Countless local and state-level establishments are at risk of data infiltration due to the purchase of Chinese technology, including educational, medical, and other facilities. Over 1,500 government organizations across 49 states acquired technology that is banned at the federal level, raising national security concerns.
From Fox News:
"Over the past few years, anecdotally, we'd heard that a lot of these state and local governments were buying this technology, but it had never been quantified before," said Michael Kratsios, one of the report's authors. "We wanted to do an analysis to actually determine the extent to which this technology – actually banned by the federal government – was being procured by state and locals." Kratsios, who served in the Trump administration as the chief technology officer, along with co-authors Jack Corrigan, a research analyst at CSET, and Sergio Fontanez, an associate at Washington, D.C.-based law firm Holland & Knight, concluded in the report that a number of loopholes exist that enable local governments to buy cheaper Chinese technology despite federal restrictions. Using local procurement data, the authors tracked state and local entities' purchases of technology manufactured by five Chinese companies Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision, Dahua and Hytera. Overall, they discovered that, during the time analyzed, state and local entities made 5,700 transactions of technologies, including smartphones, surveillance cameras, temperature scanners, handheld radios and networking equipment worth about $45.2 million. The technology could ultimately serve as "conduits for government espionage and other nefarious activities," the report states. "This covers everything from schools, hospitals, transit systems, utility departments and other government facilities," Kratsios told Fox News Digital in an interview. "The majority of these purchases are actually done by public schools and universities, but you do see a lot of activity also in the in public utility space and even some activity in the judiciary." "What's interesting about this technology is that you only need one network-connected piece of equipment to be able to potentially compromise any network that it is connected to," he continued. "That's where we see the real danger."
