House GOP Lawmaker: CCP-Linked Tech ‘Should Be Unplugged, Ripped Off the Wall’ of Federal Buildings

Federal agencies might still be using compromised Chinese devices that the government banned several years ago, National Review has exclusively learned from a House lawmaker who has opened an inquiry into the matter.

The lawmaker, Representative Ashley Hinson (R., Iowa), has launched the inquiry because although federal regulations prohibit government agencies from purchasing equipment from several Chinese military-linked surveillance companies, products purchased prior to the implementation of the ban might still remain in use. This could include equipment from notorious Chinese telecom giants such as Huawei and ZTE and from video-surveillance companies including Hikvision and Dahua — each of which has been sanctioned by the U.S.

Hinson, who is a member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told National Review that her effort is motivated by long-standing concerns about these firms, in addition to the recent revelations that Chinese-government-backed hackers breached sensitive U.S. networks and accessed the emails of high-level American officials, including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns.

“If there is still telecommunications and video-surveillance equipment produced by the PRC or PRC-linked entities in federal buildings it should be unplugged, ripped off the wall, and thrown where the sun doesn’t shine. It’s unacceptable that the government has lost track of potentially compromised equipment still installed in federal buildings — we cannot leave ourselves vulnerable to cyberattacks by the CCP while they are clearly on offense,” Hinson said.

But part of the problem is that the government doesn’t really know how prevalent the use of equipment from the blocked companies is.

In 2019, Congress passed a law barring federal entities from procuring or purchasing equipment from the Chinese firms in question, and a subsequent federal acquisition regulation (FAR) implemented the ban. The federal government does not interpret that as a requirement for agencies to remove equipment purchased prior to the ban, however. The General Services Administration, which operates the government’s buildings, has said that there’s no law mandating the removal of the preexisting Chinese equipment and that each agency assesses the risks itself, according to a Hinson aide.

On Monday, Hinson requested that the Government Accountability Office provide information on how government agencies deal with the use of equipment from the Chinese firms in question — and outline the steps that the federal government has taken to remove the equipment from high-security facilities.

“GAO has reported that Federal government facilities—some of which contain high-security space used for classified operations, as data centers, and to store items such as weapons and sensitive evidence—are susceptible to cyber threats from foreign sources that may affect their information technology systems,” Hinson wrote in a letter to Comptroller General Gene Dodaro. “I am concerned that nefarious actors could infiltrate our IT systems by exploiting the PRC-connected equipment or services that remain in Federal buildings and privately-owned buildings with Federal leases before the FAR requirements were implemented on August 13, 2019.” The letter gave the GAO until September 1 to report back on its findings.

Security concerns linked to each of the companies covered by the rule have been extensively documented by watchdog groups and raised by senior U.S. government officials. Hikvision’s products are a linchpin of the Chinese Communist Party’s high-tech police state in the Xinjiang region. They and Dahua cameras can single out ethnic Uyghurs using artificial intelligence, the video-surveillance trade group IPVM has found.

U.S. officials also maintain that Huawei, which has likewise been linked to the atrocities against Uyghurs through company documents, is a conduit for Beijing’s espionage. Last year, federal prosecutors brought charges against Chinese Ministry of State Security agents who allegedly worked with Huawei in a failed attempt to infiltrate the Justice Department and thwart the prosecution of the company’s CFO.

The GSA might soon also be asked to produce an inventory of all equipment made by the Chinese firms that is currently used in federal buildings, as language inserted by Hinson into an annual appropriations bill requests one. “It is essential to our national security that all Chinese technology or equipment, including that made by Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision, Hytera, and Dahua, installed in or on Federal Government property or Federally-leased properties is removed and replaced expeditiously,” the provision states.