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Officials familiar with assessment said it found that the connection allowed the balloon to send burst transmissions, or high-bandwidth collections of data over short periods of time.

Such a court order would have allowed U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance on the balloon as it flew over the U.S and as it sent and received messages to and from China, the officials said, including communication sent via the American internet service provider.

"As we had made it clear before, the airship, used for meteorological research, unintentionally drifted into U.S. because of the westerlies and its limited self-steering capability," Liu said in a statement to NBC News.

The previously unreported U.S. effort to monitor the balloon's communications could be one reason Biden administration officials have insisted that they got more intelligence out of the device than it got as it flew over the U.S.

In an exclusive interview with NBC News this month, VanHerck explained that he worked together with the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees U.S. nuclear weapons, to reduce the release of emergency action messages to ensure the Chinese balloon could not collect them.

“Protecting EAM and nuclear command and control communications is of critical importance to the United States,” a senior defense official told NBC News.

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