Fischer Holds Senate Commerce Subcommittee Hearing, Urges Congress to Protect America’s Communications Networks

Hearing witness highlights need to defend America’s telecommunications networks by enacting Fischer’s
FACT Act
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WASHINGTON
– Today, during a hearing on the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Media, Chairman Deb Fischer (R-NE) pressed leading cybersecurity experts—Jamil Jaffer, Founder and Executive Director of the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School and Robert Mayer, Senior Vice President of Cybersecurity and Innovation at USTelecom—on the growing national security threats posed by Chinese intrusions into America’s telecommunications networks.
During the hearing, Jaffer emphasized the unprecedented scale of China’s Salt Typhoon cyber operation—and the urgent need to enact
Fischer’s
FACT Act
—passed by the Senate—to better protect U.S. infrastructure.
On Fischer’s
FACT Act
being Critical to Countering China:
Fischer:
I mentioned the
FACT Act
and the bill that I passed here in the Senate. How concerned should we be about China in our hardware? In core networks, briefly.
Jaffer:
There is no question that we need to go after the Chinese in this space. They are absolutely targeting those core networks. They spent a lot of time trying to get into our hardware and infiltrate our supply chains.
I think the
FACT Act
is a great piece of legislation, we need to get it enacted as soon as possible.
But we need to go even further. We really have got to get aggressive about identifying the fact that China's infiltrating our infrastructure not just through hardware itself, but through the chips, as well. Right? China has a huge supply of large format chips. They're trying to get advanced chips as well. They're on the path to it. They're not going to get EUV for a while, but they are going to use advanced EUV.
On China’s Ability to Access America’s Communications Networks:
Fischer:
Mr. Jaffer, as you testified, the Salt Typhoon hacks proved that China obtained wide scale access to our telecommunications network. And based on the publicly available information, what distinguishes Salt Typhoon from prior nation-state operations targeting U.S. telecom networks?
Jaffer:
I think the most distinctive thing about Salt Typhoon is the broad, the breadth, and the depth of the access the Chinese government obtained to America's telecommunications infrastructure. Now, again, only based on what we know publicly. It's clear that they were able to go up to nine telecommunications providers.
It appears that they actually obtained access to either our law enforcement or potentially our foreign intelligence surveillance systems at some level. Whether it was the collection or the task targets or what we don't know, the details. But, if you think about what that means, that depth of access and that sustained access to that sense of information is massively damaging, not just to our communications capabilities, but to our national security. And so this is the real challenge, is the depth and breadth of the access they obtained.
On Stronger Domestic Manufacturing and Security Standards:
Fischer:
What policies do you think we need to prioritize with regard to supporting manufacturing of our domestic and our trusted ally equipment  so we don't run into to a lot of the situations that Mr. Jaffer was referring to…
Mayer:
Right, I think we have to tighten the requirements on vendors to improve cyber security. I think the concept of security by design is critical. We have to build it in, not bolt it on afterwards. And I think we need to have a very close relationship with our government intelligence community about what they discover, what's suspicious, and they have to share that with us so we can probe and help them resolve some of the insecurities in that in that realm.