The US is campaigning to keep China's Huawei Technologies telecom equipment out of US and allied telephone systems. We think Huawei is a security risk, that Huawei equipment contains secret back doors that allow Chinese intelligence services to intercept our voice and data traffic. This risk sounds real to me.
One of Tom Clancy's techo thrillers has a CIA agent in Beijing securely emailing his intel reports back to Langley using a secret backdoor in US built telecom equipment installed in the Beijing phone system. Clancy explains how the backdoor was slipped into the embedded computer code of the telecom switch by a few patriotic low level employees of AT&T and Microsoft at the request of CIA years before. Senior management knew nothing about it. Although Clancy is writing fiction, that tale sounds completely plausible to me, an old embedded systems programmer.
Huawei is a Chinese company and it is reasonable to believe that it is tied more closely to the Chinese government than US companies are, and that Huawei employees are as patriotic as US employees, perhaps even more so.
We should work as hard as possible to keep suspect Huawei equipment out of our phone systems. And out of our allies phone systems too.
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