Cybersecurity and Cyberwarfare

Google has warned the Trump Administration it risks compromising US national security if it pushes ahead with sweeping export restrictions on Huawei, as the technology group seeks to continue doing business with the blacklisted Chinese company. Senior executives at Google are pushing US officials to exempt it from a ban on exports to Huawei without a licence approved by Washington. Google is concerned it would not be allowed to update its Android operating system on Huawei’s smartphones, which it argues would prompt the Chinese company to develop its own version of the software.

Joe Franell is a fan of Huawei’s equipment. As the CEO of Eastern Oregon Telecom, he’s responsible for providing internet to about 4,000 customers, many in small communities or remote farmland. He’s been lucky: the Huawei equipment he uses has never failed, which he hasn’t been able to say about everything else in the company’s network.

The recent presidential executive order barred US companies from buying foreign-made telecommunications equipment deemed a national security risk. Although the order does not name Huawei, Congress and our intelligence agencies have voiced concern that the company’s equipment contains vulnerabilities that the Chinese government and others could exploit to spy on or harm US networks. But the executive order misses a critical problem: our networks already contain equipment from Huawei — lots of it.

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.