TECH NEWS – The United States’ Federal Communications Commission, shortened to FCC from now on, effectively launched a ban on Huawei and ZTE devices, with concerns about possible spying.

FCC had a unanimous vote on Friday about how they ban spending money on Chinese telecommunication devices (ZTE, Huawei, cheaper than other solutions) so that American military bases in the rural regions of the country would not be „open” to spy via the 5G technology. With the vote, the Universal Service Fund (shortened to USF onwards) is no longer allowed to spend money on the two companies’ devices that would have been used to create broadband Internet connections in rural America. „These two companies pose a great security risk because Chinese intelligence agencies have opportunities to tamper with their products in both the design and manufacturing processes,” the FCC noted.

In 2017, Chinese law was passed that forces companies there to work together with the government, and Huawei already got caught with espionage, when its devices were sending data back to China from the African Union’s headquarters. Thus, Americans have concerns with hardware made by ZTE and Huawei, as they could have backdoors to provide access to networks and data. (Then again, America could do the same thing possibly with Cisco devices, who knows?)

„Every day or every week they pump updates or patches … and we can’t say there isn’t a hidden command in those. The Chinese are very aggressive and nimble at intelligence collection. This isn’t a country that likes us, and they don’t behave in a particularly trustworthy manner. So would you want military bases [or] some of the national labs that are out in rural areas depending on network technology that might be reporting back to China? It’s a risk,” James Lewis, senior vice president and director of the technology policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said.

FCC also proposed to all USF telecommunications carriers recipients to remove existing Huawei and ZTE devices from their networks, and there would be a fund to reimburse their transitional costs. It’s not a cheap thing, though: Tom Wheeler, former chairman of FCC, says the costs could be as much as one billion dollars. „They knew that the United States government was urging carriers not to use Chinese equipment. They knew that the major carriers had already said, ‘Yes, we won’t [use it],’ and they still decided to go ahead and do it,” Wheeler said, hoping that „the bailout will also contain some expectations” by the US government on what the rural carriers should do in the future to protect their networks.

There was also a provision in the voting that creates an information collection effort which would help telecom providers identifying the amount of Huawei and ZTE devices in their networks, giving them a helping hand on figuring out their removal and replacement cost, too. „One thing that we actually don’t have a good handle on is how much Chinese equipment is currently on U.S. networks and what’s the actual cost associated with taking it all out, so this is a good way to actually audit what the state of affairs is,” said Martijn Rasser, a senior fellow at the the Center for New American Security’s technology and national security program.

FCC’s decision came 1.5 years after their Huawei/ZTE proposal, but amongst the national security concerns, it’s not sure if the US has a comprehensive 5G strategy. The government also tries to get other countries away from Huawei when it comes to 5G technology. „If Huawei was a Brazilian company or an Indian company, they wouldn’t be having this trouble. It’s because they are connected to a hostile foreign power and there’s not … a lot they can do about that,” Lewis added.

With the FCC ban, the military could be in a better situation, as their networks wouldn’t have spying eyes from China in them. Still, the one billion dollars sound a lot – perhaps the China import tariffs could come in handy here. Still, public subsidies can’t be spent on Chinese hardware, which could sound good.

Source: TheFifthDomain

Please support our page theGeek.games on Patreon, so we can continue to write you the latest gaming, movie and tech news and reviews as an independent magazine.
Become a Patron!