Tom Temin We’re speaking with Loyaan Egal. He is chief of the Enforcement Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission.

 Tom Temin We’re speaking with Loyaan Egal. He is chief of the Enforcement Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission. 

And the fact of this task force then presupposes there are statutes and regulations that apply to these supply chain participants in communications that you want to step up enforcement of, or you get the sense that somehow it needs to be heated up a little bit under them to make sure that everyone does what they’re supposed to.

Loyaan Egal Before I came into my position as the chief of the Enforcement Bureau, I’d spent the last four years before that working in the national security space at the Department of Justice, in the interagency group known as Team Telecom. And in there we were looking at potential risk brought on by foreign investment for participation in the U.S. Telecommunications sector. A lot of that those same concerns come to this space. Right. Even even we look at companies that might not have a significant foreign investment aspect to them. They still have global supply chains. In other words, they may use third party vendors to provide services to you, the consumer. And in many, many instances, those are services that people want and like. But what we look at is how are those companies that that you’ve trusted with your information, with your sensitive data? How are they then making sure down the supply chain that the other companies are protecting that information? And so the task force is looking at that from a rulemaking perspective. 

Are there things that the commission can do? Because the FCC, in addition to having enforcement authorities, is a rulemaking agency, We’re looking at public awareness, reaching out to people to let them know that these are areas that we’re focused on. And then we’re also looking at it from an enforcement standpoint. How can we enforce the rules in the statutes? For instance, there’s what’s known as the CPNI statute, that’s the customer proprietary network information, and that is the information that telephone carriers collect about your account. Right. That what type of account do you have, how many lines where you’re located, that information. There are specific statutes and regulations that that address that. So we’re looking at it.