"Absolutely," Burchett, the House Republican from Tennessee, said on Washington Watch Thursday afternoon while discussing the thousands of nationwide cellular outages. The reported number of affected customers was said to exceed 70,000, mostly those who receive service from AT&T.
AT&T never provided an official reason for the outage, but CNN cited an industry source that said the issue appeared to be related to how cellular services hand off calls from one network to the next. Two other major carriers, T-Mobile and Verizon, said their networks were unaffected except for customers who were unable to reach AT&T users.
There's been no indication of "malicious cyber activity so far," a U.S. cyber tracking official told CNN. But Burchett isn't quick to dismiss the event, which left thousands unable to send or receive phone calls and data, as human error.
The FBI and other U.S. agencies are investigating, "which always brings to mind that this is from the Chinese … this is our enemies," Burchett told show host Tony Perkins. "They'll do these little test runs to see how we operate, sort of like Ukraine. They're watching everything we do. They're watching our supply chains, watching our political movement; they're watching the country's will for war."
Burchett's concerns were brought to light just last week when FBI Director Christopher Wray addressed the security conference in Munich, Germany. Half of Wray's remarks dealt with the cyber threat faced by the U.S. and its allies, most of it from China:
Wray: "The bad news is that while all of us have gotten a lot better at working together to combat the cyber threat, our adversaries have also been improving exponentially – and the world has become more dangerous than ever.
"It won't surprise any of you to hear that chief among those adversaries is the Chinese government, which has continued to attack the economic security, national security, and sovereignty of rule-of-law nations worldwide. The cyber threat posed by the Chinese government is massive. China's hacking program is larger than that of every other major nation, combined. And that size advantage is only magnified because the PRC uses AI – built in large part on stolen innovation and stolen data – to improve its hacking operations, including to steal yet more AI tech and data."
Not just a cyber threat from China
The China threat is far from casual. It's an all-hands-on-deck, mapped-out approach that uses all known measures of information gathering – and it's worldwide, according to the FBI director"
Wray: "The PRC cyber threat is made even more harmful by the way the Chinese government combines cyber means with traditional espionage and economic espionage, foreign malign influence, election interference, and transnational repression. In other words, the CCP is throwing its whole government at undermining the security of the rule-of-law world. It's hitting us indiscriminately, like in the so-called 'Hafnium' Microsoft Exchange hack, where the PRC compromised managed service providers, hitting tens of thousands of victims."
Business partnerships with such an enemy would seem unwise, yet House Republicans say they have evidence of shell companies created while Joe Biden was Barack Obama's vice president … through which the Biden family members received more than $10 million from foreign nationals. Joe Biden, the House Oversight Committee says, communicated through fake email accounts and received 10% of the cut of laundered money from an energy company linked to the Chinese government.
Burchett said China "came to mind [Thursday] morning as we were receiving notices that this was going down. They're the ones that are capable of doing it; they're the ones that have an agenda; they're the ones that have complete control of this situation."
According to Burchett, the U.S. has sold that control to the Chinese – so much of it in fact that China may very well have the ability to halt any U.S. air aggression against them. He compared yesterday's phone outage incident to last year's Chinese surveillance balloon which drifted unencumbered across much of the U.S. Many believed it to be a test of U.S. readiness and response.
"This [communications outage] is the type of thing they would pull to see how we would respond if they needed to go with an all-out shutdown. They very much have the capabilities of doing it [because] we have sold our souls to the Chinese with technology and computer chips," Burchett said.
"It's been reported … they could even shut down some of [our fighter aircraft] if we were to enter into a conflict with China. We're so compromised from the White House down, I'm afraid this is very much a reality of our world today."
The savings you see come with a different price
Burchett said the Chinese threat can look very subtle in some ways and that America is ill-equipped to confront it because of many of America's own decisions. He argues that any damage brought by the Chinese could be self-inflicted on a large scale.
"We are not prepared as a nation. Say if our food supply or electricity was cut off; if they were able to do this on a large-scale type situation, our system would completely shut down – which, in my opinion, a lot of the people in Washington [are] trying to do to us financially," stated the Republican lawmaker.
"We've allowed the Chinese to invest in our farmland. They own large amounts of property near our miliary bases. This is not conspiracy theorists, this is reality. They are in major areas of our food production and processing. We've taken a lot of meat processing out of Americans' hands and put in in the hands of foreigners. It's the old days where a big chain would come in and offer gas at a reduced price, and everybody thinks, 'That's a great savings.' [As a result] they control that commodity."
Great savings … a form of control?
Online shoppers often pride themselves on finding the best possible bargains. According to Forbes.com, the online marketplace Temu has established a "cult following" among bargain hunters worldwide by selling a wide range of products directly from Chinese sellers at ultra-low prices.
Encouraging consumers to "shop like a billionaire," Temu aired six 30-second prime time ads during the recent Super Bowl, each estimated to cost about $7 million.
While Temu is headquartered in Boston, it is owned by PDD Holdings – the most valuable U.S.-listed Chinese company.
