The People’s Republic of China has already said it intended to expand its presence in Antarctica to

add new ground stations in Antarctica to support its satellite activity and data collection as concerns mount over Beijing’s surveillance programs and the rising security threats directed at the US.

Rick Fisher, Senior Fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center and Global Taiwan Institute Advisory Board member has an additional concern.

In 2021, state media revealed that China had put a LIDAR—a laser radar—into the Zhongshan station to conduct “atmospheric research.’ Any kind of laser raises the possibility that the LIDAR could be upgraded to be a far more powerful laser.

That’s true enough, and it’s a fairly simple upgrade and one about which to be concerned. However, for many of our satellites and those of our friends and allies, it would be a low angle attack through much of our atmosphere to get at very many of our satellites.

I have a larger concern, one also touched on by Fisher.

If you’re going to be attacking the United States in that manner—traversing Antarctica—it is extremely useful to have the ability to update a FOBS [Fractional Orbit Bombardment System] bus[.]

The PRC has already tested an around-the-world hypersonic nuclear missile attack profile; that test missile missed its target after its circumnavigation by some 25 miles. The route wouldn’t need to be all that close to over-the-south-pole to pick up a precise course update from the PRC’s Antarctica ground station. And at this point in our deteriorating defense capability, such a system gone operational would give the PRC a first-strike capability.

TikTok is trying to negotiate an agreement with our government that would allow it to continue operations within our nation.

TikTok has been negotiating with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, an interagency government panel, for more than two years on a way to wall off the company’s data and operations from the Chinese government.

The article’s headline, though, correctly identifies what should be the deal-breaking factor:

TikTok’s Talks With US Have an Unofficial Player: China

The China in question is the People’s Republic of China.

TikTok is a wholly owned subsidiary of ByteDance. ByteDance is a company domiciled in the PRC. The PRC has a 2017 National Intelligence Law that makes all PRC-domiciled companies beholden to the PRC intelligence community for any and all intelligence-gathering and reporting tasks the intel community might choose to levy on the company. That makes TikTok a potential espionage facility operating for the PRC within our nation.

There shouldn’t be any negotiation at all regarding TikTok: there’s nothing to discuss. The “unofficial player” isn’t hidden at all; it’s the PRC with its intelligence-gathering imperative.

People’s Republic of China Foreign Minister Qin Gang now is claiming, through his spokesman Wang Wenbin, that

the US had flown high-altitude balloons through its airspace more than 10 times since the start of 2022….

The short answer to that is this: Qin needs to show us the sensor tracking data on these balloons. Otherwise, he’s lying through his spokesman.

COMSEC, COMmunications SECurity, is the practice of protecting communications, and types of communications, no one of which is classified in any way, but that when aggregated with others can reveal classified information, even highly classified information. An example of this, probably apocryphal but illustrative nonetheless, is the WWI allies’ putative practice of reading the Berlin newspaper society pages to see which German general or generals were in Berlin for the opera. The portions of the Western front for which those generals were responsible could be expected to be quiet for the time being.

It’s also the real world case that, during the runup to the Allies’ WWII D-Day invasion, military radio traffic was steadily increased in areas in Great Britain’s southeastern regions in order to make it appear that a (the) military buildup was occurring there rather than where it actually was occurring, a deliberate use of COMSEC (here in combination with OPSEC, OPerations SECurity) weakness to spoof the Germans.

Now we learn that the People’s Republic of China’s People’s Liberation Army has been floating a fleet of spy balloons across the world, listening to communications across five continents (apparently, the winds aloft don’t blow southerly enough to get balloons reliably over Antarctica or Australia). The balloons are capable of geo-locating the origins of the communications they overhear, also.

But over five continents? The PLA likely is interested in the doings of the nations resident on those continents; however, the US remains a global power with installations all over the globe. It’s a safe bet that the primary target of those spy balloons is us and our doings around the world.

COMSEC. It would be highly useful to the PLA were its balloons, or the PLA back home on receipt of the intercepted transmissions, able to decode the communications. It’s enough, though, for the comms to be tracked back to their origins. Those concentrations then reveal sites worth focusing espionage efforts on, efforts ranging from spy shoes on the ground to focused listening from nearby locations (like, perhaps, farmland near government sites or office space near government buildings) to directed observations from orbit. Those concentrations can, on occasion, overtly expose sites of which the PLA hadn’t yet learned the existence.

This is only part of what President Joe Biden (D) deliberately allowed a PLA spy balloon to do for several days a bit over a week ago.

It’s only part of what the NORAD Commander, General Glen VanHerck, deliberately allowed with his failure of judgment in not recognizing that a spy balloon (which he correctly understood it to be) from an enemy nation was [] demonstrating hostile act or hostile intent that would have allowed him to destroy the device after it entered American airspace (not just our ADIZ) over the Aleutian Islands.