Hey - only the NSA is allowed to do that!
Don’t forget the 5 Eyes, FBI, CIA, DIA, Homeland Security, Google, Apple, Yahoo, and the list goes on and on. The other agencies may not listen directly - that is what “allies” are for! Big tech listens to everything and we let them.
There was rage from the Chinese commander of their in-orbit satellite recon fleet.
He demanded that weather balloon get the hell out of the way because it was obscuring spacecraft vision of the ground facilities being monitored.
This is why the weather minister was fired. The command receiver aboard failed and thus the commands to the venting mechanism to vent gas from the balloon and descend while still over China did not happen. The antennas aboard to receive commands and others to transmit baro/temp data, and correlated to BeiDou geographic position, back to the China facilities, perhaps via satellite completely explains the presence of antennae.
The minister was dismissed because his failed equipment caused this uproar — and obstructed those in-orbit assets from their recon mission.