While public discussions of U.S.-China relations focus overwhelmingly on tariffs, threats tied to cyberespionage also are getting increased attention from commentators and government officials. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), for example, is tackling problems associated with Chinese firm Huawei, particularly its equipment’s use in next generation (5G) communications networks. Security concerns, however, go well beyond Huawei and beyond 5G.
Unknown to most consumers, many of these firms also are either state-owned or state-controlled, with large investments from the Chinese government and corporate leadership intimately...
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 5-0 Friday to designate China’s Huawei and ZTE as national security risks, barring their U.S. rural carrier customers from tapping an $8.5 billion government fund to purchase equipment.
This is the latest in a series of actions by the U.S. government aimed at barring American companies from purchasing Huawei and ZTE equipment. Huawei...
Recently I caught up with Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI8) who co-chairs the bipartisan Cyberspace Solarium Commission charged with developing an all-of-government, all-of-society approach to empower the United States to address its cybersecurity challenges. The commission, chartered as part of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), is named for Eisenhower’s Solarium Project, then a competition of ideas to develop the strategy against the Soviet Union. The Congressman is well-skilled for the job, having served twice in Iraq as a Marine Corps intelligence officer, as a counterintelligence officer in the Middle East and Central Asia, and as a member of the CENTCOM (Central Command) assessment team. He then earned a PhD from Georgetown and staffed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Today as a member of the House Committees for Armed Services and Transportation and Infrastructure, he leads efforts to address threats from China and to restore America’s technological leadership.
As described in detail by annual reports of the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission since 2000, Chinese-made information technology presents numerous threats to the...
Strand Consult published a detailed report which discredits claims that banning 5G products from Chinese telecom firms Huawei and ZTE would cost the European Union $62 billion more, and delay 5G rollout.
The new report, titled “The Real Cost to Rip and Replace Chinese Equipment in Telecom Networks,” responded to a June 2019 analysis by the Global System for Mobile Association (GSMA), a global trade lobby group representing 800 mobile operators and 300 supplier companies. GSMA claimed banning telecoms equipment from China’s state-controlled Huawei and ZTE would add an additional $62 billion in cost and delay for an extra 18 months the deployment of 5G networks in Europe.
Strand Consult argues that GSMA’s analysis is inappropriately “based upon assumptions that the market for network equipment is perfectly competitive, which it is not, and...
Huawei’s dominance of rural America’s internet equipment market is threatened by the “Integrated Access Backhaul” (IAB) technology that will slash the cost for rural access.
On the 28th day after his inauguration, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In addition to spending $831 billion on economic stimulus, ARRA directed the Federal Communications Commission to establish the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program to award about $4.5 billion in subsidies for rural and underserved community wireless and internet services.
AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, and Sprint as the largest U.S. wireless companies—with almost 450 million individual and business accounts—had been unwilling to lose tens of billions of dollars to supply high-speed rural wireless access without compensation.
The 55 carriers that serve up to 100,000 subscribers each and are represented by the Rural Wireless Association, received subsidies and spent most of the cash on deeply discounted networking gear from China’s Huawei and ZTE. As a result, about 25 percent of U.S. territory and 4 million Americans rely on Chinese networking hardware.
The 55 carriers that serve up to 100,000 subscribers each and are represented by the Rural Wireless Association, received subsidies and spent most of the cash on deeply...
Last Sunday, the National Association of State Chief Information Security Officers came to Nashville, an event that normally flies under the media radar but plays an immensely important role in the security of American citizens.
This year the conference focused on areas like cybersecurity and malware, two issues vital to citizens of Tennessee and the greater United States.
Tennessee CIO Stephanie Dedmon understands that “[citizens] want to get to the services they need as quickly as possible on whatever device is easiest for them.” This notion rings universally true for the American public, making the security of each of those devices ever more important for CIO’s across the country.
Huawei was identified as a threat in 2012, but it took leadership five years to take action. Thankfully, the Pentagon’s lagging response has finally increased...
BEIJING—China is using a widely downloaded mobile app and a translation service to hoover up billions of pieces of data inside its borders and around the world, according to reports published in recent days by researchers in Australia and Germany.
While policy makers in the West have trained their focus on China’s advances in next-generation cellular technology and invasive cyber-surveillance capabilities, the new research suggests that Beijing has broadened its mass-data-collection efforts to include relatively innocuous technologies, such as language translation.
A Chinese propaganda app that has been likened to a digital-age “Little Red Book” of Chairman Mao’s quotations and that has racked up more than 100 million registered users provides a potential backdoor for the Chinese Communist Party to log users’ locations, calls and contact lists, according to a report published Saturday by German cybersecurity company Cure53. The report was commissioned by the Open Technology Fund of U.S.-financed Radio Free Asia.
The report focuses only on devices operating on the Android operating system, which underpins the vast majority of China’s smartphones. The app is also available...
WASHINGTON—The U.S. added 28 Chinese entities to an export blacklist Monday, citing their role in Beijing’s repression of Muslim minorities in northwest China, just days before high-level trade talks are set to resume in Washington.
The action, which the U.S. said wasn’t related to trade talks, was nonetheless likely to disturb Chinese officials already incensed over what Beijing sees as U.S. support for an increasingly disruptive pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
“I think the Chinese are probably going to see a connection, even if the administration says there isn’t one,” said Matthew Goodman, senior adviser for Asian economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “It’s going to complicate the discussions this week…the timing is going to be awkward for the Chinese.”
The newly identified entities “have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and...
A new report claims the cost of replacing Huawei and ZTE equipment in Europe’s networks is considerably lower than generally assumed.
Soon to be published by Strand Consult, the report is titled “The real cost to rip and replace of Chinese equipment in telecom networks.” It seems to have been written, at least in part, in response to analysis produced by the GSMA, which estimates a ban on Chinese gear would add $62 billion to the cost of European 5G networks and set them back by a year and a half.
The Strand report claims that cost is far lower, putting the cost of replacing Huawei equipment at just $3.5 billion, or around seven bucks per subscriber. The reason for this massive discrepancy is two-fold. Firstly Strand says around half of the GSMA figure is an extrapolation of the broader cost of delaying 5G and secondly it insists that 70-80% of existing RAN equipment is due to be replaced anyway, so should be discounted from the calculations.
CTT co-founder John Strand and his firm Strand Consult are soon to release a study highlighting the overstated costs of replacing Huawei equipment in EU...
Early in my Army career, I served as a foreign area officer in Asia focused on China and have spent the succeeding years in intelligence. Right away in my journey as a career military intelligence officer, I came to have great respect for Chinese discipline. They work hard; they sacrifice. What a large number of Chinese leaders, engineers and academics also do quite well is identify and adopt others’ good ideas. They reverse engineer what they have stolen including copying weapon designs for C-17, F-22, and F-35 planes and the Predator drone. They are masters of “hiding in plain sight.”
In 1999, two Chinese colonels published “Unrestricted Warfare,” a seminal piece that described in precise detail how China could assert dominance in competition with Western powers by using all means of warfare without limitations. America’s problem then was it did not see these other means of warfare for what they could become or how they could be employed.
China intentionally blurs the lines between public and private enterprises, to ensure that the nation’s military, espionage, and commercial interests are intertwined. This takes shape...
