During a House Oversight Committee hearing last week, Rep. William Timmons (R-NC) spoke about using tariffs to dissuade China from conducting cyber attacks.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you, Madam Chair. Back to China. I'm gonna talk about Huawei briefly, Mr. Evanita, Mr. Joyce.
00:06I'm gonna ask you some questions at the end of it. So, you know,
00:10China was using Huawei to give next-generation
00:13wireless technology to developing countries and to developed countries, many of which were allies, and they were doing that at a rate that was
00:21beyond competitive. It was essentially subsidized, and the FBI was able to
00:26reach out to our allies and essentially say, hey, this is a really bad idea.
00:29They have a backdoor in security. Their servers aren't secure. You're essentially letting the Chinese
00:35have all your data. And so what happened? Well, all of our allies said
00:40they either took steps to ban Huawei or they
00:44changed their course and are now using
00:47more secure next-generation wireless technology. And that was done
00:51basically because the United States took a leadership role in informing our allies that
00:57China was not being a good actor, and it's caused Huawei to have to completely adjust their approach to the global economy.
01:04Is that fair, Mr. Joyce?
01:07Absolutely. Okay, so I think this is a great model. It's a great model of how we can address larger concerns. So obviously we're talking about
01:15cyber attacks, and there's no amount of money that the
01:19private or publicly held companies
01:22can spend to secure their networks from a
01:26government as big as China. There's just nothing they can do. It's not a question of if they're going to get a breach.
01:31It's a question of when. But what we can do is we can use the U.S. government and use our allies to create a
01:40consequence. So I don't see why the United States and like-minded countries will create a system through which
01:47the biggest issue is attribution in this proposal. If a company is breached and receives damages, and it's from a nation-state,
01:55I think that company should be able to go to the government and say, look,
01:59we do all of these things right to try to protect our data, but China came after us. We had a breach.
02:04It cost us this amount of money. Obviously, there's gonna be a civil suit. They're gonna have to settle that civil suit with all of the
02:10individuals who had data breached. And so let's just say it's, I don't know, 100 million dollars.
02:15So then the United States says, all right, attribution is good. China did this. The government did this.
02:20Here's your 100 million dollars, and then go and use
02:24trade tariffs to essentially make the United States whole. If we create a system like that, it can create a
02:33deterrent threat to nation-states that are using cyber attacks as a tool.
02:40What do y'all think? Is that something that we should consider doing, Mr. Avenino?
02:45Congressman Timmons, yes, but I will caution the subcommittee here that I think the back end of this is the concern
02:52I have. Looking at Huawei for 15 years,
02:55we were able to get the threat relayed to the Congress who acted and had a rip-and-replace legislation.
03:01The problem we have is Huawei is a legitimate business entity that
03:06functions fairly well with an intelligence collection apparatus tied to it. If we rip it,
03:11we need to replace it with something different. And the trouble we've had, because we don't have the
03:16innovation and technology based in the United States to replace Huawei,
03:20we're still stuck with Huawei across our country in our telecommunication systems.
03:24So to your point, I agree with, but we also have to have something to replace Huawei with when we rip it out.
03:30Mr. Joyce, do you think that the international community could create this deterrent threat that would hold China accountable? It's not just China.
03:37It's China, North Korea, Iran, Russia, anybody that is using cyber attacks as a
03:43basically a state tool. Is that something that we could do?
03:47I do, Congressman, believe we've got to use all the elements of our national power, right? Whether it is military, cyber, but increasingly
03:57commercial and tariff-related activities have proven pretty forceful, and we've seen the reactions to it.
04:05Unfortunately, a lot of these cyber criminals get to remain in places like North Korea, Russia,
04:12out of the reach of law enforcement cooperation, and so we've got to have other tools beyond law enforcement.
04:17So I think that we can resolve that by saying that any
04:21individual that is attacking the United States, I mean, it's no different than the Taliban. I mean, we sent
04:28hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers and waged war for decades in
04:32Afghanistan because the Taliban allowed al-Qaeda to use it as a base of operations to attack the Twin Towers.
04:38So, I mean, there's no difference if
04:40al-Qaeda was using a computer in Afghanistan and using code to crash a
04:48energy grid in a hot area in the summer or a cold area in the winter.
04:52I mean, it could legitimately kill thousands and thousands of people if we are unable to provide heat in the Northeast
05:00during a winter storm, and it would be very easy to do that, and we would have to hold that individual accountable,
05:07but we'd have to hold the country that gave them safe harbor accountable. I mean, do we agree on this?
05:16I completely agree, and I think your analogy is right with the terrorism, because if al-Qaeda had
05:22pre-deployed explosives or electromagnetic capability in New York City, is that different than Volt Typhoon and what they're doing here to
05:29potentially cause harm to our critical infrastructure?
05:31We have to look at that as a simple model. And if there was a cyber attack on
05:36Goldman Sachs resulting in a half a billion dollars in damages,
05:40are we not going to then make them whole when they did nothing wrong versus if,
05:45you know, Hamas bombs their building? I mean, we're gonna make them whole,
05:49so I don't think that we should view a terrorist cyber attack any differently than we would view a missile, because there's no difference
05:56effectively.
05:57Okay, I'm over time. Sorry. Thank you. I agree. Cyber security is national security. Thank you, Mr. Timmons.