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Taking a break from attacking the First Amendment, FCC boss Brendan Carr this week engaged in a strange bit of performance art: his FCC announced that they’d be effectively adding all foreign-made routers to the agency’s “covered list,” in a bid to ban their sale in the United States.
That is unless manufacturers obtain “conditional approval” (including all appropriate application fees and favors, of course) from the Trump administration via the Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security. In other words, the Trump administration is attempting to shake down manufacturers of all routers manufactured outside the United States (which again, is nearly all of them) under the pretense of cybersecurity.
You can probably see how this might result in some looming legal action. And who knows what other “favors” to the Trump administration might be required to get conditional approval, like the inclusion of backdoors accessible by our current authoritarian government.
A fact sheet insists this was all necessary because many foreign routers have been exploited by foreign actors:
“Recently, malicious state and non-state sponsored cyber attackers have increasingly leveraged the vulnerabilities in small and home office routers produced abroad to carry out direct attacks against American civilians in their homes.”
But the biggest recent cybersecurity incident in recent U.S. memory, the Chinese Salt Typhoon hack (which involved Chinese state-sanctioned hackers massively compromising U.S. telecom networks to spy on important people for years) largely involved the broadly deregulated U.S. telecom sector failing to do basic things like change default admin passwords. And then trying to hide additional evidence of intrusion for liability reasons. A very domestic failure.
We’ve discussed at length that while Brendan Carr loves to pretend he’s doing important things on cybersecurity, most of his policies have made the U.S. less secure. Like his mindless deregulation of the privacy and security standards of domestic telecoms and hardware makers. Or his destruction of smart home testing programs just because they had some operations in China.
Most of the Trump administration “cybersecurity” solutions have been indistinguishable from a foreign attack. They’ve gutted numerous government cybersecurity programs (including a board investigating Salt Typhoon), and dismantled the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) (responsible for investigating significant cybersecurity incidents). The administration claims to be worried about cybersecurity, but then goes out of its way to ensure domestic telecoms see no meaningful oversight whatsoever.
I’d argue Trump administration destruction of corporate oversight of domestic telecom privacy/security standards is a much bigger threat to national security and consumer safety than 90% of foreign routers, but good luck finding any news outlet that brings that up in their coverage of the FCC’s latest move.
In reality, the biggest current threat to U.S. national security is the Trump administration’s rampant, historic corruption. Absolutely any time you see the Trump administration taking steps to “improve national security,” or “address cybersecurity” you can just easily assume there’s some ulterior motive of personal benefit to the president, as we saw when the great hyperventilation over TikTok was “fixed” by offloading the app to Trump’s dodgy billionaire friends.
