Huawei and ZTE Sales Banned

Two of the world’s largest telecom equipment makers are again being pointed to as the maker of equipment that poses a threat to the United States.  Yesterday, several news outlets quoted our Intelligence Community as warning against using Huawei’s phones.  Today, we have a similar story about ZTE.  Legislation has been proposed in the Senate by Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio that would ban the purchase of telecom equipment from either Huawei or ZTE by the U.S. government.

In my first book I had a section on these two companies because they had both come under scrutiny by the Intelligence agencies, and not just those in the United States.  That was written six years ago.  Huawei hired some US business people to try to settle this down.  ZTE was quiet about the accusations and must have thought they would blow over.  But, ZTE was caught bypassing sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program and selling computers to support that program.  Another company was accused but never named by the Obama Administration.  Speculation at the time was that it was Huawei.

Remember that Marco Rubio was the one who first openly asked about the antivirus software maker Kaspersky Labs, which was done in the same meeting with the leaders of the Intelligence Committee last year.  That was in response to information that the software was used to obtain information from people in the United States, including one contractor of NSA.  That alone would not have been adequate to ban the sale of the software from all government agencies.  There had to have been something else.  We never found out what that was.

To talk about not buying phones from Huawei is a completely different thing.  In January AT&T decided not to sell Huawei phones in the US and they were the only vendor that was lined up to sell the new Mate 10 Pro.  I wondered then why a vendor with 10% of world market in phones could not get into the market in the US.  The re-sellers must know something about those phones that we don’t.  It certainly is no secret that Chinese browsers are sending information about users back to China;  that news is 5 years old, published by the University of Toronto in a series of detailed studies.  There must be more than that.

I for one would like to know what this is really about.  Nothing like this gets to a point where legislation is introduced by members of the Intelligence Committee unless something really, really bad is going on.  We have to balance the legislation with some background, and not speculation about what Huawei and ZTE might be able to do if they chose to.  That is not what drives this to the point of a bill that will get voted on.  If what they are doing is so egregious that the US government should not buy their phones, we need to know what that is so we too might be discouraged from buying them.  I can’t make an informed decision about speculation, though I doubt that I would buy a phone made by Huawei or ZTE anyway.  I read the documents that were published on how they violated the Iran sanctions.  They were, in the words of my niece, “creepy”.