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CNN said that an investigation by the FBI into Chinese land purchases near important infrastructure and Huawei equipment on many American cell towers found that the Chinese company's telecom equipment could intercept and even disrupt U.S. military communications, including those of the U.S. Strategic Command, which is in charge of the country's nuclear arsenal.
According to a CNN report based on interviews with 12 current and former intelligence officials, the Chinese telecom giant Huawei is being looked into by the FBI. The FBI now thinks that Huawei's equipment can be used to listen in on U.S. military communications and even stop them from happening if they are turned on.
Donald Trump put in place policies that make it hard for Huawei to do business in the U.S. This hurts Huawei's profits a lot, but the company's equipment is still on many cell towers, including those strategically placed near important military infrastructure.
Nuclear Missile in Silo (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/Getty)
Huawei Technologies President Ren Zhengfei (center) points to a bar machine used for testing networks, during a visit by Chinese Communist Party Leader Xi Jinping (second from right) in London on Oct. 21, 2015. (Matthew Lloyd/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
John Lenkart, a former senior FBI agent, says that the agency started looking at Huawei's business deals from a financial point of view to find deals that "didn't make sense from a return-on-investment point of view." Lenkart says, "A lot of concerns about counterintelligence were found based on."
CNN says:
By examining the Huawei equipment themselves, FBI investigators determined it could recognize and disrupt DOD-spectrum communications — even though it had been certified by the FCC, according to a source familiar with the investigation.
“It’s not technically hard to make a device that complies with the FCC that listens to nonpublic bands but then is quietly waiting for some activation trigger to listen to other bands,” said Eduardo Rojas, who leads the radio spectrum lab at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. “Technically, it’s feasible.”
To prove a device had clandestine capabilities, Rojas said, would require technical experts to strip down a device “to the semi-conductor level” and “reverse engineer the design.” But, he said, it can be done.
Even though it would be a huge strategic risk for a hostile Communist dictatorship to be able to spy on and possibly stop communications, the government is moving slowly to require a "rip and replace," which would involve removing all Huawei telecom equipment from cell towers and other infrastructure. One CEO who was quoted in the article said that taking Chinese spy equipment out of his towers is "hard and costs a lot of money."
It looks like this problem will keep happening until Congress and the government decide to do something about Chinese spying.
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