Trump likely to sign executive order banning Chinese telecom equipment next week
politico.com
politico.com
edit: I was involved designing datacenters in China and one of our requirements was the network gear was all American. During a visit we were asked to coordinate with an engineer from ChinaTelecom to figure out where to place Gov. deep packet inspection devices on the backbone network. My take away from this was it was easier for them to add additional equipment than to hack the American routers.
Why do you automatically assume that equipment made in the US (or any other country) is magically immune to 'state level hacking' by the country that made it?
IMHO, this is more of a power move to encourage folks to use equipment the US government has control over to do with as they please. In other words, trading one 'state level hacking' opportunity for another. But in this case, the other is close enough to pay you a visit.
A good example of this is Google encrypting network traffic between servers after the Snowden stuff was made public. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-of...
The US, on the other hand, is where you're located (in this example) and can easily use any information gained against you in a large multitude of ways.
Basically, everyone would probably be better off just assuming any network gear has backdoors open to the government of the country that it came from, then just adopting security policies to mitigate this, and buying network gear from countries that aren't their own.
from Hayden the former head of the NSA: https://money.cnn.com/2013/07/19/news/huawei-china-spy/index...
also their code for routers was a direct copy of cisco IOS for years they didnt even try to hide it: https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c...