In the last few years, U.S. government officials have grown increasingly concerned about Chinese

espionage over things like

Tik-Tock. The proposed legislation comes amid growing concerns over the

threat the Chinese own social media platform poses US national security issues and telecom company

Huawei. The US has banned most American companies transactions with Huawei

over fears that it will help Beijing spy on other nations.

There was even the Chinese spy balloon from last year.

Intelligence officials have called the Chinese craft a surveillance balloon while those in the Chinese government claim it was a

weather monitoring vessel. But there's something else worrying US officials.

Cranes. More specifically the kind of cranes you see around ports.

These cranes are these like giant structures that sit at every port

and you know loom hundreds of feet in the air.

That's our colleague Aruna Vishwanatha.

You know, over the course of a couple of decades, it turned out that a Chinese state-controlled company a

Chinese state-controlled company ends up making pretty much all of these cranes.

And it got to a point where national security officials started thinking about, you know, what vulnerabilities that potentially posed.

And some national security officials have likened this to a sort of Trojan horse.

Yeah, so as you remember, you know, from Greek mythology, a Trojan horse is something that comes in seeming

innocuous but like hidden inside it are real dangers.

And so with these cranes you have structures that seem just part of the port

infrastructure but lurking within it is the potential for it to be used as an intelligence collection tool and also a potential tool to throttle port operations.

China says these concerns are driven by paranoia

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