“Beijing is … using political, economic, and military tools, as well as propaganda, to advance its influence,” Vice President Mike Pence says.
The Chinese have attempted to spy on some 30 U. S. companies, the White House says, also warning that Beijing is meddling with U. S. elections.
Those are among the reasons Vice President Mike Pence amplified the Trump administration’s assertion that it will no longer play nice with the Chinese communist regime.
“Beijing is employing a whole-of-government approach, using political, economic, and military tools, as well as propaganda, to advance its influence and benefit its interests in the United States,” Pence said Thursday, speaking at the Hudson Institute in Washington.
While much of the media coverage of Pence’s remarks focused on election meddling, the vice president also discussed cybersecurity and Beijing’s increasing militarism, and called for American companies to be on guard in dealing with China.
Here are four key threats Chinese policies pose to the U. S., according to the vice president.
1. Cyber-espionage
Chinese spies found vulnerabilities in the U. S. technology supply chain to infiltrate computer networks of nearly 30 U. S. companies, including Apple and Amazon, as well as banks and federal contractors, Bloomberg Businessweek first reported Thursday, the same day Pence took China to task.
The federal contractors included companies that have worked with the Central Intelligence Agency and with the International Space Station.
Microchips, about the size of a grain of sand, were inserted into the manufacturing of equipment in China of Super Micro Computer Inc., which is a server supplier for several major companies in the United States.
Investigators determined the chips allowed attackers to create backdoor entry to alter computers. However, Amazon, Apple, Super Micro itself and the Chinese government all disputed the Bloomberg reporting.
“This is a backdoor into the hardware level in determining personal identification, health care records, and possibly even voting machines,” Dean Cheng, research fellow on Chinese political and security affairs at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal.
“If the chip story is true, there is something fundamentally wrong with our supply chain,” he added.
Cheng contends these cybersecurity concerns are far weightier than concerns about election interference and spreading propaganda.
The White House National Security Council referred to President Donald Trump’s National Cyber Strategy released on Sept. 20. The strategy focuses on securing federal networks and the nation’s critical infrastructure and on combating cybercrime and improving incident reporting.
“We’ve taken action to authorize increased capability in the cyber world to build deterrence against our adversaries,” Pence said in his Hudson Institute remarks.
