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My concern is that even if the boardroom in Huawei and every single employee all the way down operated in good faith, there is nothing from stopping the Chinese government from taking control of the technology if they wanted to. This is a government that is currently operating concentration camps.


The concern is legit. That's why Huawei is the most audited telecom equipment provider. Also that's why U.S. has hacked into Huawei years ago. I am pretty sure if there is anything, it would have surfaced years ago. In a way, the whole thing has made Huawei more reliable than other provider if you object monitoring from U.S. government.


Every company is subject to pressure from their country's intelligence agencies. If an American company is ordered to spy on its customers, there's little it can do. This happened with Lavabit, which Edward Snowden used as an encrypted email provider. The US government forced the founder of Lavabit to hand over the website's SSL private key.

If you're afraid of a foreign country using its technology providers to spy on you, you have two options:

  1. Don't use technology from that country.
  2. Only use technology from that country that you are confident you can audit.
There's nothing Huawei can do, beyond what it's already done (offer to open up its tech for audits by foreign intelligence services), to allay the fundamental fears you're expressing. In the same manner, there's almost nothing American companies can do to allay the fears of foreigner countries (or US citizens, for that manner) that their tech won't be used by American intelligence agencies. The logical conclusion of this is that every country must develop its own technological base, and that's not a future I want to live in.




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