Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) may have aided the Chinese Communist state in developing high-altitude spy balloons. In 2012, the Democrat Senator co-founded the high-altitude balloon firm World View and sought investment from the Chinese-based technology conglomerate Tencent, which owns the spyware app WeChat. Kelly is currently under consideration to be Kamala Harris‘s running mate in the 2024 presidential election.
Tencent’s investment in Kelly‘s balloon company was facilitated by the future Arizona Senator in 2014 and again in 2016. New reports indicate that claims made by World View that the company had been cleared by the U.S. Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency (DCSA) are false—and the Kelly-founded balloon company’s business relations with Tencent and the Chinese defense industry did, in fact, raise national security concerns.
According to a report by Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics, the DCSA explicitly suspended the clearance approval process for Kelly’s company.
TOO CLOSE TO CHINA.
In 2023, a high-altitude Chinese spy balloon traversed U.S. airspace, traveling across Alaska, Canada, and the contiguous United States before being belatedly downed by the U.S. Air Force just off the coast of South Carolina. The incident was marked by further chilling in U.S.-China relations.
The Chinese spy balloon incident raises concerns about what sort of technology may have been shared by Mark Kelly’s World View company and Tencent—especially given the deep ties of the latter to Chinese defense and intelligence agencies. Chinese companies like Tencent have a reputation for using investment as a means of espionage, gaining access to foreign technology that is copied and replicated by domestic Chinese-state-aligned firms. World View may have contributed to the development of Chinese spy balloon technology through this process.
The Kelly-founded company’s subsequent attempts to obfuscate its relationship with Tencent only raises further concerns.
