The real reason for Britain’s nonexclusion of Huawei was kept under wraps by its government: fear of retaliation. After Brexit, London sees itself as dependent on Beijing’s goodwill. In an interview with the Global Times on Jan. 20, the Chinese ambassador to Britain made it clear that an exclusion of Huawei would severely damage economic and political relations. And for Johnson, the threats from Beijing—a government with expansive control over its national economy—were more credible than those of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.
Of course, fear isn’t much of an appealing public justification, especially for someone such as Johnson, who wants to project the image of a fearless leader. That’s why the government has come up with an extensive technical justification for the decision—an explanation that’s full of contradictions.
Wait, you mean to tell me that going alone instead of being part of the biggest trade and power block after the US opens you up to manipulation and spying by and subservience to the likes of China and Russia? This should make it clear to the US and the EU that the UK should not be trusted with intelligence data.
“The real reason for Britain’s nonexclusion of Huawei was kept under wraps by its government: fear of retaliation”
I don’t believe that statement. Australia has banned Huawei from its national broadband network and from the 5G network. Australia is a light weight in the world. China is Australia’s largest customer and could easily punish it with trade sanctions. It has not.
I agree, anyone with an even rudimentary knowledge of SE Asian politics knows the linked article about Britain, Huawei, China and Brexit is a complete furphy. Fake news!
I think it’s far more likely the UK in remaining in communications with Huawei is repeating the lessons it learned in the war, and keeping it’s enemies close and fed!
When a spy is known, sure they can listen in, but you are also letting them so you can control the narrative! It’s something I’ve never been good at in business, I let my emotions get the better of me, but I’ve associates who remain close to competitors and the companies benefits from the gathered intelligence. I think John Le Carre in his novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy described it as “Just a little glitter amongst the chicken-feed!”
This is another case where the comment section manages to be more informative than the actual article. Interesting that they’re not doing it out of necessity. But it’s still the wrong signal to send to the US; I wonder how the US will react.
The US will respond as usual to people not kneeling face to their “superiority” and “democracy”. Anyway, the real question should be as follow :
What currently are viable 5G alternatives to Huawei ?
“What currently are viable 5G alternatives to Huawei?”
Wasn’t Nokia doing 5G infrastructure as well?
The US will ignore this. There is not a political advantage to fighting with Britain. They are one of our closest allies, and we share lots of intelligence data with each other.
Besides there is the Coronavirus outbreak to push the narrative of China being a scary place. The narrative of China being a ogre terrorizing the US isn’t over, but the media has switched the panic away from Chinese made products spying on everyone to mild viruses which cause respiratory infections.
The bigger question is how will Putin react, and what will he tell Trump to do?
“The bigger question is how will Putin react, and what will he tell Trump to do?”
No, the real question is: will Americans get over the fact that Trump is still their President?
China hasn’t punished Australia probably because China needs Australia’s Coal, Iron Ore, Protein and Powered Milk much more, and will into the future.
Otherwise it would have been fair game.
Not to mention, the upper class there probably don’t want to cut off one of their main potential destinations for those wealthy enough to escape China.
Huawei is the only one that can provide 5G now.
4g that was provided by USA companies were spied by USA with specific backports.
Nobody has found any backport to be able to spy in Huawei hardware – only unfounded accusations -.
I am not writing that it is not possible, but what is sure is that actual 4G and future USA 5G will spy. So betting for the Chinese technology you have at least a chance that you will not be spied on.
I think that the EU, joining UK even after Brexit for some tasks would have to bet for 6G – as Japan is doing – now to have their own tech to compete with Chinese Japanese and USA ones in the near future.
No one has proved that Huawei is spying or has backdoors. Why do so many believe this?
Those ones that buy Cisco?
It’s been proven CISCO has on at least one occasion been compromised by the US gov, so unless they can provide at least that much proof about Huawei, I don’t see banning them as anything more than trade protectionism with a different excuse.
Yes.
I think the prevailing attitude in most sane countries is “trust nobody (they all suck); use a mixture of hardware from many different vendors (to minimize the risk from any one vendor)”.
Of course this approach would work best with the largest number of vendors possible (which implies that you’d want to include Huawei and CISCO and…).
@Janvl, that’s not really a logical position.
No government security agency is going to tell you what they know or don’t know. That is why for example the Glomar response exists in the USA! Most sovereign states have a similar response strategy because whenever you expose something about what they know you learn more about the source or techniques used.
you are uninformed, the german BSI has checked Huawei hardware thoroughly and found no backdoors or other problems that would indicate espionage.
The Sovereign State’s stock in trade is an information broadcasting void.
Sovereign States do not deliberately drop their trousers ever, when facts surface it’s because of either a mistake they make or whistleblower! That is why they do not volunteer useful information, because it’s gathering enough crumbs that will let you back a cake.
There is irony when critics get accused of paranoia, because you’ll never deal with a more paranoid organisation than a Sovereign State. They are so paranoid about making a mistake and exposing information that they won’t even broadcast disinformation. It’s broadcasting of disinformation that brings organisations like Isis undone.
GCHQ clearly recognises that for electronics it can no longer rely on trusted supply chains to guarantee security. That’s why it’s already been investing for several years now in research into how secure hardware can be built in untrusted environments (e.g. see https://www.ukrise.org/about/).
Before the decision my instinct told me the UK would crumble to US pressure and it turned out I was wrong. It’s always looked like the US’s reasons were more economic than security oriented. So like the other commenters here, and even though I’m absolutely no fan of the UK’s current PM, I agree it seems unlikely the UK is sacrificing national security for the sake of moving further from the US and closer to China.
Was trying in vain to do quotes. My point was that the Brits do not act out of fear. They are irrational but not afraid. Have to hand them that. Totally agree with other comments that their choice was to be spied on by China or the US. China is a good irrational choice.
You’re assuming the US and Britain don’t have a mutual agreement to share intelligence data, and the Brits don’t let the Americans spy on their nationals.
I don’t think we have the benefit of being naive anymore after edward snowden and other leaks that revealed systematic abuse across public and private sectors. Over decades of documented abuse, not one single person has been held accountable. Zero prison time, zero fines, zero slaps on the wrist. In fact it’s consistently been the whistle-blowers who get punished. Like it or not, the government does not hold itself accountable, and like it or not, the public doesn’t get a say over these crimes. The protections theoretically afforded to us by the constitution were officially negated through a secret court designed to bypass constitutional restrictions on government activity, effectively streamlining warrantless wiretapping. Despite the continuing legal objections over the FISA court (sometimes even from within the FISA court), none of this has been walked back by either political party in power in several decades of existence. It is a core staple of US infrastructure. Of course the law grants law enforcement the right to obtain private data through legally issued warrants, however these days the NSA operates it’s own facilities to capture calls and internet traffic indiscriminately without warrants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hubs/
There’s no doubt about it, US infrastructure IS back-doored, and I believe this is why the federal government is so keen on forcing 5G networks to use US tech, it’s about building these backdoors into the next generation of tech. If they don’t get their way, they stand to loose their god-like control over communications networks. Admittedly this sounds like something a crazy conspiracist would say, but given past government entitlements and known abuses spanning decades with nothing having fundamentally changed, it’s all but certain that US government is once again pushing for it’s backdoors in next gen tech.
Regarding UK’s approval of 5G vendors and GCHQ’s security analysis, chances are they realize all products will have backdoor options by design. It’s not the existence of a backdoor so much as who’s in control that would matter to GCHQ. Lets say they negotiated the source code and flash their own firmware & keys, it could help mitigate the risks versus another vendor’s product that’s a pure black box. I’d argue the later case has a greater risk of concealing something nefarious regardless of where it comes from. It’s possible that factors like this have played a role in the UK’s decision.
Alfman
Yes, the public can be naive. What you say is quite possible, that the UK have a backdoor to China’s backdoor. It’s absolutely the case that there will be some collusion between the Five Eyes initiative members. So I doubt it’s is an accident that the UK having left the EU is becoming the gateway. The advantages of having the UK in this position for the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand are huge, There will be far more to this than the public ever realises.
I should post this here since it’s relevant for the discussion.
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/
Flatland_Spider,
+1, very relevant.
He mentions the outsourcing crazy, and indeed it has transformed businesses everywhere… I found the comment on IPv6 both hilarious and sad:
Alas, this is one of the cold truths of the modern american business model…
I work more with hosting than communications, but this statement resonates with me here…
Open source needs to be mandatory. You can’t seriously consider anything proprietary unless you’re desperate, or you actually don’t don’t care about leaving security & control to outsiders…
All in all, 5G is so complicated because you’ve got public interests on the one hand, government interests on the other, and corporate service provider interests on the third hand. The other elephant in the room that actual real world 5G deployments are proving to be more modest and incremental than revolutionary. The leaps in performance promised by mmwave bands don’t have nearly enough coverage to be considered reliable without even more investment.
Or it could be that Huawei products are an objectively better value. And despite the best efforts of the US-backed security researchers, no evidence of any Huawei products spying on users (consumer or commercial) has ever been found. When exactly did we abandon the notion of “innocent ’till proven guilty” in favour of pre-emptively handing punishments? How is buying Huawei 5G equipment any worse than buying US-made 5G equipment, with US intelligence agencies having a proven track record of infecting devices with spyware mid-shipping?
The US government got cold feet that Huawei products were second place to Apple and needed some kind of way to pull the plug on their sales potential, that’s all. Any company that imposes Huawei sanctions is doing it to appease the US. The UK thinks they have better to gain by appeasing China instead.
Neither the original article nor the OSAlert commentary is particularly well informed.
Some thoughts (trying not to repeat every point already made above by others):
– The compromise of keeping Huawei at the dumb periphery of the 5G network seems likely to work for security in the short-to-medium term. In the medium-to-long term we imagine more and more intelligent handling of traffic will move to the periphery and Huawei’s involvement will become a concern. Therefore the British state is effectively kicking the issue into the long grass, meaning they’ll come back to the security concerns and worry about them later. Kicking issues into the long grass is 80% of executive decisions and a skill not to be lightly dismissed.
– Britain didn’t do this to kowtow to China. Or rather, there isn’t evidence that was the reason. As a commentator above said, Australia is more vulnerable to China and felt able to ban Huawei. Britain is almost certainly doing this because it is trying to get full 5G coverage before most other nations and the only way of achieving this right now is with Huawei equipment. Part of the reason America and Australia were keen to ban Huawei is because they were never likely to win that race anyway.
– Another reason it wasn’t banned is because the American threat to cease sharing intelligence with Britain wasn’t credible. There are some kinds of intelligence that only British agencies have access to. So, despite Thom’s closing line, other nations, including those in the EU, will still be only too willing to sell off their grandmothers for a sniff of those ‘US/UK Eyes Only’ manilla folders (OK, they might have updated the medium since 1970).
– The competition (e.g. Nokia) use components from China which are probably suppose to be dumb but will have their own firmware. Just like the Huawei equipment on the periphery is meant to be dumb, but will have its own firmware. In other words by avoiding Huawei you aren’t magically free of angles for Chinese interference.
– The decision has no observable relation to Brexit. Or Russia. Sorry.
Huawei isn’t the only 5G provider, Australia is rolling out 5G having banned Huawei!
Yep. Ericsson and Nokia kit is being rolled out by Telstra, Optus and Vodafone.
Ericsson and Telstra had a joint development of 5G from the start. So the internals of the chips from Ericsson have been fully open on the Telstra side to be audited. This puts Australia in a very different position to the UK.
Current none of the UK carriers have direct access to the silicon plans of anything they use so really cannot take random samples and compare if what they are getting it what they should be getting.
Australia banning Huawei from 5G makes sense when you wake up Australia has access to the Ericsson tech and can make sure what Australia gets from Ericsson as specified with no extra added features.
Yes the UK really could not trust that since Australia is allowing Ericsson that is absolutely secure for them. Australia is not past spying either.
Lot of this core hardware stuff really need to be open hardware inspect-able by all or you end up where the UK is where no matter who they choose its untrustable supply because most countries want to spy on each other. Don’t think Australia or the USA would be past spying on the UK if it would help them win in a trade deal.
Some ways the USA is protesting way too much have they backdoor-ed the hardware that was designed by USA firms that will be going to the UK.
The Trump administration will cook up any story to bring down China…creating a boogeyman is a start…this nonsense about national security vulnerability will not have any kind effect on the Five Eyes intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States…nough said…