Huawei, the Chinese electronics giant that was accused of being "a security risk" in a paper by the House Intelligence Committee (its chair, Mike Rogers [R-MI], said "find another vendor if you care about your intellectual property, if you care about your consumers' privacy, and you care about the national security of the United States of America") has come out swinging in a new cybersecurity paper.
In the paper's foreword, the company's deputy chair Ken Hu writes:
[Huawei] never received any instructions or requests from any government or their agencies to change our positions, policies, procedures, hardware, software or employment practices or anything else, other than suggestions to improve our end-to-end cyber security capability.
"We can confirm that we have never been asked to provide access to our technology, or provide any data or information on any citizen or organization to any Government, or their agencies."
Unlike the companies that were on the target of the NSA and GCHQ's BULLRUN/EDGEHILL programs, which spent $250,000,000 a year to subvert security standards, and to convince western electronics companies to sabotage their own security.
In July this year, Huawei issued a rebuttal to such rumours, pointing out that no hard evidence had ever been provided to back up hacking allegations, and accusing those who perpetrated them of "racism". In a statement to US tech site the Verge, the company said that allegations from the former CIA head Michael Haden were "tired nonsense we've been hearing for years…"
"Misdirecting and slandering Huawei may feel okay because the company is Chinese-based – no harm, no foul, right? Wrong. Huawei is a world-proven multinational across 150 global markets that supports scores and scores of American livelihoods, and thousands more, indirectly, through $6 billion a year in procurements from American suppliers.
"Someone says they got some proof of some sort of threat? Okay. Then put up. Or shut up. Lacking proof in terms of the former, which seems clearly the case, this is politically-inspired and racist corporate defamation, nothing more."
Huawei denies ever being told to spy on customers [Alex Hern/The Guardian]
