This year, U.S. officials discovered that the phone numbers monitored by the Justice Department in its “lawful intercept” system, which typically wiretaps people suspected of crimes or espionage with court warrants, were almost entirely accessed by Chinese hackers.

In response to China's large-scale hacking attacks on American telecommunications companies, the Biden Administration has taken the first step to counter it and has begun taking measures to ban some of the remaining operations of Chinese telecommunications companies in the United States.

The Commerce Department issued a notice last week to China Telecom America, the U.S. subsidiary of one of China's largest telecommunications companies, detailing a preliminary finding that the company's presence in U.S. networks and the cloud services it provides pose a national security risk to the United States.

The Commerce Department gave the company 30 days to respond, meaning the final decision on whether to impose a ban rests largely with the Trump administration.