Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

How Trump’s allies amplify his Truth Social messages to the wider world

In Arizona, election workers trained with deepfakes to prepare for 2024

Biden back in the battleground state of Wisconsin

A college professor wants to use Section 230 against Big Tech

Commerce Department revokes more export licenses to China’s Huawei

Defense think tank MITRE to build AI supercomputer with Nvidia 

RFK Jr’s ‘history lesson’ on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine flunks the fact test

The Trump-Biden battle over the 2017 tax cut

That time football legend, rig-driving eligible bachelor Biden was arrested

Arrested U.S. soldier was in Russia to pursue girlfriend

Middle East conflict live updates: WHO says health services in south Gaza will run out of fuel in three days

U.S. signals optimism for Gaza cease-fire as Israel moves into Rafah 

Social Security has to be fixed. But you still need your own savings.

An I bond is now at 4.28 percent. Are they still a good deal?

Use these 6 points to say no to a college you and your kid can’t afford

Cruise worker charged with stabbing 3 with scissors on ship off Canada

France tries to shed its rude reputation ahead of the Olympics

Don’t be a jerk at the airport: A guide for headphones

Serve seared scallops on a creamy herb sauce for a quick, elegant meal

Seared Scallops With Creamy Herb Sauce

From a forgotten Indian cookbook, a deeply flavored chickpea curry

‘Look at the U.S.A.’: A photographer’s reflection on post-9/11 conflict

In photos: The scene after tornadoes struck Michigan and Oklahoma 

In court, Stormy Daniels pulled a Trump on Trump 

The next global crisis could come from the sun. We should prepare now.

The FTC’s noncompete clause rule goes too far

The crisis Biden and Trump don’t want to deal with

Dog hit by car loses leg, is adopted by firefighter who helped her

Postal worker finds WWII-era letters, drives 5 hours to deliver them

Strangers help Sesame Street puppeteer after heirloom necklace was stolen

Carolyn Hax: Family pushes siblings to ‘make amends’ after their mother’s death

Miss Manners: I’m offended by a golfer’s skirt choice

Ask Amy: I want to be closer with my brother. He never reaches out to me.

Nats go over .500 the hard way by beating the O’s and Corbin Burnes

These Nationals are pretty fun. They’d be more fun with James Wood.

Baseball can crush rookies. Why hasn’t it crushed Trey Lipscomb?

Biden

The U.S. intelligence community has linked the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/04/chinese-balloon-shoot-down/" target=_blank>Chinese spy balloon shot down</a> on Saturday to a vast surveillance program run by the People’s Liberation Army, and U.S. officials have begun to brief allies and partners who have been similarly targeted.

The surveillance balloon effort, which has operated for several years partly out of Hainan province off China’s south coast, has collected information on military assets in countries and areas of emerging strategic interest to China including Japan, India, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines, according to several U.S. officials, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

Officials have said these surveillance airships, operated in part by the PLA air force, have been spotted over five continents.

“What the Chinese have done is taken an unbelievably old technology, and basically married it with modern communications and observation capabilities” to try to glean intelligence on other nations’ militaries, said one official. “It’s a massive effort.”

On Monday, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman led a briefing on China’s balloon espionage for some 150 people from about 40 embassies, said a senior administration official familiar with the matter. The department has also sent to every U.S. Embassy “detailed information” on the espionage that can be shared with allies and partners.

Separately, U.S. officials have begun to share specifics with officials in countries such as Japan whose military facilities were targeted by Beijing.

“There has been great interest in this on the part of our allies and partners,” said a senior administration official.

“Many of them recognize that they, too, may be vulnerable or susceptible to this or an object of interest to the PRC,” the official said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

In Japan in 2020, an aerial orb drew speculation. “Some people thought this was a UFO,” said a Japanese official. “In hindsight people are realizing that was a Chinese espionage balloon. But at that time it was purely novel — nobody had seen this. … So there’s a lot of heightened attention at this time.”

While most of China’s long-range surveillance efforts are conducted by its expanding military satellite array, PLA planners have identified what they consider to be an opportunity to conduct surveillance from the upper atmosphere at altitudes above where commercial jets fly, using balloons that fly between 60,000 and 80,000 feet or higher, officials said.

Analysts still don’t know the size of the balloon fleet, but there have been “dozens” of missions since 2018, said one U.S. official. They take advantage of technology provided by a private Chinese company that is part of the country’s civil-military fusion effort — a program by which private companies develop technologies and capabilities used by the PLA.

In a news briefing Saturday, senior Pentagon officials alluded to the PLA program, noting that balloons had been operating elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. “These balloons are all part of a PRC fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations, which also violated the sovereignty of other countries,” said one senior defense official.

The official flatly rejected China’s assertion that the airship moving over the United States <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/05/china-us-balloon-reaction-diplomacy/" target=_blank>was a weather balloon blown off course</a>. “This is false,” the official said. “This was a PRC surveillance balloon. This surveillance balloon purposefully traversed the United States and Canada. And we are confident it was seeking to monitor sensitive military sites.”

Some commentators have made light of the Chinese effort, noting that balloons are not the most high-tech of platforms. But others caution against dismissing the balloons’ potential.

“For those who have a sanguine view about the actual intelligence collection capabilities of this balloon, I think they’re underestimating the creative ways the PLA might use it either for intelligence and surveillance purposes, or as a platform for weapons,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chairman of the Select Committee on China, who was commenting on public remarks made by Pentagon officials over the weekend.

U.s. Navy Photo

In recent years, at least <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/05/china-spy-balloon-gop/" target=_blank>four balloons have been spotted over Hawaii, Florida, Texas and Guam</a> — in addition to the one tracked last week. Three of the four instances took place during the Trump administration but were only recently identified as Chinese surveillance airships. Other balloons have been spotted in Latin America and allied countries in the Pacific, officials have said.

President Biden directed that all sensitive sites were protected from espionage, “which was straightforward because we could track the path of the balloon and ensure no sensitive activities or unencrypted communications would be conducted in its vicinity,” said National Security Council strategic communications coordinator John Kirby. “At the same time, we turned the tables on China and collected against the balloon, so that we would learn more about China’s capabilities and tradecraft.”

Monitoring the recent balloon helped fill in gaps about the four others, officials said. The U.S. military sent up fighter jets and other aircraft over the past week to observe the airship. A Chinese spy balloon that crashed off the Hawaiian islands last June also yielded helpful information, including about the nature of the technology China is using, they said.

For instance, some of the balloons are outfitted with electrooptical sensors or digital cameras that, depending on their resolution, can capture highly precise images, officials said. They also are equipped with radio signal and satellite transmission capability, they said.

Hainan, one of the locations where officials said the balloons are based, is an island off the southern coast of China that has long been a PLA command and control location. Though known more for its naval facility, it features an airfield that was the home base for the Chinese J-8 interceptor fighter jet that collided with an American EP-3 spy plane in 2001.

In January, the U.S. military disclosed what it characterized as an unsafe maneuver in December by a Chinese fighter jet that U.S. military officials said flew too close to an American reconnaissance aircraft in international airspace near the island. The Chinese J-11 fighter <a href="https://aviationsourcenews.com/military/usaf-recon-aircraft-forced-to-take-evasive-action-to-avoid-chinese-fighter/#:~:text=USAF%20Recon%20aircraft%20forced%20to%20take%20evasive%20action%20to%20avoid%20Chinese%20fighter,-Len%20Varley&text=LONDON%20%E2%80%93%20A%20United%20States%20Air,to%20it%20during%20an%20interception." target=_blank>pulled within 20 feet of the American plane’s nose</a>, “forcing the RC-135 to take evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision,” U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement.

The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/07/china-spy-balloon-photos/" target=_blank>spy balloon</a> shot down Saturday first entered U.S. airspace over Alaska on Jan. 28. It crossed north of the Aleutian islands, back over mainland Alaska, over Canada and then over northern Idaho last week, but the Pentagon did not acknowledge its presence until NBC News reported last Thursday that the Pentagon was tracking the balloon over Montana.

The resulting political uproar — some Republicans slammed the Biden administration for not shooting down the balloon sooner — led Secretary of State Antony Blinken to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/03/blinken-postpones-china-trip-suspected-spy-balloon-detected-over-us/" target=_blank>postpone a trip to Beijing</a>, an announcement made hours before his plane was set to take off.

U.S. intelligence analysts have retroactively identified as spy balloons objects that were previously deemed unidentified, according to U.S. officials. New technologies have enabled the detection of measurement and signature intelligence, or MASINT, which typically includes information about radar or electromagnetic signals, such as those that might be emitted by surveillance balloons.

In some instances, the military and intelligence communities have been able to say that they originated in particular countries, including China, the officials said.

The retroactive discovery of the Chinese balloons helps explain why senior defense officials serving in the Trump administration were not aware of the incursions during their time in office, officials said.

China has made significant use of balloons to monitor targets on the ground, officials said. The balloons often don’t use the most cutting-edge technology — in most cases, the sensors aboard don’t capture more information than China could obtain with a satellite.

But balloons offer some advantages. They can linger over a target for hours, whereas a satellite orbiting Earth may have only minutes to snap a picture of its target. “If you have a balloon that’s moving extremely slowly you have persistence that you can’t get from a satellite,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Charlie “Tuna” Moore, a former fighter pilot who helped run operations out of NORAD and retired in October as deputy of U.S. Cyber Command.

Analysts think the balloons, like drones, can be remotely piloted — at about 30 to 60 mph, said one official. And because balloons float along high-altitude winds, their paths are less predictable and thus more difficult to track. The balloons are also much cheaper to produce and launch than space-based satellites.

Some of the balloons have been launched from China on flight paths that took them around the entire globe, officials said.

Officials noted that China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was apparently caught by surprise and was chagrined to see Blinken cancel his visit. The ministry initially issued a statement, saying China “regrets that the airship strayed into the United States by mistake.” Since then, Beijing has been contacting its neighbors to keep lines of communications open amid the burgeoning crisis — a signal, said one official in the Pacific region, that Beijing was embarrassed by the balloon’s flight across the United States and trying to quell the controversy.

In a statement over the weekend, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson appealed for maintaining “a coolheaded and prudent” approach to the incident.

A U.S. official said that “there was no sense that” the balloon’s incursion into continental U.S. airspace on the eve of Blinken’s visit was a deliberate provocation. But, the person added, “We are confident that this was a purposeful global program.”

“China’s foreign policy is a constant search for leverage and in most circumstances there are ample opportunities,” said the official. “In this one, there would appear to be very few. So when the Chinese appeal for calm and coolheadedness you can be sure they’re nearly out of options.”

Cate Cadell and Alex Horton contributed to this report.

Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, 2014

Gerald Loeb Award 2014, NSA stories

Society of American Business Editors and Writers enterprise award 2009, for the story "Banking Regulator Played Advocate over Enforcer"

Daily Californian Alumni Association Alumna of the Year, 2017

Pulitzer Prize for reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, 2018

Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2022 for an investigation of the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol

The Prince of Tennessee

City University, London, MA in international journalism

University of California at Berkeley, BA in humanities

Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter with The Washington Post. She was a member of three Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, in 2022 for an investigation of the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, in 2018 for coverage of Russia's interference in the 2016 election, and in 2014 and for reporting on the hidden scope of government surveillance. 



Ellen Nakashima

Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, The Washington Post, 2021

George Polk Award, The Washington Post, 2021 

Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, The Washington Post, 2019  

Helen Bernstein Book Award For Excellence In Journalism, 2011

Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, 2010

The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State 

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex 

Wake Forest University, B.A. in Politics

Shane Harris writes about intelligence and national security. He was a member of reporting teams that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, as well as two George Polk Awards. He is also the winner of the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. Shane is the author of two books, "The Watchers" and "@War." 

Shane Harris

Finalist, Pulitzer Prize in Public Service, with the staff of The Washington Post, 2019

Michigan State University, B.A. in International Relations

John Hudson is a reporter at The Washington Post covering the State Department and national security. He was part of the team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He has reported from dozens of countries, including Ukraine, China, Afghanistan, India and Belarus.

John Hudson

Gerald R. Ford Foundation Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, presented in 2023 for coverage of the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan and its aftermath

Major Megan McClung Award, presented by Marine Corps Heritage Foundation in 2023 for coverage of the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan and its aftermath

Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, presented in 2022 for team coverage of the attack on the U.S. Capitol

Major Megan McClung Award, presented by the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation in 2020 for distinguished reporting about an infantry unit's reintegration into civilian life as the war in Afghanistan wound down

 Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr. Award, presented by the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation in 2018 for distinguished feature writing and accompanying podcast about a family of brothers in World War II

Major Megan McClung Award, presented by the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation in 2011 for distinguished reporting alongside infantry Marines in combat in Afghanistan

University of Massachusetts at Amherst, BA in journalism

University of Maryland at College Park, master's in journalism

Letters From War

What Really Happened as the U.S. Left Afghanistan

Dan Lamothe joined The Washington Post in 2014 to cover the U.S. military. He has written about the Armed Forces for more than 15 years, traveling extensively, embedding with five branches of service and covering combat in Afghanistan.