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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

Citing BGP[*] hijacks and hack attacks, feds want China Telecom out of the US:

Citing the misrouting of US Internet traffic, malicious hacking and control by the Chinese government, a group of US executive agencies are recommending the FCC revoke the license authorizing China Telecom to provide international telecommunications services to and from the United States.

[...] Thursday's move comes as part of a review the FCC disclosed last year, when the agency barred China Mobile Limited from the US market. The federal government has also designated both Huawei and ZTE as national security threats.

"The security of our government and professional communications, as well as of our most private data, depends on our use of trusted partners from nations that share our values and our aspirations for humanity," John C. Demers, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a release.

[...] The state-owned China Telecom says it's the county's second-biggest mobile operator with about 336 million subscribers about 153 million wireline broadband subscribers, and about 111 million access lines. China Telecom Americas, the subsidiary that operates in the US, received authorization from the FCC in 2002, according to this timeline. China Telecom Americas has had a compounded and impressive annual revenue growth rate of 68% since 2005, the timeline added.

[...] BGP is largely based on implicit trust one provider—which in Internet parlance is known as an AS or autonomous system—places in another. These ASes "announce routes" that other ASes should use to reach networks in particular geographic regions. While BGP favors the shortest, most direct paths, erroneous or malicious announcements can cause traffic to follow roundabout paths that can cause major outages or worse. BGP hijackings are especially concerning because they allow spies from China, Russia, or elsewhere to monitor or tamper with any unencrypted data that improperly passes through their networks before being sent on to the intended destination.

[...] Complicating matters, attributing hacks to specific groups or countries is notoriously difficult, since attackers frequently plant false flags that wrongly implicate rivals. What's more, BGP routing mishaps happen repeatedly and frequently as a result of error and not malice. Earlier this week, for instance, an exchange of routing information between Russian providers Rascom (AS 20764) and Rostelecom (AS 12389) caused traffic to be improperly routed through Russia. The event lasted for about seven minutes and affected some of the biggest names on the Internet including Cloudflare, Amazon, Akamai, Digital Ocean, Linode, Hetzner, OVH, Leaseweb, Softlayer, Portlane, Fastly, and Ali Baba. Two BGP experts, who asked not to be named because their employers didn't authorize them to speak on the record, said all evidence points to the misrouting being the result of a configuration error.

And in cases when BGP events are the work of China or other countries, kicking their telecoms out of the US does little to stop hijackings.

"BGP hijacks can be conducted from anywhere and don't require [physical presence] in the US," one of the experts said. "Which makes this move seem more like punishment or retribution than a move that would actually stop hijacks."

[*] BGP: border gateway protocol.

Original Submission