How China's spy balloon is revealing gaps in America's security infrastructure.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech, I'm Kimberley Adams.

It's been a little over a week since the military shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon

over the coast of South Carolina. Since then, the U.S. has downed at least an additional

three unidentified crafts in North American airspace. The balloon saga has put a spotlight on foreign

espionage operations, but Shavet Ali says the practice is nothing new. He's a former national

security and intelligence official and an associate professor of practice at the University of Michigan.

Countries engage in espionage against each other all the time. That, in and of itself, is not the

issue of play here. We spy on China and likewise they spy on us. So it's not necessarily the fact

that both countries spy on each other. It's the particular method that was used or methods.

And I don't know if, in my time and government anyways, that we had seen intelligence operations

launched so brazenly by a foreign country over the domestic United States. So that, to me,

was a unique feature of the balloon incident. And we've got three other objects, which may or

may not be balloons on top of the first Chinese balloon. We also don't know the origin or the

country of origin for the other three objects as well. Aside from balloons, what other types of

technology are foreign governments using to sort of keep tabs on US activities?

So with China being such a large and sophisticated country with a powerful

military, one can imagine that they have a whole range of capabilities

at their disposal to try to engage in intelligence operations against the United States. Now how

successful they are is up to Beijing. But the spectrum is so broad and vast from a technology

perspective. That's what makes them so daunting from the US perspective is that this is a country

that has a lot of capability behind it. Just the balloon, even on its own, shows that this is just

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