UPDATE A congressional committee moved to force China’s three telecoms to cooperate with an investigation into their alleged support of the Chinese military and government, according to letters seen by Reuters. The House of Representatives’ Select Committee on China used its subpoena powers in an effort to compel China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom to answer questions about whether they could exploit access to American data through their U.S. cloud and internet businesses.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers continue to express concern over the Chinese telecoms’ U.S. operations following high-profile Chinese-led cyberattacks, including Volt Typhoon, which the FBI said has allowed China to gain access to American telecommunications, energy, water and other critical infrastructure, Inside Towers reported.
Beijing has denied responsibility for those attacks. A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington, D.C. stated, “We oppose the U.S. over-stretching the concept of national security, using national apparatus and long-arm jurisdiction to bring down Chinese companies.”
Committee Chair John Moolenaar (R-MI) and Ranking Member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) sought the companies’ responses in March to questions after a 2024 Reuters report that they were under U.S. Commerce Department investigation. The committee said the companies ignored that request.
The FCC denied China Mobile’s application to provide U.S. telecommunications service in 2019, and revoked China Telecom and China Unicom’s authorizations in 2021 and 2022, Inside Towers reported. But the companies still have a small presence in the U.S., such as providing cloud services and routing wholesale U.S. internet traffic.
U.S. regulators and lawmakers fear the companies could access personal information and intellectual property stored in their clouds and provide it to the Chinese government or prevent Americans from gaining access.
In three similar letters dated April 23, notifying the companies of the subpoenas, Moolenaar and Krishnamoorthi said the select committee received information indicating the companies “may continue to maintain network Points of Presence, data center access, and cloud-related offerings in the United States, potentially through subsidiaries or affiliates.” They called for the companies’ full cooperation by May 7.
The companies did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
The FCC, too, has sent Letters of Inquiry and at least one subpoena to the entities named on its Covered List, Inside Towers reported. It’s investigating alleged Chinese Communist Party operations in the U.S. by Huawei Technologies Company, ZTE Corporation, Hytera Communications Corporation, Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Company, Dahua Technology Company, China Mobile International USA Inc., China Telecom (Americas) Corp., Pacifica Networks Corp./ComNet (USA) LLC, and China Unicom (Americas) Operations Ltd.
“To safeguard our networks, the FCC has placed those CCP-aligned entities on our Covered List, and we have revoked many of the FCC authorizations that they had been operating under,” FCC Chair Brendan Carr said in March. “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.”
“We are not going to just look the other way,” Carr stressed. “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.”
By Leslie Stimson, Inside Towers Washington Bureau Chief
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