Hundreds of state, local government entities vulnerable to Chinese espionage: report
Fox News
Over 1,600 state and local government entities have purchased technology from Chinese companies that are restricted at the federal level, a new report released this week says.
The report's authors said, if anything, the figure could be an undercount due to data accessibility constraints. Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
"Over the past few years, anecdotally, we'd heard that a lot of these state and local governments were buying this technology, but it had never been quantified before," said Michael Kratsios, one of the report's authors. "We wanted to do an analysis to actually determine the extent to which this technology – actually banned by the federal government – was being procured by state and locals."
Kratsios, who served in the Trump administration as the chief technology officer, along with co-authors Jack Corrigan, a research analyst at CSET, and Sergio Fontanez, an associate at Washington, D.C.-based law firm Holland & Knight, concluded in the report that a number of loopholes exist that enable local governments to buy cheaper Chinese technology despite federal restrictions.