A Wall Street Journal story from Thursday revealed that a congressional espionage inquiry had discovered communication devices on several China-built cargo cranes at multiple U.S. ports.
At a recent Subcommittee on Transportation Security hearing, representatives from the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security said that 80 percent of cargo cranes in the US are manufactured in China.
“We definitely concur, and we do see an overreliance on these Chinese manufacturing cranes,” said Christa Brzozowski, assistant secretary for economic security at the DHS, according to CNBC.
Seaports handle the majority of the more than 99% of goods that enter the nation from abroad. The American Association of Port Authorities estimates that the ports in the United States support the jobs of almost 31 million Americans and generate $5.4 trillion in economic activity annually.
According to the Wall Street Journal, national security and DOJ authorities issued a warning about the port cranes manufactured by Shanghai-based ZPMC, a Chinese business, last year, alleging that they may be Trojan horses. At the time, China claimed that the espionage concerns brought up by the Biden administration were really “paranoia-driven.”
“The claim that China deploys ship-to-shore cranes to gather data is entirely baseless,” stated a statement from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The US must uphold the values of a market economy, fair competition, and an environment that is just, fair, and devoid of discrimination for businesses.”
According to CNBC, the AAPA dismissed the assertions as “sensational,” saying there was little data to back up the administration’s worries.
In an effort to “bolster the security of the nation’s ports,” President Biden issued an executive order on February 21. The government announced its intention to reintroduce manufacturing to the United States by investing over $20 billion in the port crane industry.
In its investigation of the cranes, the Wall Street Journal revealed on Thursday that many of them had communications equipment—including over a dozen cellular modems—that had not been authorized. Remotely monitoring crane operations is a common use for these devices.
“We are uncertain who installed these modems, since they were on the cranes in China,” a port representative said before the House Homeland Security Committee in December. The modems were placed in 2017, the year the cranes were constructed in China, according to port speculation. 2023 saw the removal of the gadgets.
China “is searching for every chance to acquire valuable intelligence and ready itself to exploit vulnerabilities by digging into America’s essential infrastructure — even in the marine sector,” Republican Representative Mark Green (Tenn.) told the Wall Street Journal.
Green said, “It is obvious that the United States has ignored this issue for far too long.”
The devices are not “contributing to the functioning of the cranes or infrastructure and are not part of any current contract between ZPMC and the U.S. marine port,” according to a letter the Homeland Security Committee sent to ZMPC last week, according to the Wall Street Journal.
