Should we be scared of Chinese telecoms? Definitely yes, according to US House Intelligence Committee Report, which has declared Huawei and ZTE national security risks. Yikes!
After investigating China’s two biggest mobile manufacturers for about a year, committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) concluded ZTE and Huawei “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence and thus pose a security threat to the United States and to our systems”. The House report cites a laundry list of illegal behaviour such as bribery, corruption, immigration violations and so forth, but it didn’t provide concrete evidence, like the names of the accusers or even full details. It essentially presumes that these companies could build in backdoors into routers and phones, and leak information to the Chinese government.
ZTE and Huawei both vehemently deny these claims. ZTE even says that the US is such a small market for it that this investigation doesn’t even make sense. And lacking substantial evidence, it could be just another case of China fearmongering. [Reuters, Bloomberg via The Verge]
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