FCC Chairman Brendan Carr established a new Council on National Security within the agency, Inside Towers reported. Now, he’s disclosed the Council has begun an investigation into U.S. operations of Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-aligned businesses whose equipment or services the FCC previously placed on its Covered List. These are telecoms and other companies the U.S. has determined their equipment, or services pose a national security risk.
The Commission says despite being on this list, some or all of those companies may still be operating in the U.S.—either because they do not believe the FCC’s Covered List prohibits particular types of operations or otherwise. The Covered List entities targeted are: 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 assess their current levels of operation, the FCC sent Letters of Inquiry and at least one subpoena to the entities named on the Covered List. The FCC is gathering response information and will determine any actions that may be necessary.
“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,” said Carr. “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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