(Jan. 27) Less than one week into his presidency, Joe Biden has already put U.S. security at greater risk to Chinese and other threats.
Biden, who long has been accused by critics of being soft on China, issued a lengthy executive order in which, buried amid matters purportedly designed to combat climate change, was an anomalous and potentially dangerous provision. The provision in question addresses nothing reasonably connected to climate change. Instead, it suspends for 90 days a key security measure put in place last May 1 by former President Donald Trump. Biden’s suspension of Trump’s measure makes not the slightest sense.
Trump’s Executive Order 13920 declared a national emergency with respect to the nation’s electric grid and prohibited the acquisition or installation of “any bulk-power electric equipment … designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied, by persons owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of a foreign adversary.” In sum, Trump forbade the use of grid equipment that is made in China, Russia, or other hostile nations.
Trump’s order was a common-sense response to real, proven threats. Just last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States seized a Chinese-built transformer because officials believe “its electronics had been secretly given malicious capabilities, possibly allowing a distant adversary to monitor or even disable it on command.” Cybersecurity expert Joseph Weiss reported that officials found “electronics that should not have been part of the transformer — hardware backdoors” that could allow the Chinese to “effectively gain control of the transformers without any network forensics being the wiser.”
Weiss also reminds us that China was first caught trying to hack into a U.S. grid in California as far back as 2001, and that “the Russians have been in our U.S. grids since 2014.”
Remote computer access may not be the only problem….
[The full column is here.]
