A ninth U.S. telecommunications firm has been hacked by the Chinese espionage group Salt Typhoon, but American leaders have never taken adequate measures to protect vital networks, China expert Gordon Chang warned on Newsmax Saturday.
"The United States has known about this for decades, all throughout this century, for instance, and we've not taken adequate measures to protect our networks," Chang told Newsmax's "Saturday Report." "The Chinese are going to use this for all sorts of espionage purposes, but also they are going to use it to get information about individuals to blackmail them."
The American people must ask their leaders why they have allowed the United States to remain vulnerable to China's actions, he added.
"You have the means to stop this," he said. "You have chosen not to do so. Why are you not protecting us?"
Part of the issue is that the United States has allowed telephone and telecommunications companies to set their own standards and protections, said Chang.
"We have not had an adequate sense of what our adversaries and our enemies are trying to do," he said. "After the Cold War, we just sort of thought that the competition was over and that history had ended, as Francis Fukuyama had said. So this is really on us. We know what to do."
It's not just a matter of protecting the nation's telecommunications networks, but costs must be imposed on China for what it has been doing, said Chang.
"If we impose those costs high enough, China would stop doing it," he said. "But we do not have the political will to protect us.
"The reason why this is really critical is not just them accessing all of this information. It's China believing it can do what it wants because it sees that we are feeble. We may think we're the strongest nation in history, but we are feeble."
However, the United States has a political system that is determined "not to protect us even in the face of known dangers," he said.
"We have not heard from the Biden administration about the drones that have come in and entered our airspace from the Atlantic, because those are unlikely to be domestic drones," he added.
"Whatever one thinks about the drones, over my state of New Jersey, it is really hard to explain how these drones could be domestic if they're reaching us from the Atlantic. The Biden administration has refused to talk to us about that."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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