One fear often voiced about Huawei, the Chinese telecoms equipment maker, is that it is a secret agent of the Chinese government. If it were allowed into the US, could it not embed hidden code into its devices that would enable the Chinese intelligence services to monitor everything passing along its networks? Now substitute the word Verizon for Huawei. Thanks to Edward Snowden, the US intelligence contractor gone rogue, we know that Verizon did something quite similar.
According to an order from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) court, leaked by Mr Snowden, Verizon was required to hand over information about all calls made by its 120m customers. If that’s true, should Verizon be banned from operating in China, or any other country for that matter?
The question is posed half-facetiously. But only half. If Verizon – and most other US telecoms and internet carriers – routinely pass data to the government, does that not come awfully close to people’s suspicions about Huawei? One could argue that the National Security Agency, which monitors the traffic, is only looking for terrorist threats, not snooping on other countries’ governments Then again, how could we possibly know that?