The Trojan Horse In American Ports

Many Americans are slowly waking up to the threat to America posed by China. Russia openly stated, “We will bury you,” but China is much more subtle. They are slowly undermining us economically, socially, and culturally. The amount of industrial espionage, copyright violations, and spying that has been going on right under our noses is frightening. Every Chinese exchange student in America has ties to the communist government or they wouldn’t be here. China has established Chinese police departments in some of our major cities to keep watch over its citizens in this country (article here).

On Monday, Townhall posted an article about China’s presence at American ports.

The article reports:

The highly visible but generally ignored ship-to-shore cranes at American ports are responsible for loading and unloading tens of millions of shipping containers each year. In addition to being a critical component of American supply chains, they’re also used in some cases by the U.S. military. 

Some of these cranes are innocuous, but an estimated 80 percent of ship-to-shore cranes operating at U.S. ports are made by ZPMC, a China-based manufacturer, leading to rising concern among American defense and national security personnel that have compared the cranes to a “Trojan horse,” according to an exclusive report in The Wall Street Journal.

WSJ reports that the ZPMC cranes made by the Chinese company are “comparably well-made and inexpensive” compared to other cranes produced by other manufacturers, but “they contain sophisticated sensors that can register and track the provenance and destination of containers, prompting concerns that China could capture information about materiel being shipped in or out of the country to support U.S. military operations around the world.”

The article also notes:

The WSJ report quoted the former cybersecurity lead at the port of Houston who warned “[i]t wouldn’t be hard for an attacker to disable one sensor on a crane and prevent the crane from moving” because the “systems aren’t designed for security, they are designed for operations.”

Among other worries enumerated in the report, some fear that the ZPMC cranes could, in addition to being shut down by an outside attacker or tracking what is moving in and out of U.S. ports, be turned into sabotage devices to cripple American ports without a foe needing to float its navy into U.S. waters.

We are definitely paying the price for relying on China for cheap manufactured goods.