Mugato: kermit the forg: Mugato: They have satellites. What data were they trying to get with that, exactly? If they want my Netflix password, I don't even know it.

Unlike satellites, balloons can hover slowly, at a lower altitude, which might result in better and more detailed pictures.  They can also be harder to detect on some defense systems then satellites.

What are they spying on, though? Unless they plan on going to war with the US tomorrow, it's nothing they can't change in time to make everything they see obsolete.

Sometimes spying isn't about looking for something specific.  You look for whatever you can find, then put the pieces together with all the other stuff you've found and see if it amounts to something interesting.  Say one spy finds out Lockheed Martin uses a specific screw as part of regularly-scheduled maintenance of an aircraft.  Then another, unrelated spy, finds out a huge shipment of these oddly-specific screws are being sent to Kuwait.  Then your spy balloon confirms there are no aircraft of that model stationed in Kuwait.  None of that information is classified, but put it all together and maybe it means the USAF is mobilizing a shiat-load of aircraft to Kuwait, which means a pending military action of which you were not aware, which *is* classified.

And like kermit said, the balloons can loiter.  The longer you can stay in one place, the more pictures you can take and the more signals you can intercept.   That means higher-fidelity data and pattern detection.

Maybe after all that, you get absolutely no actionable information.  However, you did test the perimeter and cause a fair amount of civil unrest, which ain't nothing.