revolutionary? one of the words i heard earlier in the week was clumsy, it just felt clumsy. the brazen nature of things given the cost-benefit from the collection perspective and the u.s. to mitigate any real threat in terms of intelligence collection has really raised not just alarms but real questions inside the administration. you can t view this in a vacuum. secretary anthony blin en was supposed to go to china this weekend. to have that happen, obviously the cancellation of the summit. if you look through what was happening behind the scenes, on wednesday night, the chinese embassy officials were summoned to meet with wendy sherman and tony blinken where they expressed their displeasure, and also after it was shot down, conversations between u.s. officials and chinese officials, saying this is what happens, this is what we told you was going to happen.
load underneath it that could cause real damage both to property and the people. the situation was made, given the fact they believed there was no national security risk and that collection perspective, they already moved quickly to address that from the u.s. side, that they would let this go, shoot it down when it came over water and be able to collect a more fulsome intelligence when they pick up the payload from the water which is the recovery process they re engaged in. i m told general mark milly, chair of the joint chiefs of staff, called former senator bill nelson to ask for help in terms of simulating where debris fall would look like. nasa, of course, has to consider this if, for instance, a satellite goes awry, they have the capability of saying, okay, where might this hit on the ground? what kind of dangers would it pose? that factored into the decision here, you shoot something this big down over populated u.s. territory, it does pose a risk
the biden administration before they take place how did the us intelligence get the information? mike baker former covert operations officer. great to have you. thanks for having me. mike: your thoughts on how the united states was aware some of this before it happened? i don t want to oversimplify it but that s the job of the cia to focus on russia. obviously over the years going back to the soviet union it was our primary concern and our primary target with intel collection perspective so it s no surprise whether through human sources that that is where significant resources have been and continue to be focused.
participation may have been? well, from an intelligence collection perspective, the russian it s consistent with the russian s modus operandi, they would cast a wide net looking at people inside of the trump campaign and frankly the other target they might be interested in, but they would be looking at guys like page, flynn, the rest of them. at the end of the day they might sit back and survey their catch and say, okay, who do we have contact with and what role are they going to play and i would agree, i think it s probably, you know, if i were a russian intelligence officer i would look at page and say i m not sure how this guy is going to pan out. many better options for us than page who did play a pretty tangential role in all of this. steve and josh, thanks so mu much. we ll leave it right there. still ahead, hackers target one of the french presidential candidates campaign ahead of tomorrow s election. details. plus russia s response next. whei just put in the namey, of
also want to be able to track people who are potential terrorists. they want to be able to track people who are potential adversaries of the united states. yeah. that s basically why they re doing this. this is a very controversial topic. i think people kind of understand this sort of vacuum-like approach to corralling in all this information, but for goodness sake, once they see the picture of my kid at the beach, obviously they discard it, but they re not. they should be discarding it. you know, these kinds of pictures of people at the beach, and people in other private moments, are totally irrelevant from an intelligence collection perspective. so what really needs to happen is there need to be some really strict guidelines that need to be put back into place when it comes to collection of this type. as i grew up through this system, it was very clear that certain things were not to be collected. among them, data from u.s. persons unless you had a warrant. that s the kind of