Well, it’s true. Over at Slate, the rarely Trumpian Fred Kaplan says that Trump’s ban on purchases of equipment from giant Chinese telecom firm Huawei using federal funds makes sense:
The problem is that those wares are also potential backdoors for Chinese intelligence. If Huawei gains a foothold in the burgeoning market of 5G networks (as it is working hard to do), those backdoors would open access to streams of sensitive political, financial, manufacturing, and military data.
Another problem, Fred acknowledges, is that Huawei is so large, doing business in 170 countries, that it’s unlikely that foreign firms are going to stop doing business with the company, especially on the say so of, you know, Donald Trump.
Now, Huawei says it won’t do favors for the Chinese government, but, as Fred warns, how much can you trust them? But then, he concedes, how much can you trust anyone?
Another obstacle to wider action is that Huawei’s practices can be shrugged away as normal. It is hardly the only firm to open its wares to the intrusions of intelligence agencies, and China’s is hardly the only agency to plug in. For many years, until Edward Snowden’s big document leak, the National Security Agency intercepted communications through the platforms and networks of several American software and telecom companies, often with their consent.
Ah, but fortunately we in the U.S. had our constitution to protect us, right? Well, sort of. “A major difference is that the NSA’s intercepts were focused mainly on counterterrorism targets and approved by a special court (though the court was quite permissive).” Yeah, I don’t like the sound of that “mainly”, nor of that “quite permissive”. I’m way not a fan of China, but I’m not crazy about the NSA either.
