Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called out big tech CEOs for claiming to U.S. lawmakers that they have no firsthand knowledge of technology theft from China, adding that such ignorance would seem “incredulous.”
“They need to get out more,” he said at a Senate committee hearing on July 30, adding that such Chinese threats have gone on for decades. “The idea that anyone in the tech space could not know of what the Chinese Communist Party is attempting to steal and the cyberattacks they’re making seems incredulous to me.
“It’s patently clear to anyone who’s watching that the Chinese are engaged in intense efforts of intellectual property theft, including to technology,” he said later at the hearing.
During a July 29 House antitrust hearing, the chief executives of four of the world’s top tech giants, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, gave a muted response when questioned by lawmakers on whether they believed Beijing was stealing U.S. technology.
“I don’t know of specific cases where we have been stolen from by the government,” Apple’s Tim Cook said. “I know of no case [of] ours where it occurred, which is, I can only speak to firsthand knowledge.”
Sundar Pichai, head of both Google and its parent company, Alphabet, similarly said he had “no firsthand knowledge of any information stolen from Google in this regard,” but later recalled a large-scale Chinese cyberattack in December 2009, weeks before the company pulled out from the Chinese market.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the wealthiest person in the world, said he hasn’t “seen it personally, but heard many reports of it.”
“Certainly there are knock-off products, if that’s what you mean, and there are counterfeit products and all of that,” he said when pressed by Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.). But “if the answer is the Chinese government stealing technology,” he said, “that’s the thing I’ve read reports of and but don’t have personal experience with.”
Mark Zuckerberg was the only one out of the four to directly address the issue. “I think it’s well documented that the Chinese government steals technology from U.S. companies,” the Facebook CEO said.
Pichai said the accusation that Google was working with the Chinese military is “absolutely false,” and pointed out that Google began a cybersecurity project with the Pentagon in May.
The CEOs were silent when Steube asked for recommendations on how to protect U.S. firms from “aggression and government intervention abroad.” After waiting for 15 seconds and hearing no reply, Steube gave the floor to another lawmaker.
China, the world’s second-largest economy, is a key manufacturing base for Apple’s iPhones. Amazon, however, gave up its local marketplace in China in April 2019 after struggling for years to compete with local e-commerce platforms.
And while the country remains the world’s top social media market, mainland Chinese users are unable to access Facebook and its properties, WhatsApp and Instagram, from behind the Great Firewall without special software.
At the July 30 hearing, Pompeo noted that Beijing could take advantage of international firms’ desire to enter the Chinese market to censor American speech.
“It’s sometimes the case—you hear it privately—because there’s continued threats made against their businesses that are operating not only in China, but ... working in other parts of Asia and Southeast Asia as well,” he said. “The Chinese Communist Party is completely willing to bully and to threaten to get these companies to behave.”
Gary Bauer, commissioner at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, previously urged U.S. companies against supplying technologies to the Chinese regime and potentially contributing to its human rights abuses.
