President Trump has sent a message to the world that national security interests are more important than a faster internet. The U.S. Commerce Department announced recently that it will place Chinese telecom giant Huawei and other related companies on the Entity List, meaning the United States deems the corporation to be a threat to national security. American companies will be unable to export parts or components to Huawei without special licensing approval.
The move is seen as a threat to the speedy rollout of 5G wireless technology. Huawei has positioned itself as an “industry leader” in 5G. In an op-ed published by The New York Times, titled “America Needs Huawei,” company board director Catherine Chen deplored the Trump administration’s move, writing that “it will hurt ordinary Americans and businesses by denying them access to leading technology, reducing competition and increasing prices.”
Chen is repeating the familiar mantra that China leaned so heavily on in recent decades as it grew into a world trade power: we’re cheaper. And why not? It has certainly proven effective. Americans have succumbed to it again and again. As have corporations eager to make a tidy profit in the global market.
Well-Founded Fears
The Italian branch of British multinational telecom corporation Vodafone in 2011 and 2012 discovered “hidden backdoors” in Huawei equipment that could have given the Chinese company unauthorized access to customers’ home networks and Vodafone’s Italian carrier’s fixed-line network. Bloomberg reported in April that Vodafone’s “nothing to see here” approach to the problem has been “contested by people involved in the security discussions between the companies.”
“Vulnerabilities in both the routers and the fixed access network remained beyond 2012 and were also present in Vodafone’s businesses in the U.K., Germany, Spain and Portugal,” Bloomberg alleged. “Vodafone stuck with Huawei because the services were competitively priced,” sources told the site. Of course they did.
The Vodafone example should be all the proof one needs that you can’t trust the “market” when it comes to securing the most secretive and highly classified of U.S. digital communications. For this very reason, U.S. intelligence officials have issued dire warnings against working with Huawei.
Electronic Infiltration
The heads of the CIA, FBI, NSA and the director of U.S. national intelligence all gave testimony before Congress in February 2018, strongly stating that Americans should not trust Huawei with their personal data. “We’re deeply concerned about the risks of allowing any company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Huawei is far from being just another telecom face in the crowd. The company is strongly aligned with the ruling Communist Party and is held up as a source of pride for the nation as a whole. The Epoch Times reports a video of Chinese children singing a song of praise titled “Huawei the Beautiful” went viral in the country earlier this year. The song, with which the company denied any association, “features nationalistic lyrics in support of the company performed by a children’s choir named Zhoudan Children’s Vocal and Music Workshop located in Zhuhai City, southern China,” the paper reports.
“Of all the phones in the world, which is the most beautiful? Everyone says Huawei!” sing the children. “Teacher tells me to love my country, and to love our domestic brand Huawei! Huawei is good, Huawei is beautiful, Huawei wins glory for our country!” the song lyrics continue. Yet board director Chen tells us “singling out Huawei because it is headquartered in China makes little sense.”
Swamp Water Bugs for Hire
Another disturbing development as Huawei pushes further into the telecommunications networks of the West is the lobbying power it has started to wield in those nations. Two top Obama administration officials are currently working for the company in the United States. Samir Jain, Obama’s former senior director for cybersecurity policy for the National Security Council, is a registered lobbyist, while James Cole, Obama’s former deputy attorney general, is a lawyer for the corporation. This is Swamp careerism at its worst.
“In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has increasingly turned to the Swamp to advance its hostile agenda,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) told Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin. “We must do all we can to prevent senior government officials from shopping their connections on behalf of foreign adversaries … There is a clear need for broader action.”
Huawei is hiring influential power players in Europe as well. Senior Sky News Editor Paul Harrison has resigned his post as the network’s royal and business correspondent after 22 years, to become a senior communications aide with Huawei, City A.M. reports. England, France, and Germany are all wrestling with U.S. efforts to get them to join in freezing Huawei out of 5G network construction. The company also cannily sponsors Hockey Night in Canada, a television institution in the Great White North.
A powerful company operating out of a communist nation is attempting to gather enormous control over the communications infrastructure of the United States and the West. It is using the traditional language and tools of global capitalism to reach its goal. It would be sheer madness for America to hand over its digital communications to a communist-backed corporation in the name of the free market. It is moments like this that we discover whether we still remain a nation, or have become just another lot on the globalist strip mall.
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