
Other Americans seem to be taking a pragmatic approach that echoes Patel’s. “We’ve been in such a dystopian fear state for such a prolonged period, I am personally unable to add an additional fear to my mental load,” says Sharon Feingold, an Atlanta-based voiceover artist. “Whether those balloons are aliens or signify an impending war with China, I’ve given up. I’m both highly sensitized and desensitized at once.”
Read More: Why the Military Keeps Spotting so Many Unidentified Flying Objects—and Then Shooting Them Down
“I try to stay focused on what’s in front of me, the things I can control,” says Dan Curry, 65, a retired addiction counselor in Petaluma, Calif. “Spy balloons, if that’s what they are, seem to be in the ‘things-I-can’t-control’ bucket.”
For a lot of people, however, things that can’t be personally controlled are precisely what cause the greatest anxiety. “To be paranoid, you have to have a good imagination,” says Behrend. “You have to be able to imagine scenarios other than what’s right in front of your face. From person to person, there are going to be individual differences in terms of whether they allow their imaginations to run wild or whether they use their critical-thinking skills. But it’s unfair to ask people to use critical-thinking skills to evaluate the balloon, because they don’t have any information about it.”
Harper agrees, seeing the fact that there’s really no clear information about exactly what the spy balloon was up to or what its capacities are as rocket fuel for paranoid thinking. “Ambiguity drives paranoia at both an individual and cultural level,” he says. “It all feeds on not having enough information.”
What’s more, the information we do have at the moment—specifically the growing tensions between the U.S. and China—only makes things worse. Paranoia, Harper explains, is driven partly by what’s known as coalitional threats. “It’s the idea that a group can covertly organize against you with malign intent,” he says. When that group is, like China, a nation of 1.4 billion people, the coalition is a formidable one.
The solution, both Behrend and Harper say, is transparency: the more Americans learn about the full scope of the Chinese surveillance program—and the more forensic analysts discern about the balloon itself from examining the wreckage—the lower the level of public anxiety may become.