China will start screening IT products

The Chinese government has announced that it will start vetting IT products and services that are to be used on networks and systems important to national security and public interest.

“For a long time, governments and enterprises of a few countries have gathered sensitive information on a large scale, taking the advantage of their monopoly in the market and technological edge,” a spokesman of the Chinese State Internet Information Office stated on Thursday. “They not only seriously undermine interests of their clients but also threaten cyber security of other countries.”

If a company or supplier is found to be supplying compromised products and services in China, they will be banned from doing so in the future.

The decision comes on the heels of the revelation that the NSA allegedly puts backdoors on American-made network devices destined for foreign markets.

But China is not the only country that’s begun to be wary of foreign companies, or domestic ones who occasionally work with/for foreign governments.

According to the Suddeutsche Zeitung, the German government has decided to change the rules when it comes to awarding sensitive public IT contracts.

“In cases of doubt, suspicious companies will now be excluded from such contracts. And companies now have to sign documents to the effect that no contracts or laws oblige them — nor can they be coerced — to pass on confidential data to foreign secret services or security authorities,” report Frederik Obermaier and Benedikt Strunz.

“The new rule would seem to be aimed primarily at American companies. These companies, as numerous Snowden documents reveal, regularly pass on information to the U.S. spy agencies,” they noted. “But since April, any company that cannot guarantee that foreign services or authorities will not obtain any of their data is being excluded from federal contracts in Germany. A spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior said that the aim of the new rule is to prevent ‘the flow of data worth protecting to foreign security authorities.'”