Chinese spy technology found at US shipping ports: Report | NewsNation Now

there's been an alarming report from Congress it's providing a warning about a potential potential National Security risk at us shipping ports a probe into chinese-built cargo cranes use supports all across the country uncovering communications equipment that does not appear to support normal operations so let's talk about the implications we bring in Jam Jaffer founder and executive director of the National Security Institute jamill thank you so much for your time first of all would is your rea

ction to this discovery of these Chinese communication devices at us ports well you know it's obviously deeply concerning we've heard rumors about these now for about the last six months or a year but this report from the house China select committee uh makes clear uh that um that this these zpmc cranes the Chinese manufacturer have communications back to China they're Gathering data and potentially uh could be used uh in a conflict or to disrupt Supply chains here in the unit States they contro

l over 80% of the cranes in critical us ports I mean this is obviously deeply troubling and you think about it you know it's not just the cranes themselves it's also all the logistics management the ports as well one has to wonder whether that software also um or the or the hardware itself may be a compromise by the Chinese that's obviously a huge concern well and talk about that jam I mean how big do you think the national security threat is at America's ports what could potentially go wrong yo

u know it's it's it's hard to explain how dramatic this could be you know you think about all the quantity of Commodities and material that comes from overseas into our us ports for our critical national uh needs uh that's a huge amount of our of our capability if that goes away if you're unable to unload stuff from container ships onto into the ports and then onto highspeed rail across the country it could dramatically damage our ability to bring Goods uh both critical you know medical supplies

and like Pharmaceuticals a lot of which we we get up from overseas critical minerals and the like that could all be shut down overnight if in fact these capabilities can be used to limit the usage of those cranes you know and I just want to broaden this out a bit Jam I mean how difficult is it to anticipate en counter this technological threat from China you know one of the challenges here is that we just haven't realized how dependent we are we we've learned you over the course of the pandemic

how dependent we were on China for pharmaceutical precursors for PPE but now we're talking about the huge amount of equipment that is at choke points in our economy these ports and one has to believe that it's probably not just the ports it's other Transportation mechanisms as well think about highspeed rail one has to ask how much of that capability parts of it critical parts of it are built in China and might have these embeded capabilities and if so what does that mean and how can we even ge

t it out and how do we then replace it when the US has lost crane building capacity we finally now at the point we're working with Japanese Riders and like and American Riders to resure that that's going to take time then well and and another layer in this uh Jam is you know there was another potential Chinese spy balloon found off the coast of Alaska last week what does that tell you well you know it's clear that the Chinese uh government the Chinese Communist party in particular which controls

China um is you know adverse to us interests they're they're going after our our friends in Taiwan threatening that that that country that Island um and they' they've opposed the us across the world they're making out out you know making a relationship with Russia this this so-called No Limits partnership we see them cooperate with Iran with North Korea so this is a real problem and now you see spy balloons coming over the fact that we didn't catch the early ones early on the fact that we let o

ne sort of continue over critical military bases and now we've got another one potentially we don't know for sure potentially floating to the United States and we don't know what it's doing yet where we know it's not we've been told it's not a threat and again this is the challenge here you know what we don't know is what could be a problem for us we didn't know about these zpn secs we're now figuring it out but it's really late to get in the game and take them out now well J is America doing th

e same thing I mean is China concerned about us spying on them right now look there's no doubt Chinese should know that we are operating in their systems we're looking to collect intelligence and we have capabilities to go after them if we need in the case of a conflict that being said right it's not clear that we necessarily are are in the places they are their their equipment is so vastly spread over our country we're so Reliant that they may have actually gotten the jump on us when it comes t

o things like these cranes we don't know for sure and the government obviously won't talk about that uh but I think they can be they can you can rest assured that we're making efforts to get in their system as well to respond to this threat yeah certainly an important conversation Jam thank you so much thanks for having me on thank you for watching go to newsnation now.com to find newsnation on your television provider and don't forget to click the red subscribe button below to get more of news

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