Ignorance is far more dangerous than any spy balloon

More valuable than any of the signals it intercepted or military assets it observed, the Chinese spy balloon uncovered something else: a snapshot of the flaws and vulnerabilities in our public discourse. Somewhere in Beijing, someone is saying the risk was worth the reward.

The official narrative on both sides of the Pacific is that these spy balloons are nothing new. Pentagon sources have confirmed that at least three suspected Chinese spy balloons entered U.S. airspace during the Trump presidency, while Beijing claims U.S. balloons have flown over China 10 times since 2022. Only the naivest amongst us would not know that this kind of mutual surveillance has been standard operating procedure, even in the post-Cold War era.

What’s new is how the news of this balloon (and the apparent false alarms that inevitably followed) led to needless paranoia, controversy and social discord.

In the 2016 presidential election, Russia learned that conducting political interference through covert means could have profoundly destabilizing effects on the American political process. Famously, Russian intelligence ran “troll farms” that saturated social media with propaganda and misinformation. But in this case, the Chinese had no need to go so far.

Right across North American airwaves, we saw astonishingly imbecilic posturing and finger-pointing. Republicans lambasted the Biden administration for failing to keep Americans safe by not shooting down the first reported spy balloon straightaway as it traversed over land. Of course, doing so would only have put citizens below in harm’s way. Republican Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio told CNN that he would prefer to see the Biden administration be “trigger happy than to be permissive.”

I wonder how quickly his tune would change if an object as tall as the Statue of Liberty with a payload the size of a jetliner fell in his backyard? Meanwhile, here at home, armchair experts prattled on about a U.S. aircraft downing an object in Canadian airspace, even though this is exactly how Norad is supposed to function.

When it comes to matters of international security, a little grandstanding based on incomplete information is about as predictable as spring following winter. The problem is when such behaviours not only grow in prominence but become the norm. As we have seen time and again on Twitter and other online platforms, on the web ambiguity does not lie still, not for a moment. Rather, it metastasizes into outright conspiracies that sow mistrust and become accepted as fact.

Make no mistake, that we have the freedom to speculate and air bad takes, is a necessary feature of our political system, not a bug. But, in a dangerous world, what we need is a little humility. And what we don’t need, most especially, is politicians fanning the flames.

More valuable than any of the signals it intercepted or military assets it observed, the Chinese spy balloon uncovered something else: a snapshot of the flaws and vulnerabilities in our public discourse. Somewhere in Beijing, someone is saying the risk was worth the reward.

The official narrative on both sides of the Pacific is that these spy balloons are nothing new. Pentagon sources have confirmed that at least three suspected Chinese spy balloons entered U.S. airspace during the Trump presidency, while Beijing claims U.S. balloons have flown over China 10 times since 2022. Only the naivest amongst us would not know that this kind of mutual surveillance has been standard operating procedure, even in the post-Cold War era.

What’s new is how the news of this balloon (and the apparent false alarms that inevitably followed) led to needless paranoia, controversy and social discord.

In the 2016 presidential election, Russia learned that conducting political interference through covert means could have profoundly destabilizing effects on the American political process. Famously, Russian intelligence ran “troll farms” that saturated social media with propaganda and misinformation. But in this case, the Chinese had no need to go so far.

Right across North American airwaves, we saw astonishingly imbecilic posturing and finger-pointing. Republicans lambasted the Biden administration for failing to keep Americans safe by not shooting down the first reported spy balloon straightaway as it traversed over land. Of course, doing so would only have put citizens below in harm’s way. Republican Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio told CNN that he would prefer to see the Biden administration be “trigger happy than to be permissive.”

I wonder how quickly his tune would change if an object as tall as the Statue of Liberty with a payload the size of a jetliner fell in his backyard? Meanwhile, here at home, armchair experts prattled on about a U.S. aircraft downing an object in Canadian airspace, even though this is exactly how Norad is supposed to function.

When it comes to matters of international security, a little grandstanding based on incomplete information is about as predictable as spring following winter. The problem is when such behaviours not only grow in prominence but become the norm. As we have seen time and again on Twitter and other online platforms, on the web ambiguity does not lie still, not for a moment. Rather, it metastasizes into outright conspiracies that sow mistrust and become accepted as fact.

Make no mistake, that we have the freedom to speculate and air bad takes, is a necessary feature of our political system, not a bug. But, in a dangerous world, what we need is a little humility. And what we don’t need, most especially, is politicians fanning the flames.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once stated:

… as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

I disagree with Rumsfeld’s tortuous assessment that the most dangerous category is “unknown unknowns.” In our social media era, the most significant threat is rather the utter collapse of the second category, “known unknowns” — that which we’re aware of but don’t understand.

When confronted with complex information, many in our society prefer to accuse or theorize rather than simply confess ignorance. Before long, that tendency will prove to be more dangerous than any balloon could ever be.