Homeland Security's China Blunder

President Joe Biden recently traveled to a newly cleaned and sanitized San Francisco at the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation Event to meet with President Xi Jinping of China. The White House celebrated the progress achieved at the meeting as the president announced that China agreed to take steps to stem the production of Fentanyl and to reopen communications between each country’s military leadership. The president walked away from the meeting with a commitment for further talks. When asked about his meeting assessment, the president said, “Trust but verify, that is where I am.”

For example, SAP Concur has received over $17 million from the Department of Homeland Security despite its deep ties to the communist regime in Beijing.

SAP is a company that manages data about travel and expense management that stores its cloud data in China — meaning all the sensitive information and defense records the company may have is housed directly in the CCP’s backyard.

The DHS Advisory also noted, “PRC laws and initiatives that compel PRC firms and entities to secretly cooperate with PRC security and intelligence services. These laws may be used to compel PRC firms to illicitly provide the PRC government with data, logical access, encryption keys, and other vital technical information, as well as to install ‘backdoors’ or ‘bugdoors’ in equipment, which create security flaws easily exploitable by PRC entities.”

Yet, DHS continues to work with SAP Concur, allowing it to store American data in China and, the Chinese government the potential to find backdoors to exploit and gain other sensitive data.

SAP Concur not only does business in China, but it actively partners with Chinese companies with long suspected CCP ties, including WeChat. Although WeChat has been described as “China’s other trojan horse,” SAP Concur still proudly issues press releases about ensuring its products work “seamlessly” with the platform.

Discussing SAP Concur’s new China Development Center, Jeff Lam, the SAP Concur General Manager in China, said, “China is a growth and a market leader in mobile innovation with tremendous opportunities for SAP Concur…The China Development Center builds upon SAP Concur’s existing commitment to the Chinese marketplace.” This does not sound like a company that appreciates the dangers involved with doing business in China. It suggests a willingness to kowtow to the Chinese government. 

SAP proudly advertises the work it does for the federal government and all the information it stores pertaining to travel and expenses for various federal agencies. It does so while its company leaders proudly meet with leaders of the Chinese government and while the company expands its business within China.

Federal employees deserve to know that their data is safe. The American people deserve to know that the federal government is awarding contracts to companies that take the cyber security of the nation seriously.

For all these reasons and more, it’s long past due for DHS to refer to their own warnings about tech companies that work closely with China and stop this problem relationship while it’s still feasible to do so.

Col Terry Thompson (U.S. Air Force, ret.), was a war planner at the Pentagon and a wing commander at Dyess Air Force Base, Texas.