The spy balloon

The Pentagon and other U.S. officials say it's a Chinese spy balloon — about the size of three school buses — moving east over America at an altitude of about 60,000 feet (18,600 meters). The U.S. says it is being used for surveillance and intelligence collection, but officials have provided few details.

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China insists the balloon is just an errant civilian airship used mainly for meteorological research that went off course due to winds and has only limited “self-steering” capabilities.

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A Pentagon spokesman said it could remain aloft over the U.S. for “a few days,” extending uncertainty about where it will go or if the U.S. will try to safely take it down. And late Friday, the Defense Department acknowledged reports of a balloon flying over Latin America — assessed as “another Chinese surveillance balloon.”

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U.S. officials say the Biden administration was aware of it even before it crossed into American airspace in Alaska early this past week. A number of officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic.

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In the first public U.S. statement, Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said Thursday evening that the balloon was not a military or physical threat — an acknowledgement that it was not carrying weapons. He said "once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information.”

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Even if the balloon is not armed, it poses a risk to the U.S., said retired Army Gen. John Ferrari, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The flight itself, he said, can be used to test America's ability to detect incoming threats and to find holes in the country's air defense warning system. It may also allow the Chinese to sense electromagnetic emissions that higher-altitude satellites cannot detect, such as low-power radio frequencies that could help them understand how different U.S. weapons systems communicate.

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According to senior administration officials, Biden initially wanted to shoot the balloon down. Some members of Congress have echoed that sentiment.

But Pentagon leaders strongly advised Biden against doing so because of risks to the safety of people on the ground, and Biden agreed.

He said the Chinese may have sent the balloon “to show us that they can do it, and maybe next time it could have a weapon. So now we have to spend money and time on it” developing defenses.

One official said the sensor package the balloon is carrying weighs as much as 1,000 pounds. The balloon is large enough and high enough in the air that the potential debris field could stretch for miles, with no control over where it would eventually land.

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Administration officials said Friday there have been other similar incidents of Chinese spy balloons, with one saying it happened twice during the Trump administration but was never made public.

  Yahoo

I wonder how you "protect against the collection of sensitive information" in this situation.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that at the very least there will be increased hate crimes against Chinese Americans.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 02/05/2023:  They killed the balloon.

Perhaps he never had their votes in the first place.

UPDATE :

Perhaps the most believable answer - if the least reassuring - is that he didn't even know about it.  There were reports that military and other national intelligence information was withheld from him for fear of what he would do with the information.