Chinese telcos branded national security risk for US

Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent

(Image: STR/AFP/GettyImages)

After what is claimed to have been an 11-month national security investigation, a US government intelligence committee says that the nation's corporations should avoid buying telephone, internet or cellphone networking equipment from two Chinese telecomms companies, Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp, both of Shenzhen.

In a report published today, the US permanent select committee on intelligence says the two firms represent a clear and present national security risk because of their links with the communist government. Committee members fear that "backdoor" and monitoring facilities could be secretly present in their equipment, allowing, for instance, industrial designs to be stolen and copied before they are patented or registered as copyright.

A draft version of the report was quoted by Reuters as saying that Huawei and ZTE "cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence" and so represent a national security threat, especially in the light of the companies' move into telecoms markets where their equipment is used to control critical infrastructure like the US power grid.

It is unclear, however, if the committee's assertions are based on evidence, fear or something close to commercial protectionism. The unclassified version of the committee's final report, due to be published today, is not expected to publicly reveal details on what, if anything, has been found lurking deep inside Huawei and ZTE hardware, software and firmware.

Speaking in a CBS TV news programme at the weekend, committee chairman Mike Rogers, a former FBI and US army wiretapping technology specialist, said that US firms using Huawei and ZTE kit should "find another vendor if you care about your intellectual property; if you care about your consumers' privacy and you care about US national security".

Unsurprisingly, Huawei and ZTE Corp have expressed shock at the report's claims. Both deny that they pose any threat, with the former describing the allegations of government control as a "baseless, dangerous political distraction".

Indeed, aside from US-owned Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, the telecoms switching and routeing arena is a field where many large players are foreign. French-owned Alcatel-Lucent, Swedish-owned Ericsson and the Finnish-German joint-venture Nokia-Siemens number among market-leading firms. As a result, ZTE is baffled why the focus should have fallen solely upon itself and Huawei.

The intelligence committee's apparent paranoia may have vast repercussions: where does it, for instance, leave mass-market devices like the Apple iPhone, which is assembled in China? Analysts already worry about a possible "kill switch" being unknowingly introduced into a billion transistor chips. Will there now be a hunt for secret surveillance Trojans - whether they are hardware or software - in offshore-produced gadgets?

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/243e823c/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A120C10A0Cus0Echinese0Etelecom0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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