UK PM Theresa May to ban Huawei from providing ‘core’ parts of Britain’s 5G network
- Britain’s National Security Council agreed to allow Huawei access to ‘non core’ parts of the 5G mobile infrastructure
- Officials in the United States and elsewhere have been increasingly public in voicing concerns that Huawei’s equipment could be used by Beijing for spying or sabotage
British Prime Minister Theresa May has ordered that Chinese telecoms supplier Huawei is to be banned from supplying core parts of the future 5G mobile phone network, following a meeting of ministers on the National Security Council (NSC) on Tuesday.
Huawei will be allowed to supply some “non core” technology to British phone companies insiders said, but several ministers in the meeting raised concerns even about that concession, arguing instead for a total ban on the supplier.
The political decision risks agitating China and the company – which is privately owned – and comes amid growing concern in Britain , the US and elsewhere about whether the company’s technology poses a long-term security risk.
Britain’s intelligence agencies have taken a cautious approach to Huawei, but not called for a blanket ban.
Jeremy Fleming, the director of spy agency GCHQ, argued last month that the UK needs to understand “the opportunities and threats posed” by Chinese technology.
Other countries have taken a tougher stance. Chinese companies are banned from working on critical telecoms infrastructure in the United States. US Vice-President Mike Pence called on “all our security partners to be vigilant” in February.
The leak of the Huawei decision also comes just days before Philip Hammond, the chancellor, is due in China this week to attend the country’s Belt and Road investment forum in Beijing and could yet prove problematic for the minister.
In February, Hammond was forced to cancel a trade meeting with Vice-Premier Hu Chunhua after Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson had suggested Britain might deploy a new aircraft carrier into waters claimed by China on its maiden voyage in around 2021.
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Ministers said to have raised concerns about Huawei at the NSC meeting include: Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary; Sajid Javid, the home secretary; Gavin Williamson, the defence secretary; and Penny Mordaunt, the international development secretary.
The decision comes on the eve of a speech from Fleming, in which he will pledge that indications that a cyberattack is coming from China or Russia will be shared in a matter of seconds with corporations as he seeks to demonstrate how the spy agency can benefit British business and consumers.
The GCHQ director is expected to promise to scale agency’s collaboration with the private and public sectors to create “a whole-of-nation, automated cyberdefence system” across Britain.
He will say at a security conference in Glasgow on Wednesday that its National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has already “made it simple for our analysts to share time-critical, secret information”.
Intelligence the NCSC picks up – “whether it’s indicators of a nation state cyber actor, details of malware used by cybercriminals or credit cards being sold on the dark web” – will be declassified and shared promptly in the future, Fleming will add.
He is not expected to name any countries as a specific threat, but hackers from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are generally considered by the intelligence agencies the most likely sources of danger to British cybersecurity.
Extracts from Fleming’s speech provided only limited detail as to how cyber intelligence would be passed on, but the GCHQ boss said it would be done in a matter of seconds and “just one click” based on existing systems.
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The NCSC acts as a window for the spy agency’s normally secretive activities, already sharing information with British business and the public sector in an attempt to improve cybersecurity.
But the organisation has already said that, despite its efforts, Britain can expect to face what it calls a category one, or C1 cyberattack, by the end of the decade, such as interference in elections, or an attack on energy, banking or other vital infrastructure.
Serious attacks elsewhere include the Russian hacking of the Democratic Party in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election. The most serious cyberattack on Britain so far was the WannaCry ransomware attack in May 2017 that disrupted hospitals, which was ranked as a C2 attack because there was no threat to life.
Last October, Hunt, accused Russian military intelligence of being behind a spate of “reckless and indiscriminate” cyberattacks ordered by the Kremlin, including on the World Anti-Doping Agency.
