- Iowa AG Brenna Bird filed a lawsuit against TP-Link Systems, which controls 60 percent of the American market for network devices like routers and is the dominant player in the US networking and smart home market, alleging that the company violated the Consumer Fraud Act by misleading consumers about the origin and security of its routers.
- The lawsuit alleges that TP-Link has not fully disclosed its connections to China, where much of TP-Link’s research, development, and manufacturing remains, and the potential that the Chinese Communist Party could access Iowans’ devices given the company’s leadership’s positive recognition and subsidies from the Chinese government.
- AG Bird cites that the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau has warned that “compromised routers can enable in-depth network surveillance, data exfiltration, botnet attacks, and unauthorized access to U.S. government or American businesses’ networks”. Additionally, the complaint notes that the NSA and Microsoft have both reported that TP-Link routers have security vulnerabilities that were exploited by Chinese state hackers.