BT and Vodafone bosses warn Johnson against outlawing Huawei

The UK needs to wake up and recognise the risk of infiltration by a hostile, totalitarian regime

TWO of the UK’S biggest telecoms companies are preparing to write to Boris Johnson warning him that the digital economy risks being “stunted” if an outright ban on Huawei is imposed.

Philip Jansen and Nick Read, chief executives of BT and Vodafone, have written a joint letter stating that neither company has seen any evidence in their dealings with Huawei that would justify an outright ban on its involvement in 5G. They also make the point that if Huawei were to be banned there would be significant problems for the roll-out of 5G.

Industry insiders told Sky News that the contents of the as yet unsent letter voiced the concerns of network providers over the potential outlawing of the Chinese technology company.

The push for a full ban came from the United States, which on Monday sent a delegation of senior officials to London to ask Mr Johnson to block Huawei, before proceeding to brief journalists about an alleged dossier of evidence against the firm.

However, Whitehall insiders suggested that this had made it harder for the Government to reject Huawei as it would be seen as a concession to Mr Trump.

Mr Johnson is believed to be considering allowing Huawei a limited role in the country’s 5G network, despite Donald Trump’s personal appeal, which is believed to be bred out of espionage fears. Although Downing Street declined to comment at the time, senior officials in London hit back at what they said was “extraordinary” lastditch lobbying attempt to try to pressure Mr Johnson into falling into line with the US ban on the Chinese firm.

British officials have claimed that due to the nature of the US telecoms system it was far easier for the country to keep Huawei out of the new 5G systems, whereas Huawei technology has already been installed in dozens of cities in the UK.

However, it has already been warned that uninstalling Huawei would take up to two years and add a significant amount to the cost.

Despite their lobbying attempts, the National Security Council is due to meet at the end of this month where it is expected to give permission to proceed with Huawei.

Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, has warned that it was in America’s interest for the UK to risk upsetting its relationship with China because it would get it “back into this market”. He highlighted that the telecoms market was dominated by the

“Chinese or Koreans or Europeans” and said he believed that “the Americans would like to get back into this market”.

“It suits them to put pressure on us to take a cost ourselves in our relationship with China whereas they themselves will not be taking a cost,” he told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.

While a decision is expected within the month Downing Street did not provide a comment on the matter.

‘Every company in China is required to have a party committee, which can make demands of its executives’

It was 2017 and, deep inside the African Union building in Addis Ababa, a data scientist had allegedly noticed something odd. Every night, between midnight and 2am, the computer system was waking up and transmitting reams and reams of data abroad – specifically, to Shanghai. The building had been hacked, according to this account, detailed in an article by Le Monde Afrique in 2018. The FT quickly followed Le Monde Afrique’s report with its own, likewise reporting news of a hack. The building, they both noted, had been designed and built by the Chinese government, including communications systems provided by Chinese companies, ZTE and Huawei. The Chinese government (which owns ZTE), Huawei and the African Union all vehemently deny the stories.

Soon, the UK government is expected to announce its decision on whether or not Huawei will participate in creating Britain’s new, superfast 5G telecoms network. Our closest ally, the US, has made its view clear: Huawei should not be allowed anywhere near 5G and, if we ignore this advice, the US will have to protect itself by restricting intelligence-sharing with us. Our Government is dithering and may well delay its decision as it sounds out the US further. Instead, Boris Johnson should end the uncertainty and tell Huawei: “Thanks, but no thanks.”

There is, on the face of it, no smoking gun. In the African Union case, for example, we will never know the full facts. Even if the Chinese government did hack the place, it doesn’t prove that Huawei was a willing co-conspirator. Nor do other peculiar incidents, like the 2017 discovery of unauthorised Huawei Wifi cards on its “safe city” CCTV systems installed in Lahore, Pakistan. The question is whether we believe that Beijing has the desire and the capability to use Huawei as a channel for espionage, hacking or theft. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that we face an unacceptably high risk.

Huawei denies firmly that it has ever spied or been asked to spy. It is a private, employee-owned company independent of the Chinese Communist Party, it says, and has competed fiercely with the Chinese state. But if there is one single, indisputable fact of China’s political system, it is that nothing and no one is independent of the Chinese Communist Party. The country’s own constitution forbids it.

The Communist Party exerts total control, including over major corporations like Huawei. For example, every company in China is required to have a party committee, which can monitor and make demands of its executives. All very senior managers in all major Chinese organisations – business, state, media and so on – are expected to have a special red telephone on their desk, allowing Communist Party officials to call them directly at any time. If the party doesn’t like the way a manager runs her own company, it can require her dismissal. And in 2017, Beijing passed a law explicitly imposing a legal obligation on all Chinese citizens and organisations, private or not, to support government intelligence services. Huawei may want to be independent, but using any definition we would recognise, it is impossible.

Despite these rather vital political facts, however, the pro-huawei side of the debate tend to frame the 5G debate in purely commercial terms. They argue, correctly, that Huawei kit is dirt cheap and the world’s most advanced, offering the fastest route to installing 5G. They point out that it is already being used all over the UK (also correct, thanks to past governments’ mistakes) and would have to be stripped out at great expense. This explains why our telecoms companies are so anxious to keep using it.

Our security services, meanwhile, have declared that they can manage the risk. The key thing, they say, is to keep Huawei out of the core network. The National Cyber Security Centre, an arm of GCHQ, already runs an outfit that pulls apart all Huawei kit and scans it for security issues and its chief has concluded that it is “shoddy”, with security that “is objectively worse” than its rivals’. But they say they have no evidence as to whether these flaws, which the Americans call “bug doors”, are malicious or inadvertent. So long as Huawei’s equipment is limited to the network periphery, like antennae and censors, the idea is that we can install security gateways, probably in the form of clever algorithms that scan software, to stop anything dodgy from entering the “core” network. Assuming this gateway system is adequately resourced and excellently managed, even if Beijing wanted to use a Huawei software update to spy on us, they would “only” get access to one little bit at a time.

If this doesn’t sounds entirely reassuring, it won’t help to know that the UK’S security services are a minority voice in the developed world in thinking that this is a manageable threat. Their counterparts in the US, Australia, New Zealand, the Czech Republic and Germany have all concluded otherwise (though the German government is nonetheless trying to overrule its own security agencies). To hope, as Boris Johnson seems to, that the US is bluffing about future intelligence-sharing when Washington is busy passing laws and spending money to strip Huawei out of the few US networks where it is present, is extremely dangerous.

The PM is clearly torn. He desperately wants to deliver a cheap, fast upgrade to UK infrastructure. If we can’t have Huawei, he declared earnestly earlier this week, what is the alternative? There is an easy answer: Ericsson or Nokia. Telecoms experts estimate that their 5G development is about 12-18 months behind Huawei and it costs more upfront. We hear mysteriously little about the potentially huge cost of building our critical communications infrastructure using kit from an explicitly untrusted source, which contains known, subpar security flaws and requires constant monitoring. The alternatives may look pricey, but they do have the indisputable advantage that they are not made by a company answerable to a government with a record of spying, censorship and technology theft.

It is high time that the UK woke up and recognised what we are facing. The Chinese government is not a “normal” state, with “normal” private companies offering “normal” technology products. It is a regime characterised by paranoia, unbridled surveillance, mass imprisonment and a relentless and global propaganda campaign aimed at buying off, befuddling and blackmailing its critics. This is Boris Johnson’s first big call as Prime Minister. He should not be worrying about whether we will thank him in 18 months’ time because we can stream

The Crown more quickly on our commute, but whether he wants to open this country up to the danger of infiltration by a hostile, totalitarian regime. There is no fun app or cool mapping tool worth that risk.