The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced last week that it’s conducting an investigation into whether Chinese telecommunication providers whose devices and services are believed to pose a risk to national security are still doing business in the United States.
For several years the government has been working on removing China-made equipment and services from the country’s networks over concerns that they could allow the Chinese government to spy on the US.
Companies such as Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision, Hytera, Pacifica Networks, Dahua, China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom have been added to a so-called Covered List after it was determined that the use of their offerings poses an unacceptable risk to the United States’ national security.
Government funding for their products and services has been cut off, they have been banned from operating in the country, and the FCC has invested billions of dollars in a ‘rip-and-replace’ program whose goal is to help small telecom firms replace equipment made by Chinese companies.
However, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced last week that his agency is conducting a sweeping investigation into whether some or all of these companies are still operating in the US.
As part of its probe, the FCC is gathering detailed information on the companies that are on the Covered List, as well as other entities that may be facilitating their operations in the US.
“We have reason to believe that, despite those actions, some or all of these Covered List entities are trying to make an end run around those FCC prohibitions by continuing to do business in America on a private or ‘unregulated’ basis,” Carr said.
“We are not going to just look the other way. The FCC, working through our new Council on National Security and in coordination with partners across the Federal government, will identify the scope of their ongoing activities and move quickly to close any loopholes that have permitted untrustworthy, foreign adversary state-backed actors to skirt our rules,” he added.
The FCC’s Council on National Security is an initiative launched earlier this month with the goal of countering the threats posed by China.
In addition, in response to the recent hacking of several US telecoms firms by a China-linked threat actor, the FCC is working on a project requiring telecommunications providers to secure their networks against cybersecurity threats.
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