The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has vowed to track down companies that could be evading sanctions against Chinese telecommunications operators.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said that the commission began an investigation to root out organizations that were still operating with equipment and services from companies in China that are currently banned in the U.S.
The Covered List, which includes the likes of Huawei, ZTE and China Telecom, is intended to block U.S.-based carriers and service providers from using equipment and services from companies that have close ties to adversary governments. The Chinese government has long been suspected of forcing companies in the country to allow for covert monitoring and data collection.
The fear from Uncle Sam is that the equipment and services from those companies could be embedded with back doors and data collection components that could potentially be leveraged for espionage operations.
According to Carr, the commission suspects that some of those companies could still be using nefarious means to get their products into the U.S. telecommunications sector.
“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 in announcing the operation.
“We are not going to just look the other way.”
According to the FCC, the operation to root out lingering Chinese infiltration has been ongoing since the announcement earlier this month of a new FCC-backed Council on National Security.
The council’s first official action was to investigate whether any U.S. operators are still using gear or services from those banned Chinese vendors, thus posing a potential national security risk.
“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,” said Carr
Notably absent from the announcement was any mention of investigating or pursuing the use of software from security vendor Kaspersky, the only non-Chinese company on the covered list.
The Russia-based security vendor, suspected of maintaining close ties to the Kremlin, was sanctioned and forced to shut down its U.S. operation over espionage fears. The Trump administration has also ordered the U.S. Cyber Command to cease operations against the Russian government while it was reported that CISA was told to scale back efforts against Russian threat actors, though those reports have been disputed.
