A sweeping Chinese government hacking campaign against American telecoms firms is a “very, very serious matter” that is “still going on,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Thursday in an interview on MSNBC.
Mayorkas confirmed that the long-term effort, nicknamed Salt Typhoon, was “a very sophisticated hack” that was not done “overnight.”
The hacking campaign is one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history. It has breached eight domestic telecom and internet service providers and dozens of others around the world, a White House official said this month. The United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand claim it is part of an intelligence operation conducted by China.
The presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, as well as the office of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told NBC News in October that the FBI had informed them that they had been targeted.
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Mayorkas said that the federal government has “taken action” and that the “telecom providers are focused intensely on it, and they are working in partnership with us to remediate it.”
The New York Times reported Monday that the data from Salt Typhoon has given Beijing a road map that will help it determine which Chinese spies have been identified by U.S. officials and which have not.
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Mayorkas confirmed that the Commerce Department issued a notice last week to China Telecom Americas, the American subsidiary of one of China’s largest communications companies. The notice said that the department had reached a preliminary finding that China Telecom America's provision of cloud services and that its presence in American networks posed a national security risk.
Mayorkas said the firm had 30 days to respond. “It’s very important to send a message and the message has substance to it,” he said. “It’s not purely symbolic.”
Defending response to drones
Mayorkas repeated that U.S. officials believed that the sightings of drones in the Northeastern United States did not represent a threat to public safety.
“We know of no threat to people’s security, and if we learn of any cause for concern, we will take action,” he said. “And we will communicate immediately with the American public.”
Congress needs to pass laws that will give the Department of Homeland Security, as well as state and local officials, more ability to regulate drones, Mayorkas said. Drones are “not a new phenomenon,” he said, and DHS needs “our authorities to catch up with the development of drone activity over the last 10 years.”
Officials need “the authority to take down drones when the situation so warrants,” he said, and “state and local officials, law enforcement officials, should have counter-drone authorities with appropriate safeguards.”
Mayorkas also defended the Biden administration’s record on immigration. He said the administration has “removed or returned or expelled more people than in the prior administration,” referring to President-elect Donald Trump’s first term.
He argued that the Biden administration has “been tough on enforcement" and "focused intensively on individuals who pose a public safety threat."
Since Biden took executive actions in June designed to deter migrants from crossing into the United States, "the number of individuals encountered at our southern border are below 2019 levels,” Mayorkas said. “And that’s very important to note.”
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