What? They can't fly the spy balloons anymore?
The DoJ announced this week the arrest of a Chinese national who was suspected of flying a drone over the Vandenberg Space Force base in Northern California.
I've gotta say, Chinese spy drones over Vandenberg ... not really a shock. But that our DoJ actually caught and arrested the suspected spy, that's an interesting development.
Yinpiao Zhou, 39, a Chinese citizen living legally in the U.S., in Brentwood, Contra Costa County, has been charged with failure to register an aircraft not providing transportation and violation of national defense airspace, the Justice Department said in a statement.
He was arrested Tuesday at San Francisco International Airport as he prepared to board a flight to China and had been due to appear in court Wednesday.
Let's see, Chinese citizen legally enters the US, flies a drone over a military base, and tries to sneak back to China right before his court date two weeks after the drone flight.
Yeah, I'm thinking we need to find out what he captured on that drone footage and whether the footage has been sent back to China already.
After obtaining a federal search warrant, agents searched Zhou's drone and found several photographs of the space force base taken via the drone, the government said.
'A search of Zhou's cellphone showed Zhou conducted a Google search approximately one month earlier for the phrase 'Vandenberg Space Force Base Drone Rules' and messaged with another person about hacking his drone to allow it to fly higher than it could otherwise,' the release said.
The Justice Department said Zhou is a Chinese citizen with legal residency in the U.S. He returned to the U.S. from a visit to China in February 2024. The statement said the person found with Zhou in November had arrived from China just several days earlier.
I'm sure it was just a one-off case, right?? 👇
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