An American intelligence assessment found that the balloon used a commercially available U.S. network to communicate, primarily for navigation, U.S. officials say.
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    Officials familiar with the assessment said it found that the connection allowed the balloon to send burst transmissions, or high-bandwidth collections of data over short periods of time.

    Such a court order would have allowed U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance on the balloon as it flew over the U.S. and as it sent and received messages to and from China, the officials said, including communications sent via the American internet service provider.

    “As we had made it clear before, the airship, used for meteorological research, unintentionally drifted into U.S. because of the westerlies and its limited self-steering capability,” Liu told NBC News in a statement.

    The previously unreported U.S. effort to monitor the balloon’s communications could be one reason Biden administration officials have insisted that they got more intelligence out of the device than it got as it flew over the U.S.

    Senior administration officials have said the U.S. was able to protect sensitive sites on the ground because they closely tracked the balloon’s projected flight path.

    In an exclusive interview this month, VanHerck said he worked together with U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees U.S. nuclear weapons, to reduce the release of emergency action messages to ensure the Chinese balloon could not collect them.

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