Britain and Germany Will Not Ban Huawei, Citing Lack of Spying Evidence (reuters.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes from a report via Reuters: Despite persistent U.S. allegations of Chinese state spying, Britain said it is able to manage the security risks of using Huawei telecom equipments and has not seen any evidence of malicious activity by the company, a senior official said on Wednesday. Asked later whether Washington had presented Britain with any evidence to support its allegations, he told reporters: "I would be obliged to report if there was evidence of malevolence [...] by Huawei. And we're yet to have to do that. So I hope that covers it."

At the same time, German officials have told The Wall Street Journal that the country has made a "preliminary decision" to allow Huawei to bid on contracts for 5G networking. Catering to the surging populism, the U.S. has accused Huawei and other Chinese telecom equipments, along with European cars, as national security risks, even though the National Security Agency, American's cyber spying agency, was found to have wiretapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel, conducted economic espionage against France, and hacked into Chinese networks. Earlier this week, beleaguered Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei described the continued investigations by the U.S. into the Chinese firm -- including the arrest of his daughter and company CFO, Meng Wanzhou -- as politically motivated.

Comments

Boy who cried wolf

[Livius]

The US has squandered its credibility. I can't say that Huawei inspires me with trust, but US accusations mean nothing.

Re:Boy who cried wolf

[ffkom]

The British, who are considered "5-Eyes"-spying comrades of the US, have, as you can read, not seen compelling evidence. And they have been the poodle fetching US-thrown sticks for decades now. What more non-evidence can you ask for?

Re: Boy who cried wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, TFA is about Huawei doing business elsewhere, and the authorities there have decided that whatever stuff US spewed about the "rich Chinks", as you call them, is baseless.

This is a welcome change, as Brexitannia has until recently followed the US repeating its lies about Iraq, Syria, Russia and whatnot to the letter.

So we see, when it comes to real money, propaganda still fails.

Re:Does evidence of bad customer service count?

[Orgasmatron]

Huawei is not a private company. It is a state-run institution. The only private companies in China are small to medium operations. Everything big enough to be strategically important is owned and/or managed by the Chinese army or the Chinese Communist Party.

Americans tend to assume that the rest of the world is like the US, but it isn't. Here, we have private companies. They are usually willing to cooperate to some extent with the government, but they are still mostly privately owned and managed. That is approximately the current situation throughout most of Western Civilization, but it is actually quite rare elsewhere.

Most importantly, China does not run on that model at all. The Chinese Communist Party owns the government and military, which in turn owns almost all of the industry and technology.

Imagine if the NSA got into the business of building cell phone network equipment using chips produced by the Air Force Cyber Command's semiconductor foundry and financed as a joint venture by the CIA and the Pentagon. No big deal, right?