From Wikipedia

>Wardriving is the act of searching for Wi-Fi wireless networks, usually from a moving vehicle, using a laptop or smartphone. Software for wardriving is freely available on the internet.

No way they’re looking for WiFi. You’re lucky if those signals make it ~300 feet from the access point, let alone 60,000.

Even cell signal is probably relatively unlikely as the antennas on cell towers are highly directional and aim most of their signal towards the ground.

Ever try getting LTE in a plane? The China ballon was even higher. There’s no chance

Which is encrypted anyway.

Not very likely I would posit. Too much effort to crack the encryption without some super stealthy backdoor method. Not impossible but unlikely as the backdoor to the crypto would have to be pretty beefy or be some sort of "shortcut" in the crypto that somehow has flown under the radar for so long as whole panels of independent experts have been perusing over since the RSA debacle.

More likely and easier to implement would be a hardware killswitch. Turning something "off" is much simpler and cheaper. Hypothetically speaking while I place this mass of tinfoil around my head; One well placed relay in the baseboards or some triggered logic patch that dumps source power to critical components and you bring down whole systems in one fell swoop. Pretty stealthy that way too because it's simple. Simple gets lost in complexity as the complexity acts as noise in the design documents. Government based systems are very much paranoid about this sort of thing so I doubt you would see this in anything like the US nuclear arsenal where they were floating these balloons.

Though with that sort of testicle tight grip on the supply lines in the consumer markets; they could cripple lots of other supporting things that aren't as stringent with their hardware/software sources. Communications, traffic controls, water, power, hell even sewer, so on and so forth. Look at how pissed people get when their internet goes out. Imagine how they react when EVERYTHING goes out and the toilet is backing up! Lots of chaos and turmoil for us to handle all at once!! Emergency response would be paper thin and stressed to the max! Cats marrying dogs outside of wedlock! We're doomed!!!

Ahem... Taking the tinfoil off... The likelihood of such a thing is still pretty darn slim. Lots of hobbyists have been peeling back baseboards and ICs without any permission from the manufacturer and voiding their warranties for a few decades now and nobody has spotted a whiff of stuff like this. We're post "clipper chip" discovery where folks will expose anything for internet clout.

I'm not confident enough to say it's impossible. Just very unlikely they have this sort of capability.

But, but, but it's just a weather balloon!

Apparently this isn't the first time. That we the public know about. In the spy business, you don't reveal what you know. It allows you to continue monitor them. If you reveal, say when our spy agencies spotted the balloon, the next time they will do something different and you might not catch them.

I've no doubt, those in the spy business and charged with protecting our secrets, knew about this and took appropriate actions to not only protect our assets, but to make sure they didn't know we knew.

Once the public became aware, they needed to do something. So they waited until they could control the area where it would come down. That was the Atlantic off the coast. Now we get to see exactly what they were doing and the level of tech used.

We will be able to point at it and say, "Look, this is spy shit, not something that would be used for 'weather' monitoring." Next time one of these approaches our territory it will be toasted ASAP and there will be no ambiguity over whether or not it was some errant weather balloon.

I don’t believe the government is neither lying nor telling the truth. Whatever they say the media will phrase the way the media wants to so why should I care either way?

I just don’t bring up thirty-year-old news to make a point. If I did, I’d use something like MK Ultra about how the government lies to us. Or Operation Northwoods.

I like how people here never question anything the American government tells the public when it comes to rival nations but they simultaneously refuse to trust the U.S. government on every other topic.

It’s definitely possible there are spy capabilities in the balloon but the government could also just easily escalate it and claim they found an unexploded nuke inside and the entire country would call for war without ever seeing the contents.