U.S. Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) has made the shortlist for Kamala Harris' choice of running mate.
Before his tenure as a senator from Arizona, Kelly had an illustrious career as an astronaut and co-founder of World View, a company initially dedicated to space tourism. However, recent reports indicate that Kelly's entrepreneurial focus shifted from celestial exploration to more terrestrial concerns.
From Space to Surveillance
Before serving on both the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Kelly launched a business that manufactures surveillance balloons. Notably, one of the company's significant investors has deep ties to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party).
Fox News' Greg Wehner reports:
“As we matured our technology, we recognized an opportunity for immediate use cases for our technology through remote sensing services to defense, scientific and commercial customers,” a spokesperson for World View told Fox News Digital. “Today, our primary business remains providing remote sensing services to the U.S. Department of Defense and her allies by way of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, as well as servicing scientific organizations like NASA, NOAA and others to better understand Earth from the unique atmospheric layer of the stratosphere.”
Axios reported that shortly after World View was started, it received venture capital from Tencent in 2013, then again in 2016.
Tencent is one of China's largest corporations, and it was founded in 1998 by “Pony” Ma Huateng, Zhang Zhidong, Xu Chenye, Chen Yidan and Zeng Liqing. Last year, “Pony” Ma Huateng was listed by Forbes as the fourth-richest man in China with a net worth of $32.1 billion. Ma is also the CEO of Tencent.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2021 that Tencent collected a trove of data over the years from its mobile app WeChat, the predominant social-media platform in China. The data was collected through its processing of the chat conversations and financial transactions of its over one billion monthly active users, most of them in China. That has made the company's platform WeChat a powerful surveillance tool for the Chinese government, which reportedly regulates Tencent and regularly has it suppress dissenting views.
RealClearPolitics' Investigation
RealClearPolitics' Susan Crabtree has reported on Kelly's aeronautic company for years, highlighting its possible role in propelling China's balloon fleet.
“The Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency (DCSA) suspended granting Kelly's company clearance for U.S. defense work,” Crabtree alleged.
An email from DCSA, which she posted on X, corroborate this claim.
Controversial Company Actions
In 2020, a spokesperson for Kelly's balloon company reportedly lied to Crabtree about securing DCSA's seal of approval. The DCSA aims to protect U.S. security assets from malign foreign influence.
Spy Balloons Over U.S. Territories
Following the discovery and studies of a crashed balloon off Hawaii in 2022, it now appears there were at least four Chinese spy balloon incursions over the U.S. or U.S. territories, such as Guam, dating back to the Trump administration. Most famously, in February 2023, a Chinese reconnaissance dirigible crossed the continental United States and gathered significant intelligence from sensitive military installations, including one of our three nuclear missile silo fields.
Instead of shooting down the 200-foot-tall balloon over the Aleutian Islands or Mountain West, the White House decided that the risk of falling debris over sparsely populated areas outweighed the threat posed by its ability to gather electronic signals intelligence.
This intelligence includes information on communications, radar and weapon systems that is inaccessible to satellites.
A U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor eventually shot down the balloon off the South Carolina coast.
Chinese surveillance balloons are believed to be constructed in Xinjiang province, with the surveillance program operating mainly out of Hainan Island off China's south coast. This highlights the close links between many ostensibly civilian-run enterprises in China and the country's military, known as China's “military-civil fusion.”
Though former President Obama has endorsed Harris, rumors have started to swirl that he prefers Mark Kelly over Kamala. According to observers, the thinking is that Kelly's status as an astronaut, veteran, and Gabby Gifford's husband would immediately put Arizona and Nevada in play.
Kelly's supporters believe his inclusion on the ticket could flip Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
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