HUA WE DEALING WITH
Fears Chinese firm Huawei building 5G network could spy on Britain after US charges company with stealing arm of T-Mobile robot
Should Britain ban the scandal-hit firm from building a futuristic 5G communications network here?
A BRAZEN heist that snared the arm of a robot called Tappy has laid bare the threat posed by China’s biggest tech firm.
Authorities in the United States this week charged Huawei, the second-largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, with stealing the robotic limb in a bid to get its hands on a rival’s trade secrets.
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Tappy was a key piece of technology developed by T-Mobile — a robot that tested new phones by mimicking how people actually use them.
Now Britain is facing its own China crisis — should we ban the scandal-hit firm from building a futuristic 5G communications network here?
The United States is pressuring its allies to join them in shutting Huawei out of sensitive state projects on the basis the firm simply cannot be trusted.
Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt travelled to Washington last week for crisis talks on the matter.
Meanwhile, US intelligence chiefs briefed a Senate committee yesterday on the Chinese threats, with Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, declaring: “Our adversaries and strategic competitors will increasingly use cyber capabilities — including cyber espionage, attack and influence — to seek political, economic and military advantage.”
Yet Britain has picked Huawei to construct the nation’s 5G communications network, which is ten times faster than 4G and which we will need for complex artificial intelligence systems and driverless cars.
There have been questions about that decision for months, well before the firm was charged on Monday over Tappy.
Some officials fear the Chinese government will use the hardware to spy on Britain or to interfere with vital services.
Although Huawei denies links with the Communist government, laws were brought in last year by dictactor President Xi Jinping to require Chinese firms, including Huawei, to provide information to state intelligence services. Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said: “I have grave, very deep concerns. We’ve got to recognise the fact, as has been recently exposed, that the Chinese state does sometimes act in a malign way.”
Dr Julian Lewis, chairman of the Defence Select Committee, went further, calling on the Government to follow India, Australia, New Zealand and the US in banning Chinese tech firms from any 5G involvement.
SMUGGLED OUT IN BAG
Last month it was revealed that BT will remove core Huawei equipment from the emergency services’ new £2.3billion communications system.
And Britain’s biggest mobile network, Vodafone, has announced it is “pausing” the roll out of Huawei hardware in its most vital systems.
Even the royals are worried. Last week Prince Charles’s main charity, the Prince’s Trust, announced it would no longer accept “new donations from Huawei in light of public concerns”.
Days later, on Monday, the US Department of Justice announced charges against Huawei, accusing it of stealing the tech from German rival T-Mobile.
As well as being involved in communications infrastructure, Huawei makes phones and is second only to Samsung in the sales stakes.
Last year its new model, the P20 Pro, was a huge hit in the UK. The US alleges that in a quest to improve these phones, the firm had a policy of giving bonuses to rival employees who successfully stole confidential information from their bosses.
Prosecutors claim Huawei worked for years to get hold of Tappy’s secrets to perfect its own phone-testing robot.
Huawei was one of T-Mobile’s equipment suppliers, so the phone firm agreed to grant Huawei’s engineers access to the robot in a US test lab. Court documents claim that in 2013, a Huawei employee then smuggled Tappy’s arm out in a laptop bag and kept it overnight.
In a successful civil action by T-Mobile in 2017, Huawei did not deny the theft, but said it was done on the thief’s own initiative, not the company’s orders.
Now in the criminal case, the US alleges that in July 2013 Huawei set up “a formal schedule for rewarding employees for stealing information from competitors based on the confidential value of the information obtained”.
Meanwhile, the US ramped up pressure on Monday by asking Canada to extradite Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou. Meng, 46, was arrested during a flight stopover in Canada in December at the request of the US.
She is accused of violating US sanctions by concealing the dealings two subsidiaries of Huawei had with Iran.
Unsurprisingly, the scandals have created a business environment that the firm’s consumer products chief Richard Yu admitted last week was “complicated”.
Earlier this month Huawei sales director Wang Weijing and a former Polish intelligence officer were arrested in Poland on suspicion of spying.
And in 2010 Motorola accused the firm of stealing trade secrets.
The problem is that there are no strong rivals when it comes to delivering a 5G network quickly and cheaply.
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However, Dr John Hemmings, director of the Asia Studies Centre at the Henry Jackson Society think tank, believes it would be a mistake to ignore the risks.
He said: “There are real dangers in ignoring the advice of our closest allies and partners — like Australia — and allowing them to build parts of our digital national infrastructure. Are they just the corporate arm of a dictatorship?
“There is a real danger of a new Cold War, economically and militarily, as China aggressively uses cyber and economic warfare to achieve its strategic objectives.”
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