Cybersecurity and Cyberwarfare

Plans to upgrade wireless service in some rural areas is being halted abruptly since President Donald Trump issued an executive order that banned the purchase of equipment from companies posing a national security threat. That includes gear from Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, a major supplier of equipment to rural wireless companies.

The Federal Election Commission gave the go-ahead to a nonprofit organization seeking to offer free cybersecurity services to political campaigns, upending rules that typically consider such free services illegal campaign contributions. The FEC’s reasoning, in a nutshell, was that it ordinarily bans such services due to the possibility people might try to cash in on political favors later. But in this case, the risk of Russian and Chinese hackers running roughshod over the 2020 elections is far worse.

It may have begun as a trade war, but the US conflict with China is increasingly becoming a technology war. President Trump’s decision to confront Beijing over policies that he says discriminate against foreign companies and distort global markets has become a battle for control of advanced communications and computing technologies. That evolution is taking the transpacific conflict into sensitive realms of national security and human rights, making a quick settlement an ever more distant outcome.

The United States 5G Leadership Act of 2019 legislation would establish US policy for the commercial deployment and security of fifth generation (5G) networks by creating the Supply Chain Security Trust Fund grant program. This program would help US communications providers remove from their networks Chinese equipment determined to threaten national security. The bill:

Rep Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) led the introduction of a bipartisan bill to protect next-generation telecommunications systems and mobile infrastructure in the United States. Rep Spanberger introduced the legislation alongside Rep Susan W. Brooks (R-IN), Tom O’Halleran (D-AZ), Francis Rooney (R-FL), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), and Elise Stefanik (R-NY).

In swaths of rural America, along roads where there are just a few farms or homes within a mile-long stretch, customers are so few that the likes of AT&T and T-Mobile don’t bother to build cell towers for coverage.

The Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) amends the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) by adding Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (Huawei) to the Entity List. The US Government has determined that there is reasonable cause to believe that Huawei has been involved in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.

Some lawmakers say the federal government should help small US wireless providers rip out and replace their existing Chinese network equipment. The Rural Wireless Association puts the collective price tag at $1 billion. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said he would raise the issue with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and push for a solution in the Senate Appropriations Committee. “We need to provide support to those small and rural communities who have already installed some of this equipment and will need help in covering the costs of removing and replacing it,” he said.

My intention today is to outline the most recent actions of the Federal Communications Commission pertaining to the protection of US national security, identify the difficult position in which we find ourselves with regard to Chinese telecommunications providers and manufacturers, and raise certain concerns with respect to the operations of the International Telecommunication Union, or the ITU as it is more commonly known.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai issued the following statement regarding the President’s Executive Order to protect our nation’s communications networks and the security of the communications supply chain: “Protecting America’s communications networks is vital to our national, economic, and personal security. I therefore applaud the President for issuing this Executive Order to safeguard the communications supply chain. Given the threats presented by certain foreign companies’ equipment and services, this is a significant step toward securing America’s