Most people know that China’s largest telecommunications supplier, Huawei, has been largely excluded from the US market because of official allegations that it will enable Chinese cyberespionage and wiretapping. What none of us realized, apparently, is the real reason that Huawei’s been forced out.
Luckily, the company’s head of Cyber Security, John Suffolk, is happy to set us straight. According to his blog, it’s because Huawei is too much of a civil liberties hero to be allowed into the US market: “Maybe
this is why America doesn’t want us to sell our equipment to American
companies; maybe they will worry that we will see what they do with American Citizens personal data, monitoring and storing of everything that passes through telecommunications.”
When I said in a recent post that, “The ACLU must be really popular these days in Beijing,” I didn’t realize how quickly China’s advocates would start channeling American civil libertarians.