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The Federal Communications Commission is investigating several Chinese telecom companies, including Huawei and China Telecom, over concerns that some of them are ignoring restrictions on their operations in the US.
The regulator said it had opened a “sweeping investigation” into Chinese groups that also include ZTE, a big telecoms equipment provider, and Hikvision, the world’s largest maker of surveillance cameras. It is also targeting China Mobile International USA, and the US subsidiaries of China Telecom, and China Unicom.
FCC chair Brendan Carr said the agency believed some groups were ignoring previous US efforts to address security threats from China. The FCC has previously revoked some authorisations to operate in the US, and placed some companies on the “covered list” of groups from which the government cannot buy products because they are thought to pose a security threat.
“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. “We are not going to just look the other way.”
Carr, who was recently appointed chair by President Donald Trump, said the FCC would determine the scope of the targeted companies’ ongoing activities in the US and would “move quickly to close any loopholes that have permitted untrustworthy, foreign adversary state-backed actors to skirt our rules”.
The FCC has sent letters to the companies seeking information about their operations, and has sent a subpoena to one of the firms.
Carr said the move was the first big action being taken by a new council on national security that he recently set up to increase the agency’s focus on telecom and cyber-related threats from adversaries, but particularly China.
This is a developing story
