Over the weekend, President Trump tweeted his way into a cybersecurity debate involving Chinese cell phone maker ZTE.
The company has been banned from doing business with the U.S. government because of surveillance suspicions and banned from receiving U.S. components, which has crippled the company.
The President says he will change that:
Republican Senator Marco Rubio tweeted about ZTE:
And Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff has this to say in response to Trump's tweet on ZTE:
"Dean Cheng, senior research fellow for Chinese political and security affairs at the Heritage Foundation, says the mere fact that companies (such as Huawei and ZTE) are Chinese means they will "respond to recommendations and advice"—read pressure—from the central Chinese government.
“We have pretty good evidence that the Chinese take a Hoover vacuum approach towards information collection,” he says.
As a typical consumer you may not think you need to be on guard, especially if you're not employed, say, by a defense contractor or aerospace company or work for a firm that does business in China.
Still, Galina Datskovsky, CEO of Vaporstream, a secure messaging company in Chicago, says you ought to think about “who you know, what you know, where do you work, where does your family work, where do your friends and contacts work, (and) with whom are you corresponding.”
We'll let you know if President Trump's tweets and cybersecurity intersect again.