Huawei hacked Ugandan politician

5G firm helped close opposition sites in Zambia

U.S. officials who argue Huawei can’t be trusted to play a major role in building global 5G telecommunications networks got another boost Wednesday when the Wall Street Journal reported that the Chinese telecom company helped two African governments spy on dissidents. Huawei workers who were providing telecommunications services in those nations and a “safe city” program, a network of cameras and sensors Huawei sells to city nominally aimed at improving public safety, also helped intelligence agencies crack into perceived adversaries’ encrypted communications — an opposition politician in Uganda and dissident bloggers in Zambia, the Journal’s Joe Parkinson, Nicholas Bariyo and Josh Chin report. “The Huawei technicians worked for two days and helped us puncture through,” a senior officer at Uganda’s surveillance unit told the Journal, describing how the Chinese telecom’s workers helped the unit hack the WhatsApp and Skype communications of opposition politician and pop star Bobi Wine. They used that information to arrest Wine and dozens of his supporters, the Journal reports. The company also helped Zambian officials shut down opposition news sites, the Journal reports. “Whenever we want to track down perpetrators of fake news, we … work with Huawei to ensure that people don’t use our telecommunications space to spread fake news,” a Zambian official said. Huawei said numerous details in the Journal story were incorrect. Only a handful of countries, including Australia and Japan, have said they’ll totally bar the company from their 5G builds.