A short history of the spy balloon – BBC News

Hot your great great Granddaddy’s blimp [Music] my name is Andrew Harmon yeah I have a real I have a really fantastic job for Millennia the only way that you could see would be climbing up a mountain climbing up a tree [Music] 1794 the battle of fleurs the French Revolutionary War almost all of the other European States against France [Music] Abraham Lincoln very you know very smart very straight guy he sees the utility of this with Lincoln’s patronage Thaddeus law becomes the chief aeronaut of the Union Army [Music] balloons are used in World War one as well because the aircraft is just an emerging technology Airship the pigeon has got a lot of power attached to it then we got up to World War II we have aircraft that can take photographs in a much more sophisticated way the camera really changes the game [Music] the Soviet Union what’s called A Hard Target a very difficult country to conduct human intelligence operations [Music] about the YouTube spy plane you could bring it out even more to satellites [Music] after 9 11 this is a big Quantum shift in the use of drones little drones the size of dragonflies and then we come up to the modern day where we have the reaper drones so this might lead to the question why why is an analog thing from 1794 why are we still using it for everything that you can put in the air to capture intelligence there’s pros and there’s cons so the pigeon for example the pigeon mind of its own it’s very difficult to make sense of the imagery afterwards So eventually this is abandoned we don’t use pigeons any longer but if you think about an aircraft the pros of that it can go in a straight line you can direct it the cons what runs out of gas you couldn’t get an aircraft to just spend days and days flying over the United States and intelligence is a thing called plausible deniability if it’s a Chinese military aircraft if a chinese pilot that game can’t be played any longer because it’s very clear what the object is [Music] see something touch something if we can hear something then it’s within our sphere of understanding but if it’s if it’s cyber if it zeros and ones if it’s artificial intelligence it’s much more difficult for us to get our head around so one of the reasons why I think the Chinese balloon became such a story is that people could see it with their own eyes you can get into your backyard and see a big gigantic blend up in the sky then you know it’s something that you you can understand and you can think aboutA short history of the spy balloon – BBC News