Are spy balloons that unusual?
Even if it seems like a far-fetched spying technique, this isn’t the first time China tried this approach. After last week, the U.S. Department of Defense declared in a statement: “Instances of this kind of balloon activity have been noticed many times in the past several years.”
Last February, authorities in Taiwan also discovered weather balloons that were deployed by the Chinese Army floating over the island (which, by the way, China claims as its territory). At that point, speculations that the balloons were used for surveillance were also raised, but officials in Taipei rapidly accepted they were only meant for meteorological observation.
China has studied balloon surveillance technology for many years, but it’s not the only country in the world to do so.
