Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The most sinister thing about Huawei may be how clean it is

I first wrote about the risks and rumours around Huawei — and made bad jokes about its name — in September 2012. That was seven years after BT started ordering cheap equipment from the Chinese telecoms giant without, apparently, delving into stories about its military-connected origins. But 2012 was the year when Huawei was reported to be working with GCHQ via a ‘Cyber-Security Evaluation Centre’ in Banbury to prove its kit was not open to hackers and did not contain ‘backdoor’ listening devices. Since then, no direct evidence of espionage has been reported, only potential vulnerabilities; but the Trump regime has become strident in denouncing Huawei as a conduit for Chinese spying and data theft, and demanding that allies toe the US line.

Hence this week’s standoff, in which Boris Johnson had to choose between affronting the White House and incurring the cost and delay of replacing Huawei in UK 5G plans. Few seem to think his compromise of excluding Huawei from the ‘core’ of the networks is either technically feasible or politically convincing.

But perhaps he analysed the issue as the thriller writer (of Seventy-Two Virgins, 2004) he once was. If you were China’s top spymaster, the last thing you’d do right now is order Huawei to up its game and channel more intelligence. Rather, you’d be finding new ways to slip bugs into Asian-made components of rival 5G systems sold by Nokia and Ericsson and smartphones from Apple and Samsung. Last year I quoted a Californian security expert on ‘the dirty secret’ that ‘most of the world’s computing infrastructure is a similar nightmare’. On this theory, the most sinister thing about Huawei is how clean it is, because that means Beijing has found other ways to steal our secrets.

Digital tax card

It was bold of Sajid Javid to declare in Davos that ‘we plan to go ahead with our digital services tax in April’, provoking US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin to respond that ‘if people wanna just put taxes arbitrarily on our digital companies, we’ll consider arbitrarily putting taxes on car companies’.

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