Securing America's Networks Against Chinese Security Threats

James Andrew Lewis: (In progress) – and Nury Turkey of the – Turkel – pardon me – of – who will speak on the issue of securing America’s networks against Chinese security threats. This is something that all of us have been working on for a long time. There’s many issues, as you know. The run of show today is that Commissioner Carr will make some opening remarks. And then Dean and Nury will follow.

I’ll give brief intros. Their full bios are available on our website. But Commissioner Brendan Carr is the senior Republican on the FCC and he was previously the agency’s general counsel. He’s led its work to modernize infrastructure rules and accelerate the buildout of high-speed networks, a crucial area for competition. He’s also done a lot on expanding the skilled workforce we’ll need for future networks. He brings years of experience in the private and public sectors in communications and tech policy. So we’re lucky to have him here today.

He’ll be followed by Dean Cheng, an old friend from the Heritage Foundation, who has been doing research on China’s political and security affairs for as long as I’ve known him, which is a long time. He specializes in China’s military and foreign policy, and in particular the relationship with the United States and the rest of Asia. Dean has written extensively on China’s military doctrine and technology policies. He previously worked at SAIC, the Center for Naval Analysis, which is an FFRDC, and prior to that – I didn’t know this – at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. So there’s a real blast from the past.

Finally, we’re lucky to have Nury Turkel, who’s a lawyer and foreign policy expert and human rights advocate. In May 2020 he was appointed as a commissioner to the U.S. commission on international religious freedom. He’s a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Nury serves as the chairman of the board for the Uyghur Human Rights Project. So again, a new perspective to this and I think this will be a good discussion.

The format is pretty straightforward. We’ll open with Commissioner Carr. So if you’re ready, please go ahead.

Brendan Carr: Great. Well, thank you so much to you, James, and to CSIS for hosting this event and inviting me to speak. Great to be joined by these distinguished panelists. And after I give a couple remarks I’m happy to join with them and take some questions as well. What I’m going to lay out here today are two additional steps that I think the FCC should take to ensure the security of our communications networks against the threats posed by Communist China, and also some targeted action that we should take at the FCC to address the genocide that’s taking place in Xinjiang right now.

And to help put this in context I’ll start two years ago. I had the privilege of visiting Malmstrom Air Force Base, which is all the way up near Great Falls, Montana. And I spent time there with Colonel Jennifer Reeves. And she’s the commander of the 341st missile wing. Colonel Reeves and her team have one of the most significant and weighty missions in government. In their charge are 150 intercontinental ballistic missiles loaded in underground silos spread across northern Montana. These are missiles that when launched can carry warheads almost 10,000 miles. Colonel Reeves told me that her job is to make sure that they’re always ready to go.

Now, set against that destructive power is a completely serene and wide-open landscape. It’s just wheat fields and big sky country. Except for one thing: There are cell towers all around those Montana missile fields that have been running on Huawei equipment. Now, this is not just a concern for the military. Everything that we do in modern society now runs on interconnected networks – from banking to transportation, even our power grids. And this will become only more so as we continue to see 5G networks spread out across the country. If these networks are threatened, everything that we have come to rely on is threatened.

Now, we’ve acknowledged the threat posed by telecom equipment vendors with ties to Communist China going back as far as 2012. And that’s when a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued a report recommending that companies avoid using Huawei, ZTE because of the threats that are posed, and that government agencies themselves should remain vigilant and focused on that threat. And I would say over the past three to four years, you know, we have really turned the page in this country, in the U.S., on the weak and timid approach that we took to Communist China in the past. And frankly, that was a bipartisan failing. And we now have a bipartisan commitment, from my perspective, to show the strength and the resolve needed to address Communist China’s threat.

We’ve been doing our part at the FCC. A couple years ago we launched a proceeding to take a look at Huawei, ZTE, and other carriers with ties to Communist China. And we started proceedings to make sure that carriers in the U.S. that receive federal dollars, universal service funds, are not using those funds to put insecure Huawei or ZTE gear into their networks. I also called for the FCC to do a top to bottom review of every carrier that has a 214 authorization, which is an FCC authorization to operate a communications line here, and to look at them and see if they have ties to Communist China. We’ve now moved forward with that proposal. We have a number of carriers that we’re looking at proposing to revoke their authorizations.

Now when we adopted these rules that require telecom carriers to remove and replace equipment that pose an unacceptable national security risk, that was an important step. And it made substantial progress in terms of securing U.S. national security. But the rules that the FCC adopted only apply to equipment, as I noted, that are purchased with federal funding – again, known as the university service fund. The FCC rules expressly allow carriers to use private funds to purchase and use that exact same equipment.

So in my view, it is time that we close this glaring loophole. Once we’ve determined that Huawei or any other gear poses an unacceptable national security risk, it makes no sense to allow that exact same equipment to get purchased and inserted into our communications network as long as federal dollars aren’t involved. It’s the presence of this insecure gear in our networks that’s the threat, not the source of funding used to purchase it. Yet, if you look back at the FCC’s equipment authorization regime, we continue to review and approve – give our stamp of approval – to thousands of applications from Huawei and other entities that we’ve deemed national security risks.

So what I’m calling for is for the FCC to move swiftly to eliminate Communist China’s backdoor into our networks. And I think doing this is going to be consistent with decisions made on a bipartisan basis in the Secure Network Act of 2019. Again, we have this equipment authorization process that disallows any device from being marketed, sold, or used in the U.S. unless it goes through that approval process. And I think we need to carry through our decisions on Huawei and ZTE with respect to federal dollars and apply it to our equipment authorization regime, so we close that loophole that allows these insecure devices to continue to get inserted into the U.S. communications network.

I also think we need to take a second step. And that’s the other idea that I’m going to throw out there today, which is we need to adopt measures to ensure devices made with forced labor do not enter the U.S. market. You know, there’s longstanding general rule that prohibit goods made with slave labor generally from entering the U.S. market. Senator Rubio and others in Congress have gotten together on a bipartisan basis and have introduced legislation to strengthen that existing prohibition. I think it’s very clear that we aren’t doing enough.

And when you step back, and you look at the genocide that is taking place in Xinjiang right now – there’s a number of studies that look at this and including at least one that points to the potential for slave labor to have been used in the supply chain of a U.S. company – it’s not enough for all of us to sort of wait around and see what happens. I think it’s incumbent on all of us to take some action. So what I think we need to do is we need to look at that same equipment authorization process that the FCC has. And again, this is a process that applies to any electronical – electronic device that comes into the U.S. market.

And we should strengthen the safeguards to make sure that when companies seek to apply to get their electronic devices approved by the FCC, and therefore approved to be used in the U.S., that we apply a heightened review to make sure there is not any forced labor there, particularly devices that were tied back to Xinjiang. So I think we need to track the approach put forward by Senator Rubio and a bipartisan group of senators. That was a bill, on the House side at least, that passed through the House during last Congress. I think the CCP is very plainly committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.

And so we need to take a more – (audio break) – FCC without waiting for that bill to pass through Congress and start a proceeding that would look at how we use our equipment authorization process to make sure that type of forced labor isn’t in the supply chain. Relatedly, Communist China’s made clear that it wants to dominate the global market for semiconductors and chipsets. And there’s certainly no reason to think that they will not refrain from using forced labor in pursuing that goal.

So I think this is yet another reason why we must require companies to be more vigilant, not to look the other way, and to take additional actions across their own supply chains to make sure that we’re not supporting Communist China’s human rights abuses, that they’re not profiting from those practices by the production of chipsets, or really any other electronic devices that we, at the FCC, ultimately review and approve.

You know, with that I’m happy to turn to the rest of the panelists for their remarks. And I’m happy to engage more directly on these two ideas that I’ve thrown out – closing this loophole so that we have no devices that get into our networks regardless of the source of funding that we’ve already determined to be a national security risk, and that we apply a heightened review to make sure that we’re not allowing any devices – from garage door openers, to network gears, to cellphones – that we review and approve at the FCC that we are making sure that the companies that are submitting these applications are doing even more work to make sure that forced labor is not involved.

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