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JEFFREY BROWN: The congressional report was a bipartisan effort. And we hear first on this issue from the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Maryland Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger.
Congressman, I want to fill in some of the details here. Did your investigation find specific evidence that these companies have engaged in spying or espionage, or is it more that they might do something in the future?
REP. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, D-Md.: No, our investigation which started a year ago, a bipartisan investigation, we looked at the connection between these two major companies, and we also looked at their connection to the Chinese government.
We—I personally met with the chairman of Huawei, the founder of Huawei, in Hong Kong and questioned him and also representatives from ZTE. We asked them hard questions. And they refused to give us specific answers.
One of the responses to our question and to our recommendation for them to give us these answers was that: We cannot give you these answers pursuant to our Chinese law at this time.
Our concern really was a national security concern.
But it's also a concern about competition. You know, we do not want a—the Chinese government to have the ability to spy on Americans who might be Huawei or ZTE customers. We do not want them to be able to spy on our businesses.
And let me just say this. Last year, the United States—pursuant to Cyber Command, the United States lost over $300 billion of trade secrets. That's $300 billion of trade secrets as a result of cyber-attacks.
JEFFREY BROWN: But I'm...
DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER: Yes, go ahead.
JEFFREY BROWN: But excuse me. But excuse me. But is there—is it the lack of evidence—I mean, the lack of them being clear with you, or is there evidence that they might do something?
DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER: No, no, no. No, we also have evidence.
We have evidence that the Chinese government have been doing it. As far as Huawei is concerned, we have gotten a lot of data and information about Huawei, but most of our concern is the relationship between their government.
JEFFREY BROWN: Now, you heard that the company pushed back pretty hard after this report came out. And they accused this—they said little more than an exercise in China bashing.
DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER: Well, the first thing, we're not masquerading at all national security to do any Chinese bashing. That's not what we do as Americans.
And my message basically and my message to the chairman of Huawei was that if you want to do business in the United States, the first thing you do is disclose the information that we need, including your financial information.
We want to make sure that you do not have a connection or the Chinese government doesn't have control over what you can do with our customers in the United States.
You know, Chinese government is a communist government. And if the Chinese government demands their citizens do something, they have to do it. And we're very much concerned about that.
We're also concerned too from a competition point of view that the Chinese government is subsidizing these two companies. When Huawei can come and grow and not only in the United States, but throughout the world, because their prices are so much cheaper, we're concerned about subsidy.
That's not a clear playing field. My answer...
JEFFREY BROWN: You're...
DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER: Go ahead.
JEFFREY BROWN: Well, I was going to ask you, you're planning to take this further. You're taking this to the Justice Department for further action?
DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER: What we do in intelligence is that we collect information and analyze information. And if we find any criminal act whatsoever, we turn it over to the Justice Department. And that's a classified part of our report.
There's a lot that we cannot say because we're the intelligence community.
But let me say this too. We want to make sure that we notify our citizens and our businesses in this country about a possible threat before the threat actually occurs. We don't want to react after the fact, like 9/11, like other issues.
This cyber-threat is real, not only with China, but with terrorists and other individuals who can attack our country.
And that's why, by the way, our committee also has a cyber-bill that passed that allows our intelligence community to give information about this negative and these attacks coming into our country to our providers like AT&T and Verizon and Qwest and Comcast and those providers who we—really , we're their customers, the people of the United States.
