My Take | The US is about to Balkanise the internet
- Former British cybersecurity chief says there is no evidence Huawei has taken part in spying activities, and US expert believes data centres, not physical equipment, are key
The United States is usually much better at manipulating global opinion than the crude propaganda of Chinese communists. But with its all-out campaign to decapitate China’s leading telecoms firm Huawei, it has become as brutish as the Chinese, if not worse.
US President Donald Trump is expected to issue a sweeping executive order to ban Chinese companies from selling telecoms network equipment in the US, claiming Beijing could exploit such technology to carry out cyberattacks and espionage. Huawei is an obvious target.
But where is the evidence? Here’s what Robert Hannigan – the former director of GCHQ, the British equivalent of America’s National Security Agency (NSA) – wrote about Huawei’s cyberspying activities – none.
“The key point here, obscured by the growing hysteria over Chinese tech, is that [the National Cyber Security Centre] has never found evidence of malicious Chinese state cyber activity through Huawei,” he wrote in the Financial Times.
“It is not naive: it has, for example, pointed to the scale of Chinese state-linked cyber espionage through attacks on IT-managed service providers around the world. But the fact that these attacks did not require the manipulation of Chinese sovereign companies such as Huawei merely underlines how ineffective a blanket security ban based on company national flags is likely to be.”
Former British surveillance head criticises call for ban on China 5G tech
In other words, Chinese state-sponsored hackers are perfectly capable of carrying out cyberattacks and spying without the need to use official Chinese or company networks. Banning Huawei will not make your networks any safer. But it will eliminate a great Chinese competitor for Western, especially American, telecoms companies. By the way, the NSA has also broken into the network systems of Huawei in Shenzhen, and found nothing.